“The Superposition Guy’s Podcast”, hosted by Yuval Boger, Chief Commercial Officer at QuEra Computing
whurley, founder and CEO of StrangeWorks, is interviewed by Yuval Boger. We discuss whurley’s journey from founding Honest Dollar to starting StrangeWorks, the lessons learned in bridging science and business communication in quantum, and the transition from quantum-only to advanced computing. Whurley also shares his views on the symbiotic relationship between AI and quantum computing, and the importance of partnerships in building the industry. He reflects on the current state of collaboration in the quantum industry, his optimism for future breakthroughs, and much more.
Listen on Spotify — here
Full Transcript
Yuval: Hello, whurley, and thank you for joining me today.
whurley: Thank you for having me.
Yuval: So who are you and what do you do?
whurley: So my name is whurley. I’m one of the co-founders and the CEO of StrangeWorks, which is an advanced computing/quantum computing company in Austin, Texas.
Yuval: Remind me how you got into advanced computing/quantum computing?
whurley: So I’ve been watching quantum computing for a number of years. I think the first time I ever heard about it was around 2000, probably early 2000s. When I really picked up interest was when Time magazine put it on the cover the first time, about nine years ago [The Infinity Machine, Feb. 17, 2014].
And then we had a company called Honest Dollar, which was acquired on its one-year anniversary by Goldman Sachs. It was the first technology company they had acquired at the time in their 147-year history. All the other acquisitions were about assets. We’re a tech company. We certainly had no assets.
When I got to Goldman, it was clear that I needed to find something cool to work on. And I suggested that they should do quantum. We decided together jointly that I should start a quantum computing open-source project with the Linux Foundation called the Global Quantum Initiative. That led to getting everybody together over the course of a year from 2016 to the summer of 2017. And then a lot of people didn’t want to work together. And I’d already invested all this time and effort, money into this. So I tried to do what I could to get it going. And when it couldn’t, I said, well, we’ll start a company to do it. And that’s when StrangeWorks was formed.
Yuval: So from Honest Dollar to Honest Qubit. What have you learned in this time or specifically what have you learned in the last, say, six to 12 months about the quantum industry?
whurley: You know, I think it’s fair to say that I probably learned my most important lesson. There were a lot of lessons. Obviously, you have a deep tech industry that’s emerging. It’s not really developed yet. So, you know, you’ve got numbers all over the place. You know, will it be worth point nine billion in five years or 90 billion or a trillion? So, look, we’ve all learned all of those lessons.
But the lesson I learned this year was really where the demarcation point is between the science and the business and where a lot of the misunderstandings come from, to be quite blunt. For example, I gave a talk at Q2B and I said there’ve been 89 world firsts and all of these things, and if that were true, there’d be more of an industry, but I tempered that by saying, you know, my next talk, maybe it’s the viewpoint.
If I’m a scientist and you move something two microns, that could be world-shattering news for me. But if I’m a CIO at a Fortune 500 company, it probably doesn’t register at all. The big lesson was: nobody in quantum is necessarily misleading or trying to overset expectations. We read about all this hype. If you look at them from a pure science standpoint, there’s some amazing advances that have happened. But you understand why the press looks at it and says, you know, you said something about, you know, qubits and fidelity last year that sounded the same. And then on the business side, we need to start getting more of those cases. I think finally I learned how to communicate to both parties and get them to communicate together. That’s where the disconnect is.
You can say that computers are going to do all these wonderful things and be fast, but if I’m a CIO or CTO at a Fortune 500 Global 2000 company, I want to know what it’s doing for me today.
Like I want to put it, you know, all the boxes I have go with data centers, right? Or they’re at AWS and I access them. So, finding that kind of, I want to say, middle ground and then being able to talk to both all of our partners on the quantum side and all of our customers on the business side and get them to where they’re speaking the same language, that’s been the biggest lesson for me in the last 12 months.
