Using IBM Experience to Analyze Quantum Tech
Overview
Dr. Bob Sutor has seen the tech industry from multiple perspectives: IBM executive, industry analyst and now independent consultant. He tracks the quantum news from this informed point of view and advises companies on how to expand the industry. In this episode of The Quantum Spin by HKA, Bob and host Veronica Combs discuss quantum networking, the qubit competition and the vital role of communications and marketing.
00:00 Introduction to Quantum Spin Podcast
00:34 Meet Dr. Bob Sutor: A Quantum Industry Veteran
00:50 From IBM to Quantum Startups
01:06 The Journey into Quantum Computing
05:04 Writing ‘Dancing with Qubits’
07:31 Challenges in the Quantum Industry
11:34 Quantum Modalities and Future Prospects
14:03 Supply Chain Issues in Quantum Hardware
16:14 The Importance of Quantum Networking
17:35 Quantum Sensing and Networking
18:27 The Role of Quantum Sensors in GPS Denial
19:56 Quantum Computers in Data Centers
21:56 The Future of Quantum Computing and Cybersecurity
24:57 Engaging the Quantum Community
29:25 Effective Communication Strategies for Quantum Companies
31:44 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Dr. Sutor is the CEO and Founder of Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory. He helps clients and investors understand sophisticated technologies such as quantum computing and use them effectively to succeed in their organizations and industries. As an author and communicator, Bob helps clients bring their messages to current and potential customers in clear, powerful, and impactful ways. Bob is a member of the Board of Directors of Nu Quantum and an advisor to the Forma Prime venture capital firm. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Buffalo, New York, USA.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Veronica: Hello, and welcome to The Quantum Spin by HKA. I’m Veronica Combs. I’m a writer and an editor here at the agency. I get to talk every day with really smart people working on really fascinating subjects, everything in the Quantum industry, from hardware to software. On our podcast, we focus in on quantum communication, and by that I don’t mean making networks safe from hacking or entangling photons over long distance, but talking about the technology.
[00:00:26] How do you explain these complicated concepts to people who don’t have a background in science and engineering but want to understand all the same?
[00:00:34] Today I am joined by Dr. Bob Sutor who is the CEO and founder of the Sutor Group. Thank you so much for joining us today, Bob.
[00:00:42] Pleased to be here. As we were talking just before we started recording, you were at IBM for 40 years, and you’re used to having that company name after your title. So you’ve worked for IBM for a long time, almost 40 years.
[00:00:53] Yeah, I think 39 your LinkedIn profile said. Mm-hmm. And you’ve advised two quantum startups and you’ve worked as an analyst. And to me that seems like a, a fantastic perspective on the industry. How does all that experience inform the way you analyze the quantum industry?
[00:01:06] Bob: I think, I think, let me just make a general statement that, as you get more senior in your career, you hope that everything seemed to have flowed naturally from one thing you did to another.
[00:01:18] I was with IBM for a very long time, but being such a large company, I did many different things. The middle part of my career there was on the business side, and of course it’s a very large business. Yet nevertheless, there’s more than working for a company with over 300,000 people.
[00:01:34] So I worked for Infleqtion previously called Cold Quanta for a couple of years. They do quantum also, but not the way IBM did quantum. To get technical for a moment, IBM is superconducting and Infleqtion is neutral atoms. And then I decided well, you know, when I left them after two years, let me just park myself and not be part of a vendor, not be Bob of IBM or Bob of Infleqtion.
[00:01:57] Just be Bob for a while. And so yeah, I worked for a little while as an analyst or, or as I sometimes say, I pretended to be an analyst. But what that gave me was a perspective across the industry. And you get to talk to people and you learn things about them that they won’t share if you’re one vendor talking to another vendor.
[00:02:15] Right? And so it was a very useful experience to, on one hand, kind of establish myself as me, but also get a much broader view of what was really going on with quantum, sometimes beyond the hype and the stories.
[00:02:29] Veronica: Yes. I can imagine how the conversation would change if you went to just being Bob interested in the technology and, and informed background as opposed to working for a vendor who had a really specific point of view.
