Teresa Carlson

Advisor, General Catalyst

Teresa Carlson is a Catalyst Advisor, actively serving as an advisor and board observer for Mark 43 and Collaborative Robotics. She was previously the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Flexport and a Corporate Vice President and Executive-in-Residence of Microsoft Corporation.

Teresa is also the Non-Executive Chair of the board of directors of KnightSwan, an industry disruptor and catalyst for new and emerging technologies focused on accelerating innovation in cyber, cloud, and mission intelligence.

Through decades of innovation and creative leadership, Teresa has enabled digital transformation for thousands of organizations worldwide, and modernized policies at all levels of government. Her work has also helped equip a diverse, inclusive, global workforce with critical cloud skills through training programs that have enabled over 400,000 people to earn active certifications.

Most recently, Teresa served as President and Chief Growth Officer at Splunk, where she led global efforts to turn data into business transformation for Splunk customers in all market segments. Under Teresa’s oversight and direction, Splunk’s revenue surpassed $3 billion, with cloud revenue growing 70% year-over-year.

Prior to Splunk, Teresa served as Vice President, Amazon Web Services (AWS), where she founded and led Worldwide Public Sector and Industries for more than a decade. Carlson’s role eventually expanded to include financial services, energy services, telecommunications, and aerospace and services industry business units, as well as overseeing AWS Training & Certification programs.

Teresa also served as Vice President of Microsoft Federal Government, where she oversaw the company’s US Federal Government business. Over her 10+ year tenure, she held a variety of positions at Microsoft including General Manager of the US Civilian Agencies and NGOs; Director of the US Federal Solutions Unit, responsible for the Federal solutions framework and the US Federal partner channel that consisted of more than 2,500 Microsoft partners; and US Federal Director of Strategy and Operations.

Teresa dedicates time to philanthropic and leadership roles in support of the global community. She currently serves as an officer for The Economic Club of Washington, D.C and the Vice Chair of the White House Historical Association. She serves as a board member and Executive Committee member of the Atlantic Council, and a board member of the Pentagon Memorial Fund. She is also a board member of for-profit Commure, a software platform company with a goal to enable developers to create empathy-driven solutions to positively impact the healthcare experiences, and of Karat, the world's first Interviewing Cloud to conduct technical interviews on behalf of organizations hiring software engineers.

Teresa earned her undergraduate and Master of Science degrees in Communications and Speech and Language Pathology from Western Kentucky University.