From Hubble to Hacker: How One Cypherpunk Built Privacy for Governments

What we talked about.

Lance Cottrell's path began in an academic household where his physicist father and sociologist mother shaped an early love of science. He pursued astrophysics through UC Santa Cruz and UCSD, working with Hubble Space Telescope data on the early universe. While completing his PhD, Cottrell became absorbed in the cypherpunk movement, alarmed by the government's Clipper chip proposal, and built the open source anonymous email tool Mixmaster. A billboard displaying a URL convinced him the internet had reached a tipping point, prompting him to leave astronomy and found Anonymizer, an early internet privacy company. After building an anonymous FBI tip line following 9/11, Anonymizer pivoted from consumer privacy to serving the US government and intelligence community, eventually selling in 2008. Cottrell discusses his years balancing kung fu, fencing, and Dungeons and Dragons with startup stress, and his current work helping founders navigate fundraising, exposing the conflicts of interest between venture capital incentives and founders' actual goals. The episode traces an unusual arc from space science to national security cryptography to startup mentorship.

An astrophysicist who built Hubble research tools became a cypherpunk, founded a government privacy company, and now demystifies fundraising for founders.

The questions, and the answers.

Watching your parents as professors, what made a six-year-old so certain he wanted to follow his father into physics?

My parents seemed to be having a lot of fun, with sabbaticals abroad and engaging work. I enjoyed those experiences, but honestly, science and physics also just came easily to me. It was the path of least resistance, so I kind of fell forward in that direction over time rather than making a dramatic decision.

Can you paint a picture of what your daily life looked like as a young astrophysicist working with Hubble data?

A lot of time sitting at a computer building observation plans with my adviser, who was a grant writing god and got me telescope time. Data actually arrived on mailed nine track tape reels that I'd load and process. We were trying to reverse engineer why the early universe reheated after the Big Bang using spectra of ancient gas.

What do fencing, Dungeons and Dragons, kung fu, and tai chi have in common in how your mind works?

Fencing tied into the fantasy role playing side, I started D&D in 1978 at age nine. Kung fu came later, after starting Anonymizer, as a physical outlet for startup stress. Going out, getting out of the office, yelling and hitting things was cathartic and helped keep my brain together through that insane process for about ten years.

The government was pushing the Clipper chip as a backdoor into encryption. Was there a specific moment that struck you as monumentally bad, or was it a slow burn?

It was a slow burn. I was already seeing how much information could be gathered just from my own website logs. The Clipper chip meant keeping a copy of everyone's keys, which was obviously going to get hacked and foreign governments would demand copies too. It never made sense, so I joined the cypherpunks to build open alternatives.

Was there a single day you knew you were done with telescopes and ready to start a company?

I was driving home from UCSD and saw a billboard for a shopping center with a URL on it, the first time I'd ever seen a web address in the wild. That told me the internet had hit a tipping point, moving from niche academic use to mass market. I went home and told my wife I needed to do this now.

What was Mixmaster, the tool you built in grad school?

It was an open source anonymous email tool that broke messages into identically sized encrypted parts routed through multiple server hops, mixed with other messages at each stage so no one could trace message in to message out. The problem was it required command line Linux skills, which pushed me to think about building something regular people could actually use.

Can you speedrun from founding Anonymizer to where you are today?

We started as consumer internet anonymity, similar to Tor or VPNs before those existed, reaching about a million users and 100,000 paying subscribers by 2000. After 9/11 we built an anonymous FBI tip line processing 25,000 tips for free, which opened doors with law enforcement. Within a couple years we went from all consumer to 98 percent US government, and I sold the company in 2008.

What do you think is broken about how founders are taught to raise capital today?

A lot of advice comes from big VCs with mixed motives who need every investment to be a multi billion dollar outcome to return their fund, given the portfolio model of investing in companies with high failure rates. That drives hyper growth at all costs, even though a smaller successful exit could be life changing for a founder but inconsequential to the VC's fund.