[00:02:40] Bob: Mm-hmm. It is refreshing. You, I think we all like to think that whatever company we work for is doing exactly the right thing and everybody should be doing it. But when you go out, there are really a lot of very smart people doing all sorts of interesting things from different perspectives.
[00:02:56] While it’s a career and a life, I, I see it as an intellectual journey too. And of course, when you’re doing quantum computing it’s, it is a bit technical.
[00:03:06] Veronica: Just a bit.
[00:03:07] Bob: It was a great opportunity too, to just learn more stuff, at this point in my life.
[00:03:11] Veronica: Yes. Yes. That’s actually what drew me to quantum too.
[00:03:13] There’s so much to learn and, and you have to be really comfortable with saying, I don’t know, but I’ll find out and, and then actually talking to the right people and finding out. So your background is in math and my colleague Mike Kilroy, and I joke that we often read the summary and the conclusions of some of these really complicated quantum papers,
[00:03:33] and we skip all the math in the middle. But your background, you don’t have to skip the math in the middle. You can, you can understand what they’re saying.
[00:03:39] Bob: Yes. I have a PhD in theoretical mathematics, Princeton, a while ago. And I led the mathematical sciences department at IBM, so I have various credentials, if you will, in math.
[00:03:50] But when I got drawn into quantum inside IBM and it was one of these internal reorganizations, suddenly the quantum group reported to the same person that the mathematical sciences group. So I got to sit in meetings like, what are all these people doing? They’re physically separated. I was down on aisle 32 of IBM Research Headquarters, Yorktown, New York, and they were way down like aisle five, no one goes down there, right?
[00:04:16] Plus they had things that exploded down there. We stayed away. So I learned about them and I was very curious about it, but what I did discover was that and we’re talking 2015, 2016, there was pretty much this assumption like, what do you mean you don’t have three years of graduate physics study?
[00:04:34] And so this was a challenge to me. And, particularly when you’re talking about computing, you, you, you can program a computer without knowing about transistors. Very true. Even today with quantum, people seem to think you want to know about qubits and all this sort of thing. Could I just write some code?
[00:04:51] Right. So I sent out to learn from a mathematician’s perspective and I’d done a lot of computer science and discovered I didn’t really like the textbooks, I didn’t like the perspective. They still fell back on this physics thing. So I wrote a textbook. It wasn’t the first book I had written but that really got me into it to say, all right what is the fundamental math?
[00:05:13] And it’s much simpler than broad quantum mechanics and things like this, but there’s a bit to it. So that’s how I got into that. I also did it from the perspective of, since everyone was talking about quantum and clearly it was technical, clearly it had a lot of math. Many people wanted to be part of it and understand it, but it was scary.
[00:05:33] But people did have math. People took math in high school. A lot of people did mathematical things in college, right? University, but life happened, right? They didn’t necessarily go around doing computational mathematics. So part of the reason I wrote the book was to ease people into this.
[00:05:52] We’re going to tell you why that stuff you learned when you were 17 actually worked. And, and so to make a very comfortable introduction, but ultimately really getting to the harder stuff. But filling in the gaps behind it. So it was a great experience and, and made me think about quantum in many other ways.
[00:06:10] Veronica: So is that “Dancing with Qubits?” I know that’s one of your books.
[00:06:14] Bob: That is “Dancing with Qubits,” right. Okay. Some people want to know where I came up with that. It was not Dancing With the Stars. It came about because one time I was giving a talk and it involved entanglement.
[00:06:24] So the idea of entanglement is two quantum particles or qubits in this case, somehow they become entangled. They become joined. They no longer can be considered independent at least for a while. And so with these algorithms, qubits would come together and they’d stay together for a while and then they’d separate.
[00:06:45] And so I referred to it, just as I was speaking, as the dance of the qubits, the algorithm. And so somehow that stuck with me, and that’s why I named it. I like the title. I still like the title. People think it’s interesting, although it doesn’t always show up in all the search engines.
[00:07:00] I mean, I will tell you in case you’re thinking of naming books,
[00:07:04] Veronica: It does increase the chances of a non-physicist picking it up though. We were working with a client once and we were talking about the need for a video, right? Something to illustrate exactly what you said.
