The CIA's Secret Weapon: How In-Q-Tel Shapes Tech | Tech'ed Up Shorts with host Niki Christoff

Transcript

tell us a little bit about IQT. >> Sure. So, uh, we were actually created by CIA 25 years ago. Uh, in the fundamental premise which was controversial back then and much more readily accepted today is that innovation had shifted in the United States from large corporate R&D labs like CRX Park and Bell Labs uh, uh, and university labs to the 10,000 plus ventureback startup companies that were around in 1999. And CIA used to be able to go into places like Zerox Park and Bell Labs and say, "Show me the latest and greatest stuff that you're working on." And they'd show it to them.

And then CIA could also say, "That's really cool, but you know what? If you maybe added, you know, a level encryption to it or added a feature to it that makes it compatible with a certain version of Scientific Linux that only we use anymore, um, we could really take more advantage of this technology." and they'd make those uh uh feature modifications because US government was a large uh customer of their parent. And so when CIA realized that innovation shifted, they realized they weren't having conversations at the early stage with with people developing these new emerging technologies. They weren't able to sort of make feature requests uh uh and they were pretty bad at sort of buying uh uh technology from these startup companies. The government really doesn't know how to do business with startup companies. >> Yes.

>> Right. And so they they created Inkyel