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

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Jeremy, welcome back to Giant Ideas.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Last week we talked about your giant idea, SciQuantum and building the world's first at-scale quantum computer.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: We'd like to dive a little bit behind the idea and to the man.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: So we ask all of our guests if you could define your life with three photographs, what would those photographs be?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was I I forget the detail of it.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was called Rising Star.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I also got to nominate and give an award uh to a rising star was my co-founder Pete, who was uh formerly my PhD student uh and my other co-founder Mark Thompson's PhD student.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then at that time he was a postdoc with my fourth co-founder, Terry Rudolph.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so that photo is the is the three of us in the lab at Bristol.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, you know, we 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.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, this photograph I guess is uh I'm guessing it's about 12 years old.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that's that's one photograph.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um the next one that springs to mind is uh there's a photo uh taken uh on Moss Beach.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: 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 as a company.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a there's a small kind of um youth hostel backpackers type of um thing at the at the lighthouse there.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess there was uh somewhere between a a dozen and and twenty of us uh in the organization.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's a photo of us on on the beach uh then and it's um you know a large number of those people are are still with the organization today.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I I kind of feel like I I I don't really like some of this sort of founder mythology type stuff.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I mean I think there's something in it, but there's also something about, well, you're just the four people who happened to be there when it started, right?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's not it's neither neither extreme.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly in our organization, um uh there's a lot of people uh, you know, made huge contributions.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh many of them arrived very early and have been with the company, you know, from just about the beginning.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: 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 and and not much to show, not much to show for it at that stage, but something about that thing uh persists uh in into the f into the future, I guess, is is interesting.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is a bit uh a bit nerdy, but um there's a photograph of one of our ATEs, stands for automated test equipment, uh, and it's got a 300 millimeter silicon wafer uh on on it.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a you know, it's about a one-ton piece of equipment, you know, the size of, I don't know, four washing machines together or something.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's got this wafer on it, which is very photogenic, so it's you know covered with about a hundred photonic chips, and so the light is uh is shining off it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: You get all these rainbow things, it's shiny and whatever.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that thing, uh, you know, before even chopping the silicon wafer up into the chips, it automatically tests all the components on it, right?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: If those components are new and you have to, you know, improve their design and fabrication and so on, you're gonna need to test billions and billions of components, right?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that first system uh was spec'd by a former uh uh photonics person at Intel and is a standard tool in the semiconductor industry.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: But when it arrived, I remember you know looking at it in operation.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it's you know like a robot automatically moving the wafer around, doing all the measurements and so on.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I remember um doing a quick sort of back of the envelope calculation and thinking, I guess this thing is doing the job of about 100,000 PhD students from back in the university research days.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, it was sort of like the full fantasy of um that I had been dreaming of, which was to really use the tools of the semiconductor industry, uh, in this case to measure, you know, millions and hundreds of millions of components and so on.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's just routine, right?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have, I don't know, half a dozen uh or more of those systems that have got auto loaders.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: So they take 25 wafers and they auto-load the wafers in and out and they're running 24-7 and all the rest of it.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: But that for a moment for me, it just really struck me it was like a real transition point in in what we were doing.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: So your four co-founders, you mentioned them in those, in in those stories.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, as investors, we would often look at that team structure and say, oh, that that that perhaps is a bit fragile.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Four four people making decisions um can sometimes not go that well, four egos in the room, you know, what have you.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: So how have you guys managed to have such a successful co-founding relationship for the over a decade now?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: How do you make decisions?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: How does that work?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I have a I have a slightly facetious but also uh uh somewhat serious answer to it.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um you need to work together for a decade or two before you found the company.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we had we had done that and we had been through a through a lot uh together already.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: We had worked really closely for a very long time uh together, and I think that was very important.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, you mentioned egos, and I I I used to say this a bit in the early days of the company.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think the I think one of the interesting things to me about Psychonomy is sometimes people see us as you know a little bit standoffish, a little bit arrogant or something.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know how people see us.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you know, um, but but actually I think it's a very low-ego organization um coupled with extreme sort of rigor about all issues, technical and non-technical issues.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: 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're probably reasonably low-ego individuals to start with.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And whatever the what whatever the profile of ego, the peak had had had happened and had had had had come up, like we had, you know, we had all done things before we we started the company.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: I like that post post-peak ego.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's good.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I like that terminology, and and I think we were in that that mode.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, like it's I think that that sometimes people get a bit confused between sort of ego and and rigor.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, Terry, Terry, who's uh, you know, I've I've known for the longest, uh, I've 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.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: 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 and Terry just paused from shouting at me to put his hand on the on this guy's saying it's fine, it's fine, this is how we communicate.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that there's a sort of um it it it's it's this sort of rigor with which you uh tackle the issue, which obviously in it in the early days for us was a lot uh technical, both, you know, uh but it was not always technical either, right?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like we'd been to a bunch, we'd been through a bunch of non-technical stuff together as well.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think it's about the it's about the you know, I think I 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.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, for us, it's it's always been about what what what we're doing, sort of the opposite of that.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: 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?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because they shouldn't have even been talking about it if it was that obvious.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if they didn't go through ideas D, E and F, you know, that came out of joint uh arguments and discussions and and all the rest of it, um and and then settle on you know a hybrid of those, you know, you get the point.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's got it and I I have an example of that where from the early days when I went into a uh I went into a uh our our boardroom, um, which was our meeting room.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was the only room we had, in fact.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was our everything room.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I went into that room to meet with the three co-founders uh and our then uh VP of engineering, uh, 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.