Yuval: When you were describing the company three minutes ago, you said advanced computing and quantum. I think if I go back in the time machine, you know, two or three years ago, it was only quantum. So, how does this advanced computing…
whurley: Well, it actually wasn’t. If you go back to our seed pitch, our seed pitch was that we would be like Tivoli or BMC for quantum and other technologies. That’s a great question.
Quantum is obviously the biggest thing we have in the focus. But once we got funded, part of the kind of directive, if you will, was what other computers are going to come into enterprise? Let’s talk about what the StrangeWorks value proposition was at that time back in 2018. It was one place you can come and you can access the machines, the hardware and software and everything that you need because enterprises can’t just take and spend money. They need a way to adopt them, to test them, to do stuff.
At that same point is DNA compute, thermal compute, etc., etc. And now you’re right because if you look at the Wayback Machine, it was quantum focused until probably three years ago, right? Probably about halfway through the timeline. But that’s about the time you saw Gill Verdon and a bunch of people break out, leave Google Qquantum, start working on thermal compute, start working on DNA compute, start doing other stuff. And these were people we already worked with and they were like, we want the new stuff on your platform. We were like, of course.
And so that’s where the advanced compute came a little bit more to the forefront.
Yuval: What can a CIO or CIO’s people, what can they do on your platform today?
whurley: So they can access all the resources they need. They can also use the StrangeWorks workflows, which automates problem discovery and problem formulation, and then where you can go and deploy that software once it’s written. They can manage all of that.
I mean, one of the things we see as a big demand from enterprises is understanding who’s spending what money where and how, and how do I set up the provisions for that. So they can provision out time on the machines and things to their users. And effectively they can jumpstart their quantum program.
When you look at StrangeWorks, I would say that the biggest value we’ve always provided is kind of this time to value for the enterprise. From the time they sign up to the time they actually get value and say like, okay, we want to spend more money. That’s very short. And we try to always just keep shortening that, shorter and shorter.
That’s led to companies like J&J and BP and others coming back and renewing year after year after year and continuing to use the software, as well as expanding into business groups with even our investors now like Hitachi and Raytheon putting us into their ecosystems as well. So that time to value is really important to all of those classes of customers. They don’t want a science project. They want a business result.
Yuval: You mentioned workflows. How do you make sure that these workflows work well on the various types of quantum computers for those workflows that do use quantum?
whurley: So that’s great. Our workflow product is a little different. It starts with you uploading your white paper, your code, whatever, and finding other resources you may not know about, both in our library and out there in archives or wherever, and pulling it all together for you. That’s all automated, so it’s very, very easy.
When you get to the point of the machine during that second step of workflows where you do the problem formulation, that’s where we determine, depending on what the problem is, where it’s going, and what it can run on in the background.
Then when you get to that third step, OK, where can I execute this? That’s where we give you a selection. We don’t say, oh, you could execute that on any one of these 30 machines. We say, you have permission to run on these machines and budget to run on this. Considering all of those and the code, here’s where that can run.
The work we did early on gave our users the ability to work across all these different quantum machines, libraries, and scaffoldings. When you look at Qiskit, Cirq, Penny Lane, TKET, all of those have been supported for a while.
We’ve taken all of that and wrapped it up into services about two years ago. For example, you had an optimization service that would run on multiple machines. Now, the workflows have effectively added this new abstraction layer on top of that. It’s still the same base, like a layer cake, but this new layer gets a lot more people in the enterprise able to play around and mess with the quantum machines.