[00:07:14] How these particles come together and, and move apart and come back together again. And we also thought of dancing, not square dancing. It didn’t seem like the best search engine term either, but certainly understanding how it works. You, you gotta have something to look at. Words are just words and equations aren’t, aren’t enough.
[00:07:31] So, you know, quantum has gotten some more attention lately and some corporate leaders have gone from, oh, it’s way far away to, oh, maybe it’s a little bit closer. But still, looking at the media coverage or looking at the response to the news in different ways you can still see that there are some hurdles that we’re not over yet in terms of why this is important, how fast it’s coming, why you should care.
[00:07:53] I’ve worked for big companies and small companies and you have the money at the big company, but you have all that inertia and at the small company, you have the ideas and the momentum, but not always the money.
[00:08:04] Bob: Right. Right.
[00:08:05] Veronica: What barriers do you see for big established Fortune 500 companies to either starting quantum or even embrace it?
[00:08:11] Bob: So first, regarding the news you read. So every week someone says, quantum computing is closer than you think. If it’s going to happen at all, every day that goes by, it’s closer.
[00:08:24] So thank you for that brilliant observation. I think there is commercial pressure on a lot of these companies to say, use, use this word imminent. If you’re a large company, you have to justify the investment coming from above in your quantum computing program.
[00:08:40] If you’re a smaller company, you have to continue to get some sort of investment somehow, some way. And really frankly, if you say that this is not going to be useful for 10 years, senior executives or money people say, well get back to me in six.
[00:08:57] Veronica: Yes. No kidding.
[00:08:58] Bob: So I appreciate that.
[00:08:59] But, also from an investment perspective, AI is the enemy, if you will, of getting dollars. AI gets. One or two orders of magnitude more than quantum. Now not everything people are doing with AI works by any means, right? But you can write code and something goes in and something comes out, and then there it is, and, and maybe it’s better.
[00:09:21] I think the biggest problem is that the industry is very diluted and spread out. I track 86 different hardware companies (wow.) making quantum shares. Now look, I’m sorry, but 86 aren’t going to survive. Right. You know, if you were very careful today and even looked at all the people who make processors and things like this, it’s a number far smaller than 86.
[00:09:45] Yes. But you have these sovereign actions that are going on, countries that want to have their own quantum systems. A lot of it’s driven by geopolitics.
[00:09:56] A lot of it’s simply history, right? The European Union, historically they get good ideas. People sweep in from the US, they buy the companies or whatever, and some other part of the world ends up dominating somehow some way. And, I’m just picking on the EU momentarily. So there is this desire to have a very strong French or German or UK or in Australia.
[00:10:23] Which is going to increase the number of companies that are out there at least for a little while.
[00:10:30] I think the industry has to grow up in this way, right? They have to start talking about consolidation.
[00:10:36] They have to start talking about partnerships, which may eventually lead to vertical integration, right? So actually being much more responsible secure supply chains. And here I’m not talking about cybersecurity. I’m just saying you can trust it, right? You know you’re going to get the parts you need. And from where, yes.
[00:10:54] Right. So there are a lot of factors. The quantum industry is almost a literal cloud of activities of all these things going around, and it’s not starting to cohere into very solid centers other than things like IBM or the Googles or whatever.
[00:11:11] Veronica: Right? Right.
[00:11:12] Bob: So it’s still going to take a while.
[00:11:14] I’d like to see more of these partnerships, it has picked up, oddly enough, it’s picked up in the last three or four months from what I’ve been able to see. But we’ve gotta see these companies coming together to produce working systems, right? Yes. Not parts, full working systems.
[00:11:34] Veronica: That brings us to modalities, right? As you mentioned at the start of our conversation, there’s superconducting, there’s trapped ions, there’s neutral atoms.
[00:11:41] There’s no winner yet, right? Each modality has its strength. Each modality picks the metric that makes them shine the brightest. I think lots of folks are focusing more on, what can I do with this? What are the use cases? Sort of moving away from the modality and how many qubits debate.
[00:11:56] But there is still a lot of evaluation to be done, I think in terms of which modality is, like you said, going to come out on top.