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh 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, uh, who knows more about uh about silicon photonics for quantum computing than anyone on the planet, tell me why we shouldn't do multi-project waver.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: What do I want to do?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like argue the point with him ad infinitum and insist that we do it, you know?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I think some some people see how me and Tommy talk to each other over email or or directly, and I'm shocked at the directness and the blunders, but it's such a sort of shorthand you develop over many decades.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's shorthand that that leads to massive efficiency, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Where there's there's there's a it's sort of the positive version of finishing someone else's sentence in the wrong way.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: 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 your bias, you you know your own biases, you know one another's biases, etc.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: It it's very uh it it makes for extreme efficiency, actually, of communication.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and it it's not just about efficiency, it's about the quality of the decisions that you make at the end.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And my view is that you know, like it shouldn't take more than if the decision's easy or obvious, then we shouldn't even have more than one person thinking about it, right?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like anyone who can think clearly should be able to make it an easy decision.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And all the decisions that that require a uh you know a handful of people or more, that then they're they're complicated, non-obvious uh decisions, and it's about the quality of them.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I think the the communication is sort of subordinate to that uh to that thing.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the more decisions you have to make, the more uh efficient your communication needs to be.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Jeremy, you mentioned they're doing this for decades.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: 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.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: How do you keep morale high when for so long you're in stealth mode, for so long you're kind of pre-commercial?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: Both for yourself, how do you keep morale high, and then also for the team around you, how do you do that?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure there'll be a lot of founders listening to this who'd love to know about that.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and apologies that I don't have, I don't feel like I have profound answers to any of these sorts of questions.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And unsurprisingly, I don't really think about it because, well, it's not hard for me for whatever reason, right?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I I can just guess that for me um it's it's uh really important and it's fun, right?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: 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?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you didn't come to do research at a university to do something different to that, I assume.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know what?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have a lot of fun while we're doing that.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: 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?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean, I think this is a a bit my um, you know, a bit segue on the climate change uh thing.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: My view is like, okay, so there's uh a hard challenge and there's hard work to solve.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that what we do as human?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Aren't we great at doing that?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like working together to solve hard things?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And isn't it great when you when you when you succeed?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And my analogy is like you do a a back backyard cleanup or whatever, and it's hot and sweaty and you get scratched by the roses, whatever.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then you sit around and eat pizza and drink beer, and you earned that pizza and beer, and you all feel great about it, right?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you if you think about the um you know really making progress in in the world, then they're gonna be hard problems that you 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.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I I think that's that's part of it.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then just more generically, like that what we're doing is not just hard, but it's hugely impactful, as we've we've talked about on the previous episode.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, it's you know, it's a bit like uh, you know, I I I'd sometimes uh 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 Psychonum.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like you might argue whether um, you know, something in synthetic biology or sending a micro spacecraft to a uh a star and another star system is equally exciting, but you know, that's just a personal preference.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: We now have a guy who used to work on the laser systems uh uh on you know, sending a micro spacecraft to another star system.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I I joke to people he obviously finds what we're doing uh uh more exciting than more interesting than that.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's a combination, right?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like of really smart, you know, like you work with really smart people, you tackle really big challenges.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: I get I guess I'm painting a bit of a picture for you that that makes sense, right?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so to me, there's there's not a lot of like what what sustains you.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what else are you gonna do?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah you know what I mean, work on something that's easy, uh, that's not impactful, um, or just I don't know, retire and and watch TV or something?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, well, hopefully you're not gonna do that.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: The world needs you to be doing this.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Jeremy, you you've you've I clearly run a very egalitarian and meritocratic organization, but we're gonna ask you to be immodest, and and modesty for this answer is definitely banned.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: What is it about you that has allowed you to be as successful as you have been?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is this is this is the truth.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so please don't accuse me being of being uh immodest.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: I am exceptionally good at uh getting unbelievably good people to come work with me on on a really hard problem.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean like absolutely you know, starting with starting with my co-founders, um, you know, our chief operating officer Farabat.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean like the best of the best of the best people.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um I am very good at getting those people to come work with me on on uh on on this problem that uh how do you do it?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well I think I'm just I'm just lucky in some ways in that it it is a really good quality problem, right?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's it's quality from a technical point of view, it's quality from impact, uh, etc.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a good problem to work on.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I used to say to um prospective uh 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, uh uh and I I don't pick on Dave Weinland for any particular reason other than he won a Nobel Prize and he's a lovely guy.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that Dave Weinand 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.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Skip these ions from now on.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make no, he was trapping ions for decades before quantum computing came along, and so then he was pursuing iron-trap quantum computing.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: One of the loveliest people that you'd ever want to meet and deserving of a Nobel Prize and all the rest of it.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: 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?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: 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 best of the best and understanding their bits of the puzzle and all the rest of it.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that um I think that's uh an important part of what gets people to come work with me on this problem is because they they then can they then can have uh confidence that you know it is gonna work.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then they end up knowing a ton more than me and tell me why it's gonna, why it's gonna uh uh why why it's gonna be the right way to do it.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: And hearing you talk about this commit conviction and commitment for 25 years to to bringing this vision to life.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Incredible, incredible that you're doing it.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: And um I think we're all very grateful that that you're pushing this forward for sure.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us on Giant Ideas.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Really, really appreciate it.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you both very much.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.