Yuval: Quantum and AI has been mentioned in one breath very often. There’s some AI that can help design better quantum computers and so on. But how do you see it?
whurley: I get criticized for this. You got me excited. You can see my reaction as soon as you said it, it switches. I’ve been doing it in the same breath for the entire time this company has existed, but not in the way that people are using it now. There’s a lot of pivots and stuff. To me, quantum and AI are symbiotic, and I’ll tell you why. There’s plenty of recordings of me saying this all the way back to 2018. Quantum is us trying to use nature to compute. Right? Fair. AI is us trying to create our own variant of nature’s best computer, which is our brain. Right? These are both physical systems. These are both physical things we’re trying to do. So I think there’s a lot more. Now, I had some of our favorite quantum Twitter handles that like to do memes and stuff be really critical of that. But I don’t think that they’re that different. Now, as far as the use that you were just saying, the other thing I said is, look, AI is going to create algorithms that don’t run on classical infrastructure. That’s without a doubt, it already knows about quantum. It already knows about all these other systems. And it can be very helpful in helping us find some of the fundamental things with the physics of error correction with quantum mechanics and these things. So I think AI is probably the biggest boost to our industry that has come in the last 10 years. I think that a lot of people in quantum didn’t like it because it sucked a lot of money out of the room last year. But as you saw, it got sucked out and then it went away right quick. And now we’re kind of back to normal. Right? Like, if you’re pitching your quantum startup, you’re not getting a lot of talks about like, well, AI this or AI that. Right? You’re probably the one bringing it up. So I think it was a little issue with fundraising, but I think overall, it’s a huge boon and a huge win for us as a community.
Yuval: You mentioned shortening the time to value. Define value today and your best guess on when there would be true business value in the sense of solving problems that you’re unable to solve efficiently today.
whurley: So when you look at that, when I say time to value, that’s based solely on a return on investment. You’re going to pay me X amount of money. How long is it before you say, okay, I’ve spent that money well and then I’ve got an actual measurable business return.
And that leads to your second part of it, which is like, what is valuable? Look, I think you look at this from the math, not from the industries. So what are quantum computers okay at now?
This does lead you into the annealer conversation and the digital use and all that, but combinatorial optimization, right? You can do that and there’s a lot of optimization problems in the world.
What’s going to be next? There’ll be some linear algebra. There’ll be some differential equations. Factoring is still a ways away in my opinion.
But you look at it from the functions of what it does, and then you go out and say, okay, what businesses can use those? And what businesses, when they apply those, will be able to leverage those into a big return. And that’s how we target who we’re talking to and who we’re working with.
That does lead you into pharma and finance and defense pretty heavily, there’s no doubt. But we have some wonderful customers there and we’re having a good time working with them. So if it’s not broke, there’s no need to repair it.
Yuval: So no guess on the timeline?
whurley: I mean, I guess that’s what I’m saying is I think value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So I think there’s value to companies with quantum today. Now, if you’re talking about when will every Fortune 500 company use quantum computing, and you’re getting closer to a general-purpose quantum computer and all of that, I think 2029, 2030 is a fairly decent guess. Could always be much earlier, could also be later. Right?
But I mean, I’d put, I think you see a lot of the hardware manufacturers—and we love them all, so be careful not to pick any out and single name them—but you see a lot of them around that kind of similar date timeframe, I think now. Whereas when we first met, good Lord, it feels like decades ago now, which it wasn’t, a lot of people were like, “Oh, two years, five years.” It was a lot closer assumptions.
But look, there’s value today. And there better be value today because we took in a little over $2 billion in 2022 and 2021. So now that’s—you add up just the venture money into quantum, there’s six, $7 billion invested now. So there should be some business value. But I think it’s hard for us to go into businesses and really, really, really demonstrably prove that we have value because we are fascinated with the science, which is absolutely fascinating. And we are focused on the art of bringing this mythical quantum computer into reality. And sometimes aren’t as focused on what the business needs.
It’s all often said and always true: better, faster, cheaper. It doesn’t matter if we have a quantum machine that’s general-purpose and it’s 10 million times as fast if it costs 100 times as much. They probably won’t use it. So I think that we just have to look at that. When you look at it from that perspective, you say, “Well, where are there opportunities for value in enterprises today?” True, there are probably a fraction of the value we’ll see in two years time and 100% a big, big fraction of what we’ll see in five or 10 years time. But that doesn’t mean there’s not value today. I think we have to get the industry past that. We have to start showing things that aren’t just proof of concepts.