[00:12:03] Bob: I count 10 major modalities. And so you mentioned some of them, there’s photonics there’s even nuclear magnetic resonance. There are about five dominant ones and, and you name them superconducting, trapped ions, neutral atoms photonic, silicon spin is coming on fast, right? And there are one or two other ones. So first of all, I don’t think there’ll be one winner by any means. And also I think if we could fast forward 50 years, right?
[00:12:30] And look around at the quantum industry, the dominant player may be none of the above.
[00:12:36] Veronica: True, true.
[00:12:37] Bob: things are going to continue to innovate. Each of the modalities have a significant problem of some sort. Many of them relate to scaling. You just can’t get enough qubits. Right, right. And it’s, it’s not simply the number of qubits, it’s the quality of the qubits, which we keep saying, and, and this complicates things.
[00:12:56] And I, I think what will happen is that, and again, let’s fast forward just a little bit, 15 years, let’s say that we have some working systems. There’ll be three or four. That worked pretty well. Some we will find work better for different applications, different algorithms, right? But there’re going to be other knobs.
[00:13:15] I may be willing to pay more for a faster system if I’m a hedge fund, right? But if I get the answer tomorrow, I may use a different system if it’s less expensive or if it uses less energy, right? Sustainability and, or if it’s more accurate, if it’s things like this. Mm-hmm. So it is not going to be a binary choice, this or that.
[00:13:38] There’ll be five or six different factors that will go into this. And people will look at combining these as well. One thing about the computer industry is it always ends up being so heterogeneous. We’re connecting so many different things of different flavors, right? Think of networking.
[00:13:55] You’ve got optical networking, you have copper networking, you have all these things, you have wireless, you have this and that. So there’s not one. The same is going to be true with quantum.
[00:14:02] Veronica: Right, right.
[00:14:03] You mentioned supply chain, and I was doing a little reading about that lately, and it seems like that’s a significant weak point. There’s not like tons of companies that manufacture all the parts of a, of quantum hardware.
[00:14:14] Have you thought much about supply chains in the quantum industry?
[00:14:17] Bob: I think yeah, I have. I think they need to, so for example let’s just talk about cryogenics, right? So you can go to Blue Fors, you can go to Mabell Quantum, there are a couple of others.
[00:14:28] Oxford Instruments, I believe. Mm-hmm. We won’t get into this much, but if there are, for example, very large tariffs suddenly put on or required things you need from another country, that may affect what you do. If you are a multinational company maybe you have a different supply chain situation because you can manufacture things in other places.
[00:14:50] Right. And that were partially manufactured. I do remember going back to my IBM days about one particular part. A startup was complaining to their investor that IBM had bought up all of these coaxial cables. These cryogenic coaxial tables, and I, I don’t know what really happened, part of the response was, look, IBM knows supply chain, right?
[00:15:12] These companies are in manufacturing, have been doing it for so long, they secure it. They have long-term contracts, they have supplier A, supplier B, supplier C, and things like this. And if you’re a startup, you could be just stopped. Yes. I’ll tell you one area, lasers.
[00:15:30] Veronica: Yeah, that’s the one I was thinking of, lasers. Yeah.
[00:15:31] Bob: Lasers are not easy to get. There are sometimes you say, yeah, that would be, yeah, we’d love to sell you one and you can have it in 18 months.
[00:15:38] Veronica: Right, right. Yeah. Nevermind Nvidia chips. There are other high demand items that are going to be hard to get, I think, as quantum hardware develops a little bit more down the line. I’ve been talking to some folks recently about tech sovereignty in Europe. American cloud companies provide a lot of the cloud access for European countries and they do have some of the manufacturing that we don’t have here in the States. But I think there’s nothing like a change in administration to bring that, that issue into a more sharper focus and make people think a little bit more about how their businesses run at a fundamental level
[00:16:12] Bob: into the forefront.
[00:16:13] We mentioned lasers. Photonics is going to be incredibly important. Even if you do a non photonically oriented, you know, more semiconductor approach to qubits quantum networking is going to be photonic. At some point. So where, where is that work going on? Or a handful of companies?
