The security industry is full of "ex-NSA hotshots". Having worked at NSA is hardly a powerful hook for an article. For starters: only a tiny minority of those working in tech at NSA are experts on encryption.
It was a very interesting story to read. Glad they managed to build something that's is potentially strong while easy to use. That's difficult to bootstrap. Unfortunately, it's so difficult to design good cryptosystems, protocols, etc. that I can't trust the product until it gets strong, peer review from a diverse audience. Both the level of screw-ups in the field and massive investments in subversion by nation-states means a tool like this needs to be fully open-source plus local, build option. Note that they can do open-source w/ proprietary license.<p>The escrow is also a problem. There's the risk of hackers, malicious insiders, courts in regular legal system, and the court in the secret legal system. If you do escrow, it needs to run on the most secure and tamper-resistant systems you can throw at it w/ 3rd parties verifying this. Given above risks, it's better if they <i>don't</i> do escrow and instead switch to a private/public key model. Bernstein et al have given us some really fast and secure software for that, too. They just auto-generate the key-pairs locally & handle the public key management instead. Would be a nice improvement.
Congratulations to the Virtru team for your success! I remember in 2012 when 2 of the guys were working on a cryptographic binding contract and left to join this startup.