Do you believe people would continue using a VPN if they knew several of its employees were ex-NSA? No, not at all.

The same applies here, it doesn't matter if you call the people spy or not, VPNs should not have any association with intelligence services.

Thing is, Akamai and Cisco employ a lot of those people. Quite many of them in security research. People who were in the NSA or Israeli intelligence are the people companies seek when they want security. Israel's military intelligence is one of the places where VPNs were first used, and the idea later became commercial VPN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_Point#History