[00:16:32] I’m on the board of Nu Quantum, which is a UK company that does quantum networking. The fundamental connections between qubits and being able to move that information outside the device to something else. And there are probably only four or five companies around the world that do that. IonQ bought one, Lightsync.
[00:16:52] That’s an essential technology for all we talk about, right? All these 86 companies. We’re only going to get big quantum computers by connecting little quantum computers, right?
[00:17:02] Veronica: Right.
[00:17:04] Bob: So if you can’t connect them, you’re in trouble. Right, right, right. I sometimes advise companies, just stop for a while in your quest for more qubits and start focusing on connecting the devices you have to each other.
[00:17:19] Because if you get stuck with nine or 50 or 92 qubits and you can’t connect them, you’re going to have toy quantum computers that
[00:17:32] Veronica: indefinitely
[00:17:33] Bob: that have no applications.
[00:17:34] Veronica: Yes, for sure. And I think quantum sensing has gotten a little more attention lately. That’s such an easy to understand application or technology. And I think quantum networking is, seems even more under the radar than, and then sensing when it is easier to understand. It’s one thing to try to explain physics to a business reporter, but it’s something else to say we’re going to connect these computers and they’ll be stronger and you can go across the country or whatever.
[00:17:57] So, I’ve been watching Nu Quantum, it will be interesting to see where they go and how they get there.
[00:18:03] Bob: I think the problem with networking is you really do have to start getting into these notions of entanglement and teleportation a little bit more. True. True. It’s not just, even though you use old style technology, it’s not like just plugging an internet cable into two quantum computers and there you go.
[00:18:19] Veronica: If only that coaxial cable was enough.
[00:18:21] Bob: Right. Yeah. You’re not just shooting zeros and ones, right. Quantum states, whatever they are. Oh my gosh. Super positioned. Right. And, and you do this, sensors are interesting. Sensors are a little bit easier to explain particularly in terms of GPS denial.
[00:18:35] Veronica: Yes.
[00:18:35] Bob: Right. So the idea is, and, and actually it’s fascinating. There’s, there’s this book called “Longitude,” which was about the development of the first marine chronometers. It’s relatively easy to measure latitude by using a sextant and looking at stars and things like this, but it’s very difficult to measure longitude if you don’t have an accurate clock.
[00:18:54] And so there’s, the book describes that, but if you read that and now you go forward to say how do we do it now? We use GPS and things like this. We’ll subtract GPS from the picture. You’re doing the same idea. You have to know very accurately in what direction you are pointing, how fast you’re going, and for how long you’re traveling.
[00:19:13] Right. And if any of those have big errors associated right. A plane doesn’t go in a perfectly straight line. It zigs and zags and goes up and down and lifted, right? All this error would accumulate. So sensing really would feed into this, and that’s the quantum. Quantum will give you the best possible resolution you’re ever going to get.
[00:19:31] Veronica: Right. And as we see DARPA invest in these, some of these, developing these solutions or at least supporting the companies that are developing them. And I think that also brings it into more focus for all of us to understand the need for that. Maybe not an alternative to GPS yet, but certainly a backup.
[00:19:47] Bob: A backup. That’s, that’s right. Systems need two or three different backups, and there are land-based alternatives to GPS, for example, right now. Just in case it fails.
[00:19:56] Veronica: Right. One place I have seen a little more focus and interest lately is quantum computers and data centers. The high performance computing centers seem to be
[00:20:05] Not just talking about it, but like thinking about the next step. How do we integrate quantum computers? How did we divide up the workloads? What have you noticed about that, that conversation? Have you seen more, more momentum there?
[00:20:16] Bob: There was the inaugural meeting of the Quantum Data Center Alliance in London a couple of months ago.
[00:20:22] Veronica: Yeah. Nu Quantum is one of the sponsors of that effort. Right?
[00:20:25] Bob: That’s right. They were the initial organizer, but brought in many other companies to do this. Well, if you’re networking computers, where do they all live?
[00:20:32] Veronica: Oh well, true. Yes.
[00:20:34] Bob: Data. The other angle is, and, and IBM does talk about this, in fact, IBM had an announcement with AMD.
