Startups That Received Investment from In-Q-Tel

Yeah, 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?)

i'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?]

Palmer Luckey of Oculus fame was funded by Joe Lonsdale, of Palantir. He told me Lonsdale hasn't been involved with Palantir in over 4 years though, so any associations with "spooks" or "nsa" type stuff is silly. Yah right, OK Palmer Luckey, like the NSA, CIA wouldn't love to control hardware and software related to future VR worlds. Like Lonsdale has been able to cut all ties, I thought the old saying was once you get in, you never get out, at least not willingly! LOL! I think Palmer Luckey is a sith lord.

These types of things don't go in "side letters", and reciprocation often doesn't even need to be discussed explicitly.

The 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/ . It's certainly an interesting approach to the problem.

I'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."

I 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."

Correct; 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.

Do 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.

In-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.

Tendril: the CIA might have a use for smart power networks that could detect non-authorized devices (bugs) drawing power.

No more or less safe than it was yesterday. :)

Yes...you should only be worried if they added some anonymous background job replicating your mongo instance somewhere else for 'support' or something.

You 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

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.."

You 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.