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...intelligence community strategy. describes his technical role as helping identify promising technology companies and products, helping provide the intelligence community with vision of how it might deploy those technologies to face business challenges, and then helping in the investment and project management activities related to those investments. KMWorld also asked Pepus to discuss some of the companies in which the organization has invested. More information about In-Q-Tel's history and investments can be found at its Web site, in-q-tel.com.
Q KMWorld: First, In-Q-Tel's name. I get the "In" and the "Tel" parts, but what's with the "Q?"
A Pepus: The Q is just the play on the character Q who provides all of the cool gadgets in the James Bond movies. [The Wall St. Journal did describe In-Q-Tel "as outside the box as government gets."]
Q KMWorld: Tell us a little about In-Q-Tel's strategy. Your investments are not necessarily purely software licensing but also research and development support. Correct?
A Pepus: Typically, when we identify a company, we enter into a venture-type relationship with them, which means there is an investment component. [We want to contribute to a] commercially viable activity that's beneficial to the company and adds some things that In-Q-Tel would like to see in the product. And it's a way for us to work more closely with the company to help guide its whole product strategy. We [generally] deal with companies that are at either Version 1.0 or their technology is so compelling at the alpha and beta stage that we take the risk to invest in them because it is so promising. If [a company] survives that early stage, it can hold great, great promise.
Typically, the deal may involve a limited number of licenses, or it may compose more than that. It really depends on the situation. The company may be in the very early stage of the product, and we can't make use of it yet. Or it may be that we are going with a company that has a relatively mature product, and we can take it and run with it right away. I want to make clear that we are not really doing R & D. There's none of that going on or [the kind of work] done by university or national labs. We are really much, much later on [in the developmental stage].
These companies have to be locked and loaded, ready to go to that commercial space and start making sales or very soon thereafter. And you know when...
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