[00:20:40] Talking about quantum supercomputers or just in general supercomputers that have classical and quantum components together? Supercomputers, HPC, those classical systems take up a fair amount of room. They do live in data centers. What are the requirements if quantum computers are going to be co-located with those?
[00:21:02] Again, we’re talking networking at some point of how to do this. The thought being is that, we don’t use quantum for little, little problems. You don’t need quantum for little problems. You need them for big ones. What systems are currently working on big problems? It’s HPC. It’s supercomputers.
[00:21:19] That’s where you plug in quantum first, right? So that’s where it naturally flows. Now, all the usual questions, aside from networking such as energy and cooling come into effect.
[00:21:31] But we do need energy efficiency of this. Some of the photonic approaches are anticipating using massive, massive amounts of energy to do this.
[00:21:40] Bob: Yeah. Right. That might not make sense. We already have these huge AI data centers there’s some good studies. There’s one in Europe that’s going on about energy use.
[00:21:49] Mm-hmm. Quantum computers, which I think dovetails very nicely with some of the data center concerns people have.
[00:21:55] Veronica: Right, right. For sure.
[00:21:56] What do you think about this 2030 is, you know, the deadline is when quantum computers may be able to break some forms of encryption that we’re using right now.
[00:22:05] Bob: From a marking perspective, it’s a nice round number. Well, you know, If I were to say 2032, it’s oh, that doesn’t just drip off the top. Easily true. Very true. I, I think, if the security people aren’t trying to scare the daylights out of you, which seems to be a basic marketing way of operating, buy my stuff or people will start dying actually.
[00:22:27] True. The thing is, it is very time consuming to upgrade your cybersecurity infrastructure, right? The first thing we recommend that people do is just inventory what you’ve got, right? Tell me every place in your enterprise, in your business that cryptography is used. You might say I know this little part right here.
[00:22:47] Well, does anyone else outside have access to your system? Do you use the cloud? Do you do this? And suddenly this explodes into all these types of things. And so it takes a while to do this. Then you have to develop a plan, and it’s a lot of these things, because you’re interacting with third parties, you can’t do it all yourself, so you have to find out when the vendor.
[00:23:08] Whatever the service provider you’re working with will be, let’s say post quantum cryptographic ready. That might be two years, right? One or so. When we start talking about years, there are things you can do yourself, but there are dependencies on other people that may take a long time. And then just the whole process.
[00:23:27] So usually people say really 10 years to do a complete job. Let’s start with that, and then what can we do to speed that up? And so half of that from now is five years, but that’s a reasonable thing to do. So you want to put the fear into people saying this problem is much harder than you think. And oh, by the way, isn’t it time to get crypto agile once and for all, right?
[00:23:51] Yes. Right. Stop at this hodgepodge of things that are so wired in, make it more flexible, more modular, and things like this. People are trying to use it as a forcing function, not only because of the threat, but it’s time you had a modern cybersecurity architecture.
[00:24:08] Veronica: Right, right.
[00:24:09] Bob: So now whether or not the quantum computers will be ready I don’t know.
[00:24:13] I think most of the real, the heyday of quantum computing will happen after we have error correction, fault tolerance. Mm-hmm. I think people will do a few interesting projects with these noisy quantum computers and maybe claim advantage. They can go down the history books, yay, whatever.
[00:24:28] But it’s not going to be kind of a serious long-term industry until we get fault tolerance in and at scale. That will be in the early thirties, you know, even beyond.
[00:24:38] Veronica: Right. And as you, we were talking about HPC centers, they’re the ones doing material science and some of this research that’s the early use cases for quantum hardware.
[00:24:48] So, Yeah, that will help us, help us get a little farther down the path. But yes, it is, we still do have those big hurdles of fault tolerance and error correction to get over. As you mentioned, you’ve written a book about quantum computing “Dancing with Qubits.”
[00:25:01] And you have a Substack newsletter. You have 25,000 followers on LinkedIn. What’s your strategy for engaging people in so many different formats?
