
Startups That Received Investment from In-Q-Tel - dmor
http://mattermark.com/106-startups-who-received-investment-from-the-c-i-a-most-frequent-in-q-tel-co-investors/
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tptacek
Time 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.

~~~
andrewcooke
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?]

~~~
nemothekid
If you look at their portfolio you would see most of these investments are
centered around products, namely those that processes or make sense of either
large amounts or complex data, nothing that includes covert surveillance a la
facebook.

NSA bad actors withheld, I have a tough time seeing why anyone would consider
In-Q-Tel a bad thing. A lot of our current technology (lets not forget the
Internet) were born out of government funded projects.

~~~
fixxer
> I have a tough time seeing why anyone would consider In-Q-Tel a bad thing.

Wholeheartedly agree.

I take their investment as a stronger sign of success because they are closer
to the customer (rather than just being one of those firms that bets on the
greater fool theory).

Case in point, consider their 10gen play. CIA has been a major player in
database design since the beginning:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation#Overall_time...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation#Overall_timeline)

------
jacquesm
Whether 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.

~~~
samstave
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. "_ __

~~~
jacquesm
Barring 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'.

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sheri
In-Q-Tel's own site list's their portfolio:
[https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/](https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/)

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qwerty_asdf

      Name                  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...

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001sky
Intel & Samsung are two of only 6 "VCs" with more than 3-coincidences, from a
dataset ~70 entities.

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

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sciguy77
Hmm I interviewed there for a SE Data job.

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woah
10gen- Is it safe to use mongo?

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

~~~
rit
You mean like this one? [http://www.mongodb.com/press/10gen-announces-mongodb-
backup-...](http://www.mongodb.com/press/10gen-announces-mongodb-backup-
service)

~~~
jacquesm
Hehe. Oops...

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volokoumphetico
disgraceful 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
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](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
Very informative video. Thanks for sharing!

