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Startups That Received Investment from In-Q-Tel
- jacquesm 13y agoWhether they received investment is one thing. What would be much more interesting to know about are the conditions of the investments and whether or not there were any side-letters or small favours to be done in return for the investments, I find it hard to believe that the CIA would make 'investments' hoping for a monetary ROI but at the same time I find it even harder to believe that they would make an investment without any kind of ROI at all. Some surprisingly august names in that roster, not everybody there will be happy to be associated in this particular manner.
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoThese types of things don't go in "side letters", and reciprocation often doesn't even need to be discussed explicitly.
- jacquesm 13y agoIf it wasn't discussed explicitly I'd be happy to read that as that it wasn't discussed if I were the recipient of this money. Either there is a paper trail or it did not happen.
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoI'm not saying it did happen (I have no idea what "it" even is here), but "paper trail or it did not happen" is laughable. I think I see what you are trying to say with that, but you know that successful corruption actively avoids paper trails, right?
- jacquesm 13y agoOliver North would disagree. Hence all the shredding when the tide turns.
- showerst 13y agoThe point of In-Q-Tel is not to make money, or even traditional ROI. It's to bring technologies to the intelligence market that might not otherwise exist. They're actually not for profit. https://www.iqt.org/about-iqt/ https://www.iqt.org/about-iqt/ . It's certainly an interesting approach to the problem.
- eli 13y agoIn fact, if I remember correctly they are literally not profitable -- the fund has lost money every year since its inception. In some ways they're the ideal investor. EDIT: decent article on In-Q-Tel from NPR last year that explains that they originally intended to make money, but as of last year they hadn't (and weren't on track to do so)http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839153/in-q-tel-the-cias-tax-funded-player-in-silicon-valley http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839...
- jlarocco 13y agoI'm skeptical. If there's anything going on, it's probably more like, "We bought a product from this company and don't want them to disappear in case we need support/more product/whatever, so we're going to invest in them so they can stick around."
- samstave 13y agoI agree, both with you and with TPTACEK, as in-and-of-itself, an investment by In-Q-Tel just means that they are interested in the value of the tech in general defense/intel perspective. What I would be interested in, and there is likely never going to be any way, other than an actual leak of proof, whether IF a company could be leaned on to comply with some NSA/CIA request based on their funding; E.g. "Hey, you know how we gave you $100MM to build out your infra? Yeah - well here - install this box into your DCs as well."
- jacquesm 13y agoBarring such a leak this is really just speculative. But such a leak would definitely shine a different light on all the other investments. So until then this amounts to a big fat '0'.
- nemothekid 13y agoThe current rumor is that the NSA told Facebook, Microsoft, et. al to do this and they have yet to receive any In-Q-Tel funding.
- jonnathanson 13y agoCorrect; In-Q-Tel is not trying to make a profit. The purpose of In-Q-Tel is to subsidize technologies that could be useful for the intelligence community (CIA, NSA, etc.) -- with the implication that entrepreneurs might have less incentive to develop such technologies if there weren't someone willing to fund them. A lot of these technologies are R&D-intensive, aren't massively scalable, don't have a huge consumer TAM, and wouldn't meet the criteria traditional VCs would demand from an ROI standpoint. So the presence of an investor without a profit motive makes a lot of sense. In many respects this is similar to DARPA, and I don't see anyone up in arms about DARPA. I know the NSA is a hot-button topic right now, as well it should be. But let's not bust out the torches and pitchforks over anything and everything with some connection to the intelligence community. We're placing some pretty heavy burdens of guilt by association on the startups in this list, whether fairly or unfairly.
- eli 13y agoDo you have any evidence In-Q-Tel has ever done anything like that? I know the NSA disclosures have everyone all amped up, but if the only evidence for an accusation is that nobody can prove it didn't happen, then it's still a conspiracy theory in my book.
- jacquesm 13y agoNone whatsoever. That's why it is interesting. If someone throws around large amounts of money without asking for anything in return that's normally called charity. DOD does a lot of that (pretty much the whole internet came from there) and I'd happily assume this is just like that. So unless someone steps forward with something concrete that's where it stands. But given the latest batch of revelations investments like these will be scrutinized a lot more than in the past. We can ridicule these ties all we want but after it has become a documented fact that industry has received (substantial) investment in order to facilitate wholesale eavesdropping nothing else you could think of seems too far-fetched to possibly be reality. That's maybe one of the biggest bits of fall-out from all this media hype, conspiracy nuts suddenly seem to be fairly respectable and maybe a little bit gullible and naive. It's gone a lot further than I ever thought it would have. I'm not in a position to receive funds from a CIA backed VC but if I were they wouldn't be on my shortlist for ethical reasons, but for practical reasons I'd be happy to take the money. There is some irony in the CIA indirectly investing in HyTrust, if the NSA had used that product then Snowden wouldn't have been able to do what the did :)
- eli 13y agoAbsent any evidence whatsoever, I see no reason to doubt the official story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839153/in-q-tel-the-cias-tax-funded-player-in-silicon-valley http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839... I wish the government would do more to help fund research and innovation.