[00:25:09] Bob: Wow, they’re all over the place. It’s tricky. So I’ve also done some reports and I have this fundamental, we talked about big companies and things like this.
[00:25:19] There’s a question of competitive intelligence. If you were a small startup and you’re a bunch of, let’s say physicists who now are running a company, are looking around for some more business help, you’ve gotta focus on what you’re doing, right? I, you, you’ve gotta, you gotta feed yourself. You gotta keep doing these True.
[00:25:35] You can’t invest a lot in competitive intelligence. And even though I really dislike, for example, when people say democratizing quantum computing, right? Because it’s just a catch word. I’m trying to democratize quantum competitive intelligence. Mm-hmm. Okay. I’m trying to make it easy for people to spend a little time and know what else is going on.
[00:25:59] Right. I started with a newsletter with some interesting links or if they’re funny or whatever. Yes, yes. Then I started adding a little commentary. And part of this is based on experience.
[00:26:10] It’s not meant to be 1200 words. It’s meant to be like a few paragraphs that just get to the point, and move on. As I did more and more of my own research, I had to know the bigger picture of what was happening. And if you use Google alerts, if you use this service, you can spend all day just popping around left and right, trying to find the latest.
[00:26:30] And there’s always one, how did I miss this? So I built a little aggregator for myself with news. So I go through, and so for people who have RSS feeds mm-hmm. Which I highly recommend, to just pull together and categorize all the latest quantum information.
[00:26:46] So that’s available on my website for the last 45 days. And then for the last few weeks I’ve been doing these, these daily things. And it’s the last two days because whatever time I do it, somebody’s going to announce something later in the day. Exactly, yes. And so I’m just trying to give people an opportunity to, to see what’s going on, whatever catches their eye as being something interesting and to learn from it.
[00:27:11] I’d like to see all this stuff work. I’m not building qubits. But I’m trying to help the industry along and this is why I advise, right. I think a lot of companies probably should invest a little bit. You don’t have to invest a fortune, but every once in a while you need a big picture review of what you do compared to other people.
[00:27:29] So I’m trying to educate, advise and again, all to the point of accelerating this stuff because it’s going to have amazing value.
[00:27:37] Veronica: Yes, yes. We do our own internal news tracking, of course. And it’s a long list these days. You know, We make our comprehensive list internally and then we share, like you said, the pick out the most important things for a particular client or, or whoever’s interested.
[00:27:50] And there’s a lot going on and I think having a point of view and having a distinct voice. I think, like you said, there’s too much sort of vanilla, it’s coming now or you know, it’s right around the corner and having a distinct perspective and a point of view. I think people appreciate that and they listen a little closer if they think you’re not just going on and on and speaking in, cliches.
[00:28:08] If you have something sharp and helpful to say that gets more attention to your message.
[00:28:14] Bob: I’m trying to balance it. So I know that some people did like the short commentary plus just a few like links. And I, I can see that and I want to get back to that somehow. Right now you get
[00:28:25] almost everything that’s happening, I think that has value, but I probably will return to a little bit more. Here’s a quick read, thing to think about today. And if you only read these four things today, this is it.
[00:28:38] Veronica: Yes, yes, yes.
[00:28:39] Bob: And
[00:28:39] Veronica: it’s funny to me that RSS feeds are coming back because they were such a helpful tool, especially for journalists, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I forget when the Google RSS reader went away.
[00:28:49] But it is a really helpful tool and it’s pretty easy to set up. You don’t need entanglement to get an RSS feed going, but as you said, it does really get your message out farther and more consistently.
[00:28:58] Bob: And, and for those of you who are listening who don’t know what we’re talking about, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s about 25 years old. What happens is when you put, for example, a press release on your website there’s this other little special file that’s created, which has some of the summary information and you can find out who published it and their description and the title and the date and the thing like this.
[00:29:21] And it makes it so easy for other people to just really see what you’re doing.
[00:29:25] Veronica: So I wanted to ask you one last question.
[00:29:27] We’re always looking for ways to communicate quantum and, you know, the good news and the bad news. So, do you have any reliable tactics for delivering that competitive analysis?
[00:29:37] Bob: I think LinkedIn is working pretty well. You mