I can’t find the OpenDNS citation — could you post a link? I would be super disappointed to find out that the founder of OpenDNS was involved in this sort of behavior.
IANAL, but: One can be both an advisor to a company and their company can be a customer of it. That is not, in itself, illegal.
It is illegal when they are tied together as a quid pro quo, and further, when it is undisclosed. In every case any company I ran has ever done this, we fully expected the other party to disclose the conflict of interest to their company before becoming an advisor. Of course we have no way of confirming this, but this is also why none of the startups themselves were charged here.