What we found though that hurts the industry is when you do something of value with the customer, they don’t want you to tell anybody about it. This has been the bane of my existence for the last three years, which is we have great customers. We’re like, “We have great customers.” And you can call them and they’ll be like, “We’re great customers. We love them.” You’re like, “What are you doing?” It’s like, silence. So I’m very happy that hopefully towards the end of this year, early next year, we have some of our customers finally ready to talk about what they’ve been doing for the last few years.
And I think that’s what we need. We need more cases where an enterprise CIO can go and look at something and say, “Oh, my competitor did this. I have to be on this.” Or, “That’s an advantage I could use in my industry,” or whatever the case may be. But everybody wants to bitch and moan and complain, “Oh, it’s overhyped,” or, “It’s overvalued,” or it’s this and that. Here’s the reality. It’s hard. Nobody’s ever done this before. There aren’t quantum computers for a reason. If it was easy to do quantum computers, we’d have had them in the ‘60s. We’d have had them in the ’80s. IBM has notes going back decades on their work on quantum computing.
So I think we just have to be realistic about the values there. There is value today. The value is going to increase over time and be a little bit more focused on translating all of our quantum wishes and dreams into basically business requirements and KPIs and things that the business will understand and invest more money.
Yuval: As nice as your platform is today, it would not be as nice without your technology partners, without the quantum computer, the resulting services, and so on. What advice can you give to entrepreneurs listening to this about building a partnership or building an ecosystem?
whurley: Okay. This is one of my favorite topics. Startups are team sports. Not everybody that supports the team works on the team. They’re not all players, right?
Think of your startup like you’re, I don’t have a favorite football team, but I went to a UT game three weeks ago. So say it’s UT. They’re on the road to Oklahoma. There’s a band and there’s vans and there’s all of this stuff. And so we think about as an entrepreneur getting into deep tech, you want a lot of friends, right? You want to know as many people as possible. You want to really have it out. But you want to approach it as a team.
One of the things I love is that we don’t even call our customers customers. They’re just another partner. They just give us money instead of things and we do different work with them. I think when you’re in a new industry, when you look at quantum, people don’t want to be sold. They want to be invited to participate. And so bringing them as a partner, working with them hand in hand becomes really important.
Having the relationships to build the now over 40, 50, whatever partners that StrangeWorks has, super useful. You never know where you’re going to learn something or find something out. Startups are a team sport. It’s very, very important to figure out all of those players.
And by the way, teams compete. Think about it like this. You watch the Olympics this year. Guess what? Everybody on Team USA plays for a different team in their job. And so there’s other activities like you think about QEDC. You think about JESTA, you think about CERN, you think about a lot of the activities where we’re all kind of on the same team.
And so that’s why I continually try to tell people there shouldn’t be competition in quantum right now. There should just be collaboration. We should all be helping each other to actually build the foundation for the industry. And when it hits, look, some people are going to be great at competition and nice, and some people aren’t going to be nice people in competition, but we’re just not at that point yet.
When we get to the point where businesses are calling us saying, “We need to get on quantum computing.” When we get to the point where the press is not saying it’s an overblown hype cycle, but here’s a demonstrable proof point. Everything changes, but we are still nowhere near there. And we should be all helping each other and partnering.
And anybody coming into this, my advice would be, partner with as many people as you can. Keep their secrets. Don’t cross the streams. Very important. Build their trust over time. And know that you may invest time in a relationship that never produces anything. But it’s what we need. We’re trying to build an industry here.
And by the way, we’re all going to have the hits and we’re all going to have the misses. So there’s no reason in trying to have a big ego about it and pretend that things are different than what they are. This is one of the most impactful, most important industries in the history of our species. And it, combined with AI and other technologies, are set to change the world more in the next 10 years than they have in the last 100. But it’s going to take a lot of working together. End of story.
Yuval: So if we exclude your company, StrangeWorks, and QuEra, the company I work for, who do you think is doing a good job in building partnerships in our industry?
whurley: So obviously, I’ll break it into three categories.
