Judge an Institution by Where Its People Go Next

The best test of an institution may be what its people do after they leave. A former In-Q-Tel insider on where its alumni went, what the place taught, and how an investor can read a cohort.

Most institutions are judged by what they do while their people are inside them. I think the better test is what their people do after they leave. I worked at In-Q-Tel for more than a decade, and almost everyone I know from there has left. What they did next is the best evidence I have of what the place taught.

A small institution with an odd structure

In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 to bring commercial technology to the intelligence community. Norm Augustine and Gilman Louie are credited as its founders.[1] It is a not-for-profit corporation funded mainly through contracts with the CIA and other government partners, and it is legally independent of the CIA.[1] It invests in startups. It is also not a conventional firm, and I will come to its critics.

Where some of them went

None of these people stayed.

Gilman Louie, IQT's first CEO, co-founded Alsop Louie Partners, an early-stage venture firm, in 2006.[2]
Michael Griffin, a former IQT president, later became NASA's administrator.[1]
Chris Darby ran IQT from 2006 to 2023. Cerberus now lists him as its global head of venture investments.[3]
TJ Rylander spent about a decade at IQT and is now a partner at Next47, the Siemens-backed venture firm.[4]
Jay Emmanuel, IQT's chief architect, is now a partner in venture capital at NextEra Energy Investments.[5]
Syd Ulvick, hired in my cohort, spent thirteen years at IQT and now leads technology transfer and commercialization at Lockheed Martin.[6]
Charles Hudson spent about three and a half years at IQT, investing in areas such as drones, big data and sensor networks, and is now founder and managing partner of Precursor Ventures, a seed-stage firm.[9]

Venture firms, a corporate venture arm, a federal agency, a defense prime. That is not a pipeline. It is a spread.

What the room was like

The résumés do not capture the place. Biologists sat next to computational scientists, who sat next to electrical engineers who knew what a bad wafer cost. All of them were in constant dialog with investors who had to draft a term sheet and work out the equity structure. Nobody there had the whole picture, and everybody could see the part of it that someone else was missing.

The room hired for diversity: different views, different experiences, different paths. The filter was curiosity and intelligence. Different was an asset there, not a problem to be managed.

The same rule applied to the work. Every business plan that was submitted was read by one person, who decided which expert should see it next. We called that first vet. It was a hard job, because you had to know the entire technology landscape. The person in the aluminum foil hat got the same review as Keyhole, the mapping company In-Q-Tel backed early, which Google bought in 2004 and turned into Google Earth.[8] As I understood it, the practice was a requirement of the public funding, tied to the 501(c)(3) status. I do not know whether that is the exact rule, or whether they still work that way.

I was hired the same year as Syd. IQT was not the first job of any of us. We all arrived with other careers behind us, and it was formative anyway. The ones I know have founded companies, become managing partners at venture firms, and built. The place prepares you for nothing and for everything at the same time. I mean that literally: no single role there trains you for what comes next, and the range of what you are exposed to is useful in whatever you do afterward.

I wrote elsewhere that choosing a job is choosing an education, and that the room matters more than the title.[7] The diaspora is that claim in aggregate. The room did the teaching, and it kept teaching after we walked out of it.

Why an investor should read it

When several people from one place land in the same new organization, that is a stronger signal than one founder with an impressive résumé. A cohort that reassembles carries its habits with it: the way it checks a claim, the way it argues, the way it decides. I look for that when I read a founding team. Ask where a founder's former colleagues went, not only where the founder worked.

What I do not know

Whether IQT's alumni do better than the alumni of comparable institutions. I have a cohort I know well and public records for a few more, and no comparison group.
How much of this is the place and how much is the kind of person who would be hired there. That is survivorship, and I cannot separate the two.
IQT has critics. Its structure lets employees and trustees profit from its investments, and a Wall Street Journal investigation, as summarized on its Wikipedia page, found that nearly half of its trustees in 2016 had a financial connection to a funded company.[1] I worked there, so read my view with that in mind.

This is the author's account. I worked at In-Q-Tel from 2003 to 2016. The reading of what the place taught, and of what its alumni's paths show, is my interpretation and not a measured finding. This is not investment advice.