EXCLUSIVE: Quantum’s SpaceX Moment? Ashlee Vance on PsiQuantum’s Moonshot

0:00So, Pete, before we get too in-depth with the conversation and breaking down what quantum computing is, I wanted to bring in a real expert. great ashley can you walk in please

0:15you're not supposed to laugh nice to see you again what do we have here well i figured quantum computing out um i know you guys are anti-chandelier that's right this is where sia sia yeah nice she has a shandelier um But the rest, I think, is pretty self-exploitatory. You got Peter Shaw. I went deep. Banking system equals over. Weather solved. Not weather. Not weather. Weather's chaotic. Does it make sense? It makes sense. Ashley, because you are a expert, you've been covering this since, I think, 2007. I looked back. Oh, God. I read the receipts. You wrote a piece on D-Wave. Can you explain to us maybe like chat GPT?

1:09No, you're going to do it. Where is quantum computing today? Oh, that was better than where I thought it was going to go. Well, we're at this interesting spot. I mean, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Pete for a couple of days going through CyQuantum's various facilities. And I mean, one thing we talked about was that it used to be just like total science experiment across the board. All these things had come out of these university labs and then gotten some venture capital money. And it was like, take your experiment and see if it's real. And things like making qubits were – started off quite – until pretty recently.

1:54It was like a rare achievement that somebody would be like, we made a qubit. Now we made two. We made four. And it was just going like that for many years. Now it seems like just about everybody can make qubits. They can make quite a few of them. You're kind of at this point where definitely seeing progress, right, in this thing that feels unattainable, which is like these basic building blocks people seem to know how to make. It moved out of the university into startup land. And then still, though, at that very expensive, exotic, does this work, does it not kind of state. And then the other thing I find challenging about this field is that there's different ways you can go at quantum computing, depending on how you're making your qubits.

2:41And whoever you talk to will tell you that their way is the best. And the other one is for sure flawed. and then you're sitting with all these very smart, well-funded people. And so I'm always left like, okay, either some portion of these people are really bad decision makers and I don't know fully which one that is. And so anyway, I feel like lots of progress but still quite confusing. So what makes SciQuantum different? I know your point of view kind of changed after you guys did a piece together. So I wrote the first piece ever on PsyQuantum five years ago. Something like that, yeah. So in that moment, I would say PsyQuantum was a – it was like a – not like fully theoretical, but an idea, right, of where they wanted to go, which was – the idea has been consistent since the beginning.

3:35It was that we mentioned people can make qubits. Some people wanted to get to like 64 qubits, 128 qubits, and that felt like progress. Like since the beginning, CyQuantum, like we're going to make a million qubits and that is the quantity of qubits you need to do useful work. There's this weird thing with quantum computing where you have to use all these funky software techniques to do this error correction stuff. And so if you have a million qubits, it comes down to about like a thousand are really, really useful for what you're trying to do. And so it was just the scale, right? Like since the beginning, they were trying to build a much bigger quantum computer than anybody else.

4:17And it was always going to be expensive. It was going to require basically inventing like at least partial fields of computing and networking to get there. And I would just say over those five years since I first wrote about them and then went to go see all the stuff. I mean, they just made tremendous progress to do all the – go from like idea to prototype to proof of concept of, yes, we can build all of these individual components and now we have to string them together. And then if they do build a machine of this size, it would just be much, much larger than what anyone else is doing. so if you believe what side quantum says and like what if you believe in their what their bet is then that should be the it should be a machine that is just far far ahead of what everybody else is trying to do what was your biggest takeaway from touring the facility i mean kind of the progress that they had made and um i think it was like a reminder it reminded me of I'm like a Silicon Valley history nerd and I've been covering semiconductors for a really long time.

