Venture

Venture Capital is a funny thing. I've worked for many companies in the tech space, and VC funding, from my experience, is something that can provide the kind of money and connections your company needs to be successful. One startup I worked at raised some VC funding that also included a really great incubation space to work out of. In addition to being one of the wilder contracts I've ever worked, this place also provided CEOs with coaching and teaching them, ideally, not to give into their worst urges and run a business like a relatively sane human being.

A different startup I worked at had a bunch of private VC money that was somehow connected to some folks who were connected to the Canadian Government. This allowed them to follow the tried and true business model of talking to your friends in government to see what you can sell them. This isn't so much corruption, per se, as it is extremely effective and highly targeted advertising.

Many people talk negatively about VC funding, or software being owned by a private equity firm, and while I have some feelings about that, I do know what side my bread is buttered on. Age has also taught me not to disparage a whole class of industry. VC can be extremely good, and can be very transformative for a company, allowing them to succeed and, ideally, benefit society in some way.

Like I said, ideally.

However, a lot of money, as proven time and again, can provide absolute insane people with money they probably shouldn't have, and connections that are, to say the least, very dubious.

I was recently made aware of In-Q-Tel, or IQT, a VC firm who are, among other things, very proud to have on their client list Swarm Technologies, founded in 2016.

From Wikipedia:

Swarm Technologies, Inc. is a company building a low Earth orbit satellite constellation for communications with Internet of things (IoT) devices using a store and forward design.

Swarm is an interesting case because their early stages have didn't really have anything to do with IQT, as its investment was late stage investor in Swarm, and not part of its initial funding rounds.

Initially, from my very lazy research, they were incubated by Society Capital, who were funded in part by Microsoft's capture and kill of Yammer, and a different company that was acquired by Google. They also gave a bunch of funding to Slack, prior to its eventual acquisition by Atlassian.

They eventually received funding from Craft Ventures, which was founded by David O. Sacks and Bill Lee, the former most famous for being one of the "early guys at PayPal". Sacks is a conservative reactionary attempting to lure "former leftists" over to conservatism, and exerting his power to wind up in the middle of the conservative zeitgeist.

Sacks was also the "moderator" the disastrous launch of of Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign on X Spaces (Not to be confused with SpaceX). Regardless, Sacks is an avowed Trump voter, and endorsed him in the most recent American election.

Swarm Technologies would eventually receive some funding from IQT around the time that it was acquired by Sacks' good friend and fellow PayPal alum, Elon Musk, current 'first buddy' of Trump, via SpaceX, and likely used their technology and knowledge to expand Starlink.

As a bit of history, in the earlier days of SpaceX, a major player they picked up early on was Michael Griffin. Mike Griffin would move from SpaceX to NASA via George W. Bush from 2005-2009, then Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering for the first Trump administration from 2018-2020.

It's worth mentioning here that Griffin, in addition to trying to help Musk buy ICBMs from Russia, and was one of the major influences to get Musk his big NASA contract. He also turned down a role at SpaceX to become the President of In-Q-Tel, which I mentioned earlier.

In-Q-Tel is, well, a front for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The guys who overthrow governments in Central America, and do all sorts of other shady bullshit around the world, are also in the Venture Capital game.

Not only that, IQT was also one of the few early investors in Palantir, which is of course Peter Thiel's surveillance corporation.

Thiel is, of course, involved in the Founders Fund with Sean Parker and a couple other of the PayPal Co Founders, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, which of course completes the snake eating its own tail, as the Founders Fund also invested in Yammer, and still invests in Palantir and SpaceX, Facebook, all sorts of big tech companies.

Again, Sacks, Thiel, Musk were all associated with the early days of PayPal, and very clearly have long entrenched relationships with the US Government. These three have been really great at setting up a long game for a major return on investment.

But none more so than Elon Musk.

In part two: Emerald mines, Russian rockets, hair plugs, and flying sports cars.

Take care of yourselves,

Matthew