Читать книгу The Hunt for Unicorns - Winston Ma - Страница 40

The overall trend of the sovereign investor world is to invest in the digital future – whether existing funds seeking to facilitate a digital transformation, or new funds established with that goal from the beginning. What's interesting is that this is not a new phenomenon: the states have (always) been active in tech investments. Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv were largely the creation of the US and Israeli states. Many of the innovations we take for granted today – such as the Internet, cloud computing, and virtual reality – were fostered by state seed capital or driven by government agencies.

And this continues to be partly the case: in 2014, the Pentagon, the US Defense Ministry, teamed up with the CIA to invest in cybersecurity startups. The CIA has been running its Q-Telventure capital fund since 1999, with extensive investments in tech companies. This state–military link is particularly important for understanding the rise of startups in Israel and its famous Yozma program, which unleashed the technical miracle Start-up Nation. Not to mention that space, initially the sole preserve of governments, now hosts Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos), SpaceX (Elon Musk), and Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson), backed in part by sovereign investor cash.