5:27It sort of was like hearkening back, you know, to people doing it's like at that edge of research and making a product and how hard some of that stuff is. Like Pete and I would go into a building, you know, you have to build a machine to make this one specific part of the quantum computer and that machine they're building looks like is from, I don't know, you know, from a government lab, basically. I was going to go and see it tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Getting suited up. So you'll see, you know, and so it was,

6:01it's like how cool and dramatic all of this is in some ways and like how much work you have to do to get to the end. But yeah, it was just like a reminder of feeling Silicon Valley's roots and people still doing hard tech, deep tech stuff and what goes into that. sorcery is brought to you by brex the financial stack trusted by more than 30 000 companies including one in three venture-backed startups in the u.s nearly 40 percent of startups fail because they run out of cash brex is literally built to help founders avoid that unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle shipping away at it with fees brex's designs help you spend smarter and move faster their all-in-one solution combines checking treasury and fdic protection into one powerful account.

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7:37I mean, I like that. He a little bit like DARPA. we talked earlier about DARPA, you know, not starting from a position of quantum computing is awesome, but starting from a position that quantum computing is a pain in the ass. And it has, you know, failed promises and endless confusion and all of this competitive jostling. And it's a pain in the ass. And it's like failed to deliver many, many times. And it's really confusing and i'm really skeptical of it and so you know i really appreciate that ashley started from that point of view and i think you know that um that's a battle-hardened uh instinct from what i can tell uh the quality of the obviously of the work and and his team like we knew that we could trust what ashley was was going to do um we knew that he wouldn't be singing our praises to high heaven.

8:38And, you know, I think like now we're at this stage and I'm really happy to hear sort of how you like what's what you've taken away from from coming to see us. We're at this stage where there's stuff that you can go and look at. And like, of course, you shouldn't believe me when I say we're going to do this. You should come and look at it. And this is sort of endlessly what I say to people actually out there in the world, which is just come and see, come and see the facility, come and see the data, come and see some wafers. And, you know, together with obviously a bunch of expertise that has also done diligence on what we're doing, you can come and get a feeling for what is the magnitude, what is the level of maturity.

9:20But yeah, finally, I mean, I think the secret is that, as Ashley says, he's a Silicon Valley history nerd. And that's secretly my number one reason that I was excited to have him come and visit, which is that, yeah, I mean, I'm really proud of the fact that we're making semiconductors in Silicon Valley and we're making mind boggling, weird, crazy, frightening, loud stuff that is thrilling to go and look at. And, you know, I occasionally tell people, I don't think it's totally arrogant for me to say that we will be in the history books like i feel confident that we'll get a footnote at least somewhere in the history book one day and uh hopefully more than that and um yeah uh to have somebody come and look at us through that lens and all of the amazing companies that that ashley's covered uh that's uh humbling and exciting to me so yeah it was a real thrill to have them come through.

10:20I think that this is one of those fields where like most of the people doing it start coming from academia and academics, in my experience, a lot of times are bad at starting businesses. Really? Well, there's a thing where you want everything to be perfect and you're just forever engineering. And I think when I first met the PsyQuantum team, they all had such impressive academic pedigrees and they were all coming from Australia and the UK and coming to Silicon Valley. And I already have like a little bit of a bias sometimes about how well like those cultures are going to blend into doing the startup thing.

11:02And so you could have seen a scenario easily where you've got these science minded folks who have a bunch of capital at their disposal and you're forever engineering and like chasing the perfect thing I mean it happens like all the things whether it's chips or rockets or whatever it's just you don't know when to stop or or when to make like the first vaguely feasible object to go to the next step and so I think there'd been this big gap of time since I had written the story and then come to see the stuff so it was just cool to see the things were like operating in buildings and to put um to put some structure around the ideas and i think writ large quantum computing probably just because of where it's at in how long it's been around is most of these efforts are academic efforts at their roots and i so i think everybody's probably under this challenge of like when does yours it's that when does it stop being a science experiment and when does it start becoming a product and that's such a hard decision to make and you can spend so much money in between those two spots without getting to the finish line and so um i would say yeah like i don't even think i was like skeptical when i first met you guys because the the academic pedigree and the ideas and everything were all so clear but i think i was probably in my head like Like, oh, I can see this group of people sort of having a tough time doing the Silicon Valley thing and like actually turning this into a useful thing.

