We’ve written recently about a new era of global resilience and what it means for re-engineering and modernizing our most essential and critical systems. Making progress will require new talents and capabilities: namely the ability to truly understand the end user’s needs and mission, and the ability to navigate, sell and build trust with government partners. We believe a new era of collaboration is required to meet the urgent need to enable modern defense and intelligence capabilities for the US and its allies.
We are incredibly excited to announce that Teresa Carlson and Ret. Gen. Scott Howell will be joining GC as Catalyst Advisors focused on our global resilience thesis. We have worked with both Teresa and Scott for some time now, as Teresa serves on the board of Commure, which is working toward building the first operating system designed for healthcare, and Scott has been working with several of our companies; we’re incredibly excited to work with them on this mission.
Teresa Carlson has spent over 20 years helping governments around the world drive digital transformation, leading Amazon Web Services’ worldwide public sector business and Microsoft’s federal business prior. Teresa founded AWS’ worldwide public sector business in 2010 and led its growth to include over 5,000 government agencies, 10,000 education institutions, and 28,000 nonprofit organizations as its clients. In 2020, her role expanded to financial services, energy services, telecommunications, and aerospace and satellite industry business units. Teresa is currently president and chief commercial officer of Flexport, a leader in supply chain management and logistics, and prior, president of Splunk. She is also Non-Executive Chair of KnightSwan, an industry disruptor and catalyst for emerging tech in cyber, cloud and mission intelligence. Teresa has been a strong advocate for empowering women in the technology field and has taken many leadership roles in support of the global community.
Lt. General Scott Howell retired from the United States Air Force in August 2021 after a 34 year career, including most recently as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), from July 2018 to June 2021. In his role at JSOC, Lt. Gen. Howell oversaw military operations across multiple theaters, and was responsible for the readiness and mission execution of highly-specialized military forces of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Before JSOC, he served as the Vice Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command with a focus on organizing, training, and equipping more than 70,000 U.S. Special Operations personnel operating in more than 85 countries. In this role he led acquisition, budgeting, programming, and fiscal processes for USSOCOM with the military services, Joint Staff, and Office of the Secretary of Defense. Before that, Lt. Gen. Howell commanded all Coalition special operations forces in Afghanistan. Lt. Gen. Howell is a guest lecturer at Vanderbilt University and is active with The Vanderbilt Project on Unity & American Democracy. He is a CAPSTONE Senior Fellow at National Defense University. He is a Board advisor to several public and private emerging technology, AI, software and aerospace companies, and a Board member of the Special Operations Foundation.
We believe our Catalyst Advisor program is a huge differentiator for GC and a tremendous advantage to our portfolio companies working with us and them. Teresa and Lt. Gen. Howell’s arrival bring even more bench strength to what is already a group of luminary talent. We are privileged to have them here as we strive to make real progress on our global resilience thesis and investing in modern defense and intelligence.
