'Sometimes People Get Confused Between Ego and Rigour': PsiQuantum Co-Founder, Jeremy O'Brien's Wisdom

0:06Jeremy, welcome back to Giant Ideas. Last week we talked about your giant idea, PsyQuantum and building the world's first at-scale quantum computer. We'd like to dive a little bit behind the idea and to the man. So we ask all of our guests, if you could define your life with three photographs, what would those photographs be?

0:24Jeremy O'Brien:It's a tricky question. The first one that comes into my mind is a photograph of myself, one of my co-founders, Pete Shadbolt, and Lord Danny Finkelstein, who was sort of partnered with me through a UK EPSRC, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council scheme. it was I forget the detail of it it's called rising stars it was called some rising star thing where I think I applied for this uh award and upon being successful was was partnered with with someone uh you know exceptional like like Danny Finkelstein I also got to nominate and give an award to a rising star was my co-founder Pete who was formerly my PhD student and my other co-founder Mark Thompson's PhD student and then at that time he was a postdoc with my fourth co-founder Terry Rudolph and so that photo is the is the three of us in the lab at Bristol all and to me you know we had spent a lot of time you know uh in in the university environment um you know chipping away at this research you know of course this photograph I guess is uh I'm guessing it's about 12 years old uh Danny is a is a is a dear friend uh to this day and a fabulous human being and it was just such a privilege to get connected to him through this process and then pete um yeah was was you know one of the most brilliant phd students or postdocs of mine marks and terry's of the hundreds uh over the years it was such a privilege to be able to confer an award on him and then it also felt like this magical moment where wow so this you know you know lord finkelstein is is interested in what we're doing here in this you know dark lab in in the University of Bristol.

2:33Jeremy O'Brien:Uh, so that's, that's one photograph. Um, the next one that springs to mind is, uh, there's a photo, uh, taken, uh, on Moss Beach. Um, there's a lighthouse at Moss Beach, not far from, uh, Silicon Valley, where I think we probably had our first, uh, our first offsite as a company, so there's a small kind of youth hostel backpackers type of thing at the lighthouse there, and I guess there was somewhere between a dozen and 20 of us in the organisation. There's a photo of us on the beach then, and it's, you know, a large number of those people are still with the organization today and I kind of feel like I don't really like some of this sort of founder mythology type stuff I mean I think there's something in it but there's also something about well you're just the four people who happen to be there when it started right like it's not it's neither neither extreme and certainly in our organization um uh there's a lot of people uh you you know, you've made huge contributions.

3:53Jeremy O'Brien:Many of them arrived very early and have been with the company, you know, from just about the beginning. And so there's something magical about that, that I don't really want to, you know, like I don't want to claim prescience or even, you know, whatever. But there's something in that photograph of us all on the beach where you can see this, you know, it's just a bunch of people with a crazy idea and not much to show for it at that stage. But something about that thing persists into the future, I guess, is interesting. This is a bit nerdy, but there's a photograph of one of our ATEs, stands for Automated Test Equipment.

4:33Jeremy O'Brien:And it's got a 300 millimeter silicon wafer on it. And it's about a one ton piece of equipment, the size of, I don't know, four washing machines together or something. It's got this wafer on it, which is very photogenic. So it's covered with about 100 photonic chips. And as the light is shining off it, you get all these rainbow things. It's shiny and whatever. And that thing, before even chopping the silicon wafer up into the chips, it automatically tests all the components on it, right? uh and this is this is a sort of interesting feature of um of quantum computing i think is that people often overlook the fact that you have to test a whole you know like if you if you need to make a million qubit system then the total system has at least a million if not billions of components in it if those components are new and you have to you know improve their design and fabrication and so on you're going to need to test billions and billions of components right so that first system was specced by a former photonics person at Intel and is a standard tool in the semiconductor industry but when it arrived I remember you know looking at it in operation so it's you know like a robot automatically moving the wafer around doing all the measurements and so on I remember doing a quick sort of back of the envelope calculation thinking I guess this thing is doing the job of about 100 ,000 PhD students from back in the university research days and for me it was sort of like the the full fantasy of um that i had been dreaming of which was to to really use the tools of the semiconductor industry uh in this case to measure you know millions and hundreds of millions of of components and so on and now it's just routine right like we have i don't know half a dozen uh or more of those systems that have got auto loaders.

6:34Jeremy O'Brien:So they take 25 wafers and they auto load the wafers in and out and they're running 24 seven and all the rest of it. But that for a moment for me, it just really struck me. It was like a real transition point in what we're doing. So your four co-founders, you mentioned them in those stories. As investors, we would often look at that team structure and say, oh, that perhaps is a bit fragile. Four people making decisions can sometimes not go that well, four egos in the room, what have you. So how have you guys managed to have such a successful co-founding relationship for over a decade now? How do you make decisions?