12:42I've had a tough time. Well, I mean, it was always going to be hard. But yeah, I think I've seen it a bunch with like rocket companies. It's funny where you have different rocket startups trying to do ostensibly the same thing. And a bunch of the people have similar backgrounds. And maybe they've even had a few people from SpaceX that have built a rocket before. But it really is a funny thing. It's like getting from nothing to the final object still, even if you have sort of a roadmap, is a very difficult thing to do. And so when you actually see, you'll get to, when you go to the lab, I don't, you know, you actually get to see the stuff in the room and you're like, oh, okay, this is making more sense now.

13:24I loved how part of the interview you were, you were filming out of this like crazy house. What is that? Where did you get that? So it's like Pete said, I was scarred by quantum computing and I told him going in, I was like, I don't even know if I want to do this. It feels like a quest that I don't even know. I'm always frustrated about trying to explain how this stuff works to everybody. And so I was picturing my headspace and then I just put out a tweet. Yeah, my mind palace. I put out a post on X where I was like, does anyone have like a crazy person's office? We just wanted a – kind of wanted a backdrop that reflected my inner turmoil.

14:10And then God bless the power of the people. Somebody was like, my dad has exactly what you're looking for. Wait, you found this on Twitter? Yeah, it was even better. Sorry, X. I did. I found it on X and it ended up being a dude who spent, I might get the number wrong, but 20 plus years at Xerox PARC and was just a hardcore engineer and he had collected everything. He even had, there's quantum computing books. They were just there. so it was perfect yeah and he had like every laptop you know every hard drive ever it's just like all stacked up and i was talking to him and he's like yeah my daughter thinks there's bitcoin on it a couple bit yeah i'm like dude which one i'll sit here i'll go through those no problem but yeah he had this his his family said they had held interventions periodically to try to get him to clean the office.

15:10And then after we came and shot there, they're like, oh, maybe this was all, it's... Gotta keep it. They viewed it in a different light. It's a thing. You know, you should respect it, the chaos. That's amazing. I love that. Yeah, so we didn't change anything. If people see that, it was like not a set. It was just natural. Iconic. Natural habitat. In today's high-speed business world, Staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence. Meet Turing Intelligence. Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission-critical challenges, no matter your industry.

15:50From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit Turing.com slash sorcery, spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com slash sorcery. Pete, on the part of the team, bringing in researchers and academics, how do you keep your team motivated and like working on this for a really long time? Yeah. We talk about insanity. We talk about like mindset with all this, but like how do you keep your team motivated? Yeah, I mean, the gift really is just the mission, right?

16:39Like it is such a gift to have a mission of this magnitude that is completely singular, unambiguously incredibly hard and unambiguously worth spending your life on. like to have that as something to organize a team around is is a dream for somebody trying to do something like this. I always think about the she when I first came out here I had a Apollo patch my mum and dad gave me an Apollo 11 patch it's on my rucksack I think it sat in a drawer for years and then I pulled it out one day and just started to get to the age where that really had significance for me and i always think about apollo 11 as like the dream situation obviously to ashley's point like it hasn't been easy it's been bloody difficult building this company over the years um you know i've learned a lot about semiconductor industry and so on and you you have these situations where there's 100 people they're standing around some problem of extreme complexity and difficulty and they're all fighting with each other and they're all misaligned about how to solve for it.

17:48And there's emotions and personalities and whatever else involved. And I always think about that situation in the Apollo program, where you would have just walked those people out the front of the building, pointed up at the moon and said, ladies and gentlemen, there is still nobody on that bastard moon. Get your act together. And having that, you know, singular aligning goal, like the whole company is only doing one thing, build a useful fault tolerant quantum computer and yeah I'm very grateful to the team members who have already spent nearly a decade in pursuit of that and are working harder than ever to do it it's it's awesome to have lots of new people of course joining the company and sort of also just getting oriented around that target but but I guess like the the one you know and this is kind of where we started like early on you asked us like how we raised so much money and it blows my mind that we've raised this money it's extraordinary it's a crazy privilege my observation on this is that we i think it is fair to say that psych quantum has always been the most extreme in pig-headedly insisting that we're just going to go for the real thing, that we're not going to make half measures, that we're just going to stick to what we understand from the science is necessary to do useful things.

