Crawl-paced .govs are good places for Silicon Valley investors to sink dollars they never want to see again, right? Maybe — five or 10 years ago. Today, venture capitalists are actively seeking to expand their portfolios in government verticals, according to Teresa Carlson (pictured), vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services Inc.

There’s been a change in AWS’s public sector lately. “In my previous life, I never had venture capitalists of private equity firms come and say, ‘We want our companies in government,'” said Carlson, who has worked in the department since its inception in 2011. Now, the likes of Andreessen Horowitz LLC and Madrona Venture Group LLC are approaching her for advice on how to break into government.

The reason for the sea change is that cloud and cloud services allow government entities to move much faster than they have in the past, Carlson explained. New education tech is a hot area of interest among VCs,  she added.

Carlson spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during last week’s AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas.

Governments and techies shake hands

As novel as this sounds, it’s not so surprising given trends in governments’ thirst for tech innovation, according to Carlson. “It’s a huge growth strategy,” she said. 

Some recent signals of tech’s growth potential in government include the White House’s information technology Modernization initiative and the government in the United Kingdom officially revealing its public cloud- and cloud-native-first approach.

“Government loves that we are bringing in innovative new technologies,” Carlson said.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is an AWS customer and has extolled the security if its cloud publicly. “We just announced our Secret Region. And that allows them to have top-secret capabilities secret and classified in our gov cloud,” Carlson said.

Last month, California Polytechnic State University launched the Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub powered by AWS. Inspired by the work of tech-savvy, anti-child trafficking nonprofit Thorn: Digital Defencers of Children, the university is working to develop new technologies for justice and public safety, Carlson concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: SiliconANGLE