7:10How does that work?

7:11Jeremy O'Brien:I have a slightly facetious but also somewhat serious answer to it. You need to work together for a decade or two before you found the company. And we had done that and we had been through a lot together already. And so there was, you know, no surprises and no ambiguity and nothing left. And in terms of the dynamic amongst the four of us, we had worked really closely for a very long time together. And I think that was very important. And then, you know, you mentioned egos and I, I used to say this a bit in the early days of the company. I think the, I think one of the interesting things to me about psychonomy is sometimes Sometimes people see us as a little bit standoffish, a little bit arrogant or something.

7:59Jeremy O'Brien:I don't really know how people see us. But actually, I think it's a very low ego organization coupled with extreme sort of rigor about all issues, technical and non-technical issues. Um, and the way I used to describe it in the early days is that, you know, the four of us who founded the company, we probably reasonably low ego individuals to start with and whatever the, whatever the profile of ego, the peak had, had, had happened and it had, had, had come up. Like we had, you know, we had all done things before we, we started the company. I like that post, post peak ego. That's good. Yeah. I like that terminology.

8:41Jeremy O'Brien:And, and I think we were in that, that mode. And then, you know, like it's, I think that sometimes people get a bit confused between sort of ego and rigor and, you know, Terry, Terry, who's, you know, I've known for the longest, I've known all of these guys for, I don't know, 15 plus years and more like closer to 25 years in Terry's case. um i remember at some point um we were uh the four of us were meeting and we had a sort of you know biz dev type person who was just you know friend and helping us out whatever terry and i were arguing about something and he's um this this person from the outside sort of like looking a bit worried and so on and and terry just paused from shouting at me to put his hand on on this guy's it's fine this is how we communicate and i think that there's a sort of um it it's it's this sort of rigor with which you uh tackle the issue which obviously in the early days for us was a lot technical both you know but it was not always technical either right i mean we even in the university days we had to figure out you know how to get large amounts of of funding for our research and all this sort of thing like we'd been to about we'd been through a bunch of non-technical stuff together as well and so I think it's about the it's about the you know I think I mean we all kind of get this ego thing with this which is that if it's about you then that's it that's a problem and actually for us it's it's always been about what what what we're doing sort of the opposite of that um and the way I always say it is that you know if if three people walk into a room with ideas A, B, and C, and they walk out of the room having concluded that one of those ideas is the right one, they have failed, right?

10:29Jeremy O'Brien:Because they shouldn't have even been talking about it if it was that obvious. And if they didn't go through ideas D, E, and F, you know, that came out of joint arguments and discussions and all the rest of it, and then settle on, you know, a hybrid of that, you know, you get the point. It's got it. And I have an example of that where from the early days when I went into our boardroom, which was our meeting room, it was the only room we had in fact, it was our everything room. I went into that room to meet with the three co-founders and our then VP of engineering. And I was determined to let these guys know we have to do every silicon photonics multi-project wafer run that's out there in the world from now until further notice.

11:19Jeremy O'Brien:I guess it was an hour later that I walked out of the room convinced we're never doing another multi-project wafer run ever again. And I think that's an example where all four of us, it's just routine for us to do a full 180 on what we think about something. Because, you know, I've just had Mark Thompson, who knows more about silicon photonics for quantum computing than anyone on the planet, tell me why we shouldn't do multi-project wave 1. What do I want to do? Like, argue the point with him ad infinitum and insist that we do it, you know? Yeah. Interesting. I always think it's so funny how when you work together for that amount of time, you end up having a shorthand, you know?

11:57So I think some people see how me and Tommy talk to each other over email or directly and are shocked at the directives and the plunders, but it's just a shorthand you develop over many decades.