On the consulting side, obviously, they’re great at that. So whether it be Shreyas at Accenture, or Scott at Deloitte, or I guess Kristen left EY recently, but they’re all awesome at that. So they start there. They’re the masters.
Go down a layer and say, “Okay, what about software people?” I talk to Matt at QC Ware all the time; Nir over at Classiq has been awesome at getting and working with us at partnering; Michael over at Q-CTRL—plenty of good people on that side.
And on the hardware side, I see that a lot more now than I did in the past too. You, sir, are one of the best collaborators in the industry and have brought that to your new job. Nick over at AeroQ, there’s a lot of collaboration on the hardware side. So I think people are starting to see the value of that.
I think right now we’re moving towards a high point in collaboration. It’s kind of funny. You would have thought we would have started very collaborative and then ended up very competitive. In my limited eight years around this industry, it’s like it was very competitive and very academic. And now it’s coming back to collaborative and then eventually it’ll get competitive again. But I’m really proud of the community.
I mean, I was at Quantum World Congress a couple of weeks ago. Before that, I was at Q2B over in Tokyo and the amount of people willing to share and they think to do three or four-way deals. Do you have a consultancy and a couple of hardware providers and a couple of software providers? Even four or five companies kind of talking together about how they could work to help one customer. That’s valuable because the customer doesn’t care if they split it with you and me or you and me and somebody else. They have a problem they want to solve. And the faster we get to solve those problems, the faster we see an industry take off.
Yuval: Are you guys hiring? What are you looking for if you’re hiring?
whurley: So we are hiring. We are a software company. We have a chief scientist. We have scientists on staff. But compared to a lot of other companies, we’re not trying to be a consultancy or do a lot of research. We’re going to hire a few of those, primarily software developers. Those hires are going to be surpassed by where we’re at in the development of the company.
We’re hiring sales teams, expanding internationally, and starting to market, which we’ve never really done before. I mean, yeah, I wrote a couple of cheesy books and we’ve got great design, but we’ve never spent money on marketing campaigns, road shows, or any of that stuff. So we’re looking for a lot of people on the business side. I’d say that’s our primary focus, with software development as secondary, and then scientists after that.
But if you think about it, we’re always happy to hire smart people too. We’re a council of the right person. We don’t have to have a job specifically for them. That’s kind of how Steve got hired before here at our last company. It’s also how Justin and I met. So we’re opportunistic with hiring. If it’s the right person, a smart person, they can do a lot. You don’t necessarily need to have a predefined slot for them. In fact, sometimes it’s better to work someone into the company, give them a variety of tasks, and then find out which team they vibe with and where they can be most productive, before settling them into that direction.
Yuval: Last hypothetical. If you could have dinner with one of the quantum greats dead or alive, who would that be?
whurley: Oh, that’s a tough one. Surprisingly, in the eight years around this, I’ve never been asked that question. So, Schrodinger came to mind. Niels Bohr came to mind. Dirac or some of the other… I mean, I’ll be blunt. As somebody fascinated with the technology, who’s not a physicist, any of them would be an amazing dinner for me. But I’d probably go with one of the more popular ones. I’ve been really trying to read a lot on Schrodinger and Niels Bohr and Dirac lately, which is why I mentioned them. So I’ve been reading old papers and just trying to get my head wrapped around some of the thoughts and conjecture there. That’s a great question, by the way. That’s a true stump question.
Yuval: You know, and I ask it every week at every episode of this podcast.
whurley: Do people have solid, like, very… Are people like, “Oh, it’s this person.” Are they all like, “Feynman?”
Yuval: I think half of them say Feynman. That’s by now has sort of been the cop-out answer. But Schrodinger comes up and Dirac and Einstein and many others. And sometimes it’s people from outside quantum, just mathematicians or other historical figures. So anyway, whurley, thank you so much for joining me today.
whurley: Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.
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