If you follow Qubes / ITL, you would know that they are hardly a "startup" as a decade-old company, and they have been experimenting with enterprise-level support. If they can find a home in the enterprise market, it will at least give them enough cashflow to continue developing Qubes for the foreseeable future.

Besides, I imagine Joanna Rutkowska's opinion on the ICO scene isn't a very positive one, and I don't think she wants to complicate her company by pivoting to a blockchain model that has absolutely no relevance to developing secure operating sytems.

All I said is that their product would be great in the hands of a startup that focuses on a single hardware platform and does more marketing, and/or does an ico because I see a great incentive to run nodes of the cloud (because qubes utself provides all the building block for trust).

> If you follow Qubes I do, since 2010, when I was doing very similar research on trusted cloud computing.

> If they can find a home in the enterprise market I wish it to them, but this doesn’t mean someone else can try a more aggressive consumer route, or an alternative for their cloud model.

I respect a ton their work, and as I said in my very first comment I think they should focus on the research part, and someone else could provide capital and grow the consumer product.

All I said is that their product would be great in the hands of a startup that focuses on a single hardware platform and does more marketing

That's strange, because the first sentence in your OP is:

Qubes would make for a great startup and, given the time, prob a very successful ICO.

In my mind I was thinking to Qubes as the product(s), that could benefit from a startup. Similarly to as Kafka has Confluent, or Druid has Imply.

And I fully agree that Qubes the company should continue to be focus on research.

And I see the confusion now: Qubes isn't a company, the company is Invisible Things Lab.