TLDR they developed a server-side spam classification tool and tried to sell it to US ISPs but couldn't find buyers. Eventually someone from China reached out and told them the government might be interested. The founder was really excited about the prospect and told us about it. I was really upset with him and resigned the next day. Don't know what happened after that =/ The company is no more, though was apparently involved in a series of investor scandals for several years after I left. It's not clear to me if China ever actually bought it. Doesn't seem to be in the public record, at least.
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Here's the longer narrative, if you really want more details. This was nearly 20 years ago, so my memory is foggy, but...
The technology was essentially bulk message classification at the ISP/mail server level (though could be adapted to SMS carriers), clustering together similar messages through several statistical techniques, like looking for similarities in the message bodies and headers. They filed a bunch of patents and was making a MVP to try to sell the tech directly to ISPs.
A couple years in, they weren't getting any bites -- this was also right around the time Gmail first came out and really "disrupted" the email space, so poor timing -- and I think the investors were getting concerned.
I remember one morning, we were standing outside in the garden (our office was just a repurposed residential home in a suburb of Los Angeles). It was a beautiful day and one of the founders had good news to share about a possible sales lead. He was glowing with excitement and mentioned that some of his contacts in China had expressed interest in the technology, on behalf of the government there. This was around the time the Great Firewall was being developed, so maybe that was part of the draw (my speculation).
I blinked, surprised. Up to that moment, the founder seemed like a perfectly normal, bright, wizened old sys-admin type geek. Imagine Richard Stallman, but in a business suit. I looked up to him. It was hard to reconcile the idea that man I had worked for the last couple years, who treated us all well and always had a smile and a joke handy, was about to sell us all out.
My (flawed) recollection of the convo:
"Wait, what? You're... you're going to sell the technology to China? Not to an email provider there, but the government itself...?"
"Yeah! This tech could easily scale up to millions, hundreds of millions of users. It's exactly what they're looking for. I was thinking too small before. Why sell to one ISP at a time when an entire government of a billion people could use it?"
"But... but you know they're just going to use it to monitor and block their citizens, right?!"
I think that caught him a bit off-guard, maybe even slightly offended. "Well, yeah, maybe. But if we don't do it, someone else will. We're just selling tools. We can't control how they use it."
It was a major WTF moment for me. "No, how could you, as an American, purposely contribute to something like this?! Don't you care about human rights at ALL? You have two kids of your own at home, growing up under the protection of a liberal democracy. There are kids in China who will never know what that's like, and you are actively subverting their future. What will you tell your kids when they grow up? That Dad sold out his entire company and all his morals to the first convenient buyer? This is not ok." I was like 21 then, pretty naive and idealistic, and this was my first real professional confrontation with a higher-up (who's also the CEO).
I don't remember what he said in response. I walked away, fuming, and resigned the next morning. Disillusioned, I unfortunately stopped keeping track of the company's affairs, and I don't know if China ever actually bought it.
Looking up the company twenty years later, they've apparently abandoned all their patents, and pissed off a bunch of investors who felt misled. The website is no more. Probably it was just another failed dot-com startup, unless they went to great lengths to hide their sales to China, but that seems too conspiratorial.
Shrug. As an older adult, I don't think too much of this incident any longer. It's probably par for the course for US tech businesses wanting to do business in China. Some sell out, others pull out, but in the end they all have their price, and they all choose their battles. But 21 year old me wasn't OK with that (I still wouldn't be), and left what was otherwise a really great internship. The people there treated me well, I learned a lot and had a ton of fun with them. I want to believe that the whole thing was just a dumb misguided idea from a desperate CEO, needing the money after several failed sales leads, and not some elaborate ploy to develop censoring tech specifically for China. I dunno. These days, censoring tech is everywhere, both in the East and the West, and technologies like this probably aren't that special anymore anyway.
That's all...