19:16And that sort of like pig-headedness and insistence and singularity, like what you realize after doing it for many years is that that is the rocket fuel. Like that is the stuff that makes the best people want to come and join your company despite the fact that they could get 15 other jobs. It makes the best investors want to invest in your company. It actually rules out weaker people who want to see some half-measure kind of outcome. And yeah, that has been really sort of fascinating to see how I've just become more and more and more convinced that just sticking to what we know and the real end goal is good for us.

20:01You mentioned also one of your management principles. Do you remember that? No. Always be impressive? Oh, no. Yeah, that's just, I mean, yeah, just be impressive. Well, I thought that was a really good point. So what do you tell your team in presentations and everything? Oh, yeah, just be, I mean, I don't have any wisdom on managing people. But my refrain endlessly is to be impressive. Like people ask, and it's a little bit to Ashley's thing, in quantum computing, you get all of these founders, they all show up and they all think that their way is the only way to do it and sling mud at everybody else.

20:46Everything else is crap.

20:50Like you can't win that game. Like nobody wins in that game. somebody walks out of that meeting completely convinced that the photon is the right way to build the qubit and then they'll go and meet with the ion trap people and the ion trap people will talk about nature's perfect qubit and all-to-all connectivity and you'll walk out of that meeting saying what was p even talking about with these photons it's really ion is that god's gift to quantum computing and so on and so on and i'm sympathetic it's terrible for people on the other side of that bouncing around between these various different sales pitches um and so yeah like like Like this sort of turn of people focus so intently on the turn of phrase or the PowerPoint slide that's going to win the deal or whatever.

21:32And I think it's more like you can tell if people are sincere and impressive and like for real. And if they've done things that they said they were going to do. And so I try and push the team a little bit to focus more on that way of looking at things. I'll also say like, and actually you might have a view on this from watching Silicon Valley for decades. I'm pretty sure people were doing the same kind of nonsense with memory technologies or with new transistor designs and stuff like that for a long time. And most of those efforts disappeared to nothing. But the good news is we got the bloody semiconductor industry out of it, or we got microelectronics out of it.

22:11And that's just, that's progress. That's the way the world works, as far as I can tell. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's so i mean it's probably not totally unique to the quantum field to have all these different pitches i mean it's the same thing if you're talking about like dna sequencing it's like this method versus that method and then and then usually it sort of ends up where i don't know usually it ends up where different things kind of can fill different roles but the one who wins the most is the closest to the general purpose machine and that's that's kind of the big the big quest and i was thinking about like the stuff you're talking about early it seems like all the really good the biggest things i've ever covered they all take 10 to 12 years i think silica valley sometimes you have this overnight sensation kind of thing where you see steve jobs or mark zuckerberg turn up when they're 26 and they're worth a billion dollars and i don't know it all look so easy sometimes and and especially in software i think sometimes you could get some something closer to like a overnight success even though even that usually takes longer but on the hardware side i think everything worthwhile even you know like spacex yeah from like 2003 three you know it took them until like 2012 to actually start looking like a real rocket company and even then it was like they could go bankrupt at any minute of just a couple things went wrong and then you get to like 2016 and they start getting closer to flying their main rocket the Falcon 9 a bit more often and then all of a sudden you get to like 2018 and they've flipped the entire world on its head and they're flying more than all their competitors combined and so it's just funny these these cycles but you know through that first 10 12 years it's like they could have gone under at any moment required tons of money and it all looks if you'd ask somebody in 2012 there still would have been people said this company's ridiculous it will never work and they're just gonna spend themselves into oblivion and nobody can make a reusable rocket and this is all pointless and those people wouldn't even just be jerks.

24:34They would like sort of have a reasonable argument to say all that stuff. So yeah, the hardware things are always tricky, I think. Okay. Okay. That's my hardware servant for the day. Oh, that's a good answer. Well, Ashley, thank you for coming on and being the expert call of the day. It's my pleasure. I hope you enjoy your quantum journey. Who's that addressed to? Me or Molly? I feel like you're always on a quantum journey. I'm enjoying it. Yeah. Yeah. You're on a quantum life. Yep. Yep. It's got to work. It's going to work. Okay. Cool. All right. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, Sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews.

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