12:07Jeremy O'Brien:it's shorthand that that leads to massive efficiency right yes yes there's there's it's sort of the positive version of finishing someone else's sentence in the wrong way it's like you you know you know one another you know how you work you know how you think you know how you communicate you know you buy you you know your own biases you know one another's biases etc etc it's very uh it it makes for extreme efficiency actually of communication and and and it's not just about efficiency it's about the quality of the decisions that you make at the end and my view is that you know like it shouldn't take more that if the decision's easy or obvious then we shouldn't even have more than one person thinking about it right like anyone who can think clearly should be able to make it an easy decision and all the decisions that that require you know a handful of people or more that then they're complicated non-obvious uh decisions and it's about the quality of them uh so i think that the communication is sort of subordinate to that uh to that thing and you know the more decisions you have to make the more uh efficient your communication needs to be jeremy you mentioned they're doing this for decades you must be a master of deferred gratification because you've been working on this for 25 plus years the company's over a decade old how do you keep morale high when for so long you're in stealth mode for so long you're kind of pre-commercial both for yourself how do you keep morale high and then also for the team around you how do you do that i'm sure there'll be a lot of founders listening to this you'd love to know about that yeah and apologies that i don't have i don't feel like i have profound answers to any of these sorts of questions and unsurprisingly i don't really think about it because well it's not hard for me for whatever reason right and i i can just guess that for me um it's it's uh really important and it's fun right um and i i used to say in in my you know when i was a university professor i used to say to people like we're gonna um we're gonna work really hard on really hard problems right obviously you didn't come to do research at a university to do something different to that i assume um but you know what we're gonna have a lot of fun while we're doing that because why would working hard on hard problems not be fun uh with people that are doing the same thing that you like and that you have to work on you know what i mean like i mean i think this is a bit my um you know a bit segue on the climate change uh thing i think the communication of that's been a bit problematic in that you know my i think uh tommy you and i discussed this over dinner at some point my view is like okay so there's a hard challenge and there's hard work to solve isn't that what we do as humans aren't we great at doing that like working together to solve hard things and isn't it great when you when you when you succeed and my analogy is like you do a back backyard cleanup or whatever and it's hot and sweaty and you get scratched by the roses whatever and then you sit around and eat pizza and drink beer and you earn that pizza and beer and you all feel great about it right like I just think that this is a mistake that we that we make that you know like the only things that are worth doing are hard in the in the in the sense of just personal satisfaction and all the rest of it.

15:16Jeremy O'Brien:And then if you think about really making progress in the world, then they're going to be hard problems that you're solving, because there's a lot of people out there, a lot of smart people out there, and et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think that's part of it. And then just more generically, what we're doing is not just hard but it's hugely impactful as we've we've talked about on the previous episode um and you know it's you know it's a bit like a you know i i'd sometimes you know years ago i'd say to people well there's nothing more exciting to be working on than what what we're doing at like you might argue whether um you know something in synthetic biology or sending a micro spacecraft to a star and another star system is equally exciting.

16:06Jeremy O'Brien:But, you know, that's just a personal preference. We now have a guy who used to work on the laser systems on, you know, sending a micro spacecraft to another star system. So I joke to people, he obviously finds what we're doing more exciting than more interesting than that. So I think it's a combination, right, like of really smart, you know, like you work with really smart people, you tackle really big challenges, you know, like, I don't know, I guess I'm painting a bit of a picture for you that makes sense, right? And so to me, there's not a lot of like, what sustains you? I mean, what else are you going to do?

16:41Jeremy O'Brien:You know what I mean? Work on something that's easy, that's not impactful, or just, I don't know, retire and watch TV or something? I don't know. Yes. Well, hopefully you're not going to do that. The world needs you to be doing this. Jeremy, I clearly run a very egalitarian and meritocratic organization, but we're going to asked you to be immodest and modesty for this answer is definitely banned what is it about you that has allowed you to be as successful as you have been well this is this is this is the truth uh and so please don't accuse me being of being uh immodest i am exceptionally good at getting unbelievably good people to come work with me on on a really hard problem and i mean like Like, absolutely, you know, starting with my co-founders, you know, our chief operating officer, Farrah, but like, I mean, like, best of the best of the best people.

17:41Jeremy O'Brien:I am very good at getting those people to come work with me on this problem. How do you do it? Well, I think I'm just lucky in some ways in that it is a really good quality problem, right? Like it's quality from a technical point of view, it's quality from impact, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a good problem to work on. I used to say to prospective PhD students back in the day, I said, don't believe anyone who tells you that their approach to quantum computing is the right one. Because what do you think that, you know, and I don't pick on Dave Wineland for any particular reason other than he won a Nobel Prize and he's a lovely guy.

18:23Jeremy O'Brien:do you think that Dave Wineland is doing iron trap quantum computing because he used to be a semiconductor quantum dot guy and then quantum computing came along and he thought oh the best way to build a quantum computer is using quantum dots skip these irons from now on I'm gonna make no he was trapping irons for decades before quantum computing came along and so then he was pursuing iron trap quantum computing one of the loveliest people that you'd ever want to meet and deserving of a Nobel Prize and all the rest of it and so I guess that's a long-winded way of saying I really know that this is the right way to do it right like I know it partly from a technical background and partly from instinct and uh partly from you know staring in the whites of the eyes of the the best of the best and understanding their bits of the puzzle and all the rest of it and I think that um I think that's a an important part of what gets people to come work with me on this problem is because they then can have confidence that it is going to work.

19:24Jeremy O'Brien:And then they end up knowing a ton more than me and tell me why it's going to be the right way to do it. Hearing you talk about this conviction and commitment for 25 years to bringing this vision to life, incredible that you're doing it. And I think we're all very grateful that you're pushing this forward for sure. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us on Giant Ideas. really really appreciate it thank you both very much thank you fun thank you