Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt has been named an advisor for the San Francisco-based venture capital firm ARTIS Ventures.
From his office in Langley, Va., Hunt made some of the government’s most important technology decisions and helped pave the way for CIA implementation of commercial technology on a massive scale.
“At the CIA, I quickly learned that one of the best ways to identify emerging technologies was to watch the money. VCs are often the leading phalanx of where things are headed and that’s certainly been true of ARTIS Ventures over the last decade,” said Hunt. “Diversity is an important component of the ARTIS portfolio. Because they work across markets they’re consistently identifying efficiencies in one sector that can benefit another. That plurality of thinking is such an important part of effective decision making, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”
At ARTIS, Hunt will assist in identifying and analyzing new enterprise investment opportunities and work with its portfolio companies.
“It goes without saying, but Gus has decades of experience analyzing and making decisions regarding new technologies at the highest levels of government,”
He also maintains an infectiously insatiable curiosity when it comes to seeking out new technologies,” said Stuart Peterson, president and founder of ARTIS. “That open-mindedness is core to our investment approach, which focuses on identifying the biggest ideas and secular themes within technology and those companies best positioned to benefit, something Gus did at the CIA very successfully at the CIA for quite some time.”
Based on Hunt’s recommendation, the CIA made a $600 million, 10-year investment in Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform in 2013 – a move that set a bold path forward for the agency. It was one of the final projects he oversaw during a 28-year career that began at the CIA in 1985. Prior to joining the agency as an analyst, Gus spent seven years as an aerospace engineer designing advanced manned flight systems and satellite orbital transfer vehicles. He holds an master’s degree in engineering with a focus on civil/ structural engineering, from Vanderbilt University.
