For 16 years at In-Q-Tel, Chris Darby split leadership with Steve Bowsher, running the Washington and agency side while Bowsher handled Menlo Park and venture relationships, and under his leadership the firm became known for helping companies like Palantir, Anduril, Databricks, FireEye, Cloudera, and GitLab land their first government customers, while also putting about half its capital into hardware areas like microelectronics, commercial space, drones, batteries, and materials. He has long argued that satellites, geolocation, and cyber tools are becoming so widely available that countries no longer need to be wealthy to gain real intelligence or military capabilities, a view that carries into his work at Cerberus, where he joined the board of quantum infrastructure company Maybell Quantum after describing quantum infrastructure as key to future security.