- jacquesm 13y agoI tried to address this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6393680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6393680 Almost all technology is 'dual use', even a hammer. It is probably a lot harder to find something that does not benefit the CIA/NSA/Bogeyman than something that does. The tricky part is that three letter agencies are now toxic in a way they weren't before and that could easily hurt perfectly good entrepreneurs that took their money in good faith, if only because other entrepreneurs took such money in bad faith. Especially palantir will have a hard time with such associations.
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoIn-Q-Tel is something of the blue sky research arm of the CIA, a bit like DARPA is for the DoD. Special deals would generally be handled by normal classified contracting/procurement, which for the CIA can include just about anything you can imagine.
- lindauer 13y agoNot exactly, IARPA is the intelligence community equivalent of DARPA. I don't think DoD has anything like In-Q-Tel.
- qwerty_asdf 13y agoName Estimated Employees Total Funding Palantir Technologies 920 $301,000,000 They were Elves once, taken by the dark powers. Tortured and mutilated. A ruined and terrible form of life. And now... perfected: my fighting Uruk Hai! Whom do you serve? Sarumannnnnnnn...
- 001sky 13y agoIntel & Samsung are two of only 6 "VCs" with more than 3-coincidences, from a dataset ~70 entities.
- tptacek 13y agoTime for another thrilling round of everyone's famous game, Guilt By Association yaaaaay! The truth is usually 83.46% more boring than conjecture, but in this case I bet it's 100%. I have no affiliation with In-Q-Tel, nor have I ever worked for an In-Q-Tel-funded company, but I have friends on the management teams of more than one and my bet is: In-Q-Tel just gives money to things they thing DoD will find useful, and that's that.
- timr 13y agoYeah, but that's just what you would say if you were in on the conspiracy. Obviously. (Aside: I can't help but notice that 10gen is in that list. MongoDB is clearly a tool for the Man. That means that people will start using real databases again, right?)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- andrewcooke 13y agoi'm sorry, but i think this is mistaken. it's both mis-applying the term and misunderstanding why this list could be useful. guilt by association is when, say, two companies happen to share the same building. if one is known to work for the intelligence community then guilt by association blackens both. but this isn't (accidental) association. this is a direct, paid relationship. and association isn't useful anyway. what's interesting is understanding why. you don't give money for nothing. you use it to buy (or invest in) something. maybe it's a useful service. palantir's products seem like exactly the kind of thing you'd buy if you were an intelligence agency. or hardware and software for processing a large volume of data. but what about other companies here? can they all be explained that simply? if not, what else could the money be buying? access? information? that seems like a smart question to ask. particular when you no longer trust the person paying. i don't think this is being paranoid, but i am curious. i'm not painting everyone black through simple "association", but i am asking myself what is being sold. and that seems like a reasonable question. [indeed, given how reasonable that seems, your knee-jerk dismissal is odd. do you really not see the questions raised?]
- sciguy77 13y agoHmm I interviewed there for a SE Data job.
- volokoumphetico 13y agodisgraceful to see fellow entrepreneurs and coders working to kill other humans. hope your parents are as "patriotic" as you when they watch CIA drones kill children and women for oil.
- molesy 13y agoYou should do a little research into how this whole energy/technology/computing/internet stuff came to being. Steve Blank gives a good talk about the "Secret History of Silicon Valley" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo You'll note that at the end he kind of says "but everything got better and we're all driven solely by the capital markets and they know best - don't worry be happy! Pay no attention to the g-men behind the cur.."
- dybskiy 13y agoVery informative video. Thanks for sharing!
- diminoten 13y agoYou say that like you haven't helped kill humans too, through your purchases and therefore implicit support of companies who help do this. Your very use of this website is evidence to your hypocrisy.
- woah 13y ago10gen- Is it safe to use mongo?
- andrewcooke 13y agoi can understand why they're investing in companies like palantir. and hardware like pure storage seems like it could be useful too; similarly cloudera/mongo for data handling. but why have tendril got so much? http://www.tendrilinc.com/ http://www.tendrilinc.com/ or apigee? http://apigee.com http://apigee.com
- pkinsky 13y agoTendril: the CIA might have a use for smart power networks that could detect non-authorized devices (bugs) drawing power.
- sheri 13y agoIn-Q-Tel's own site list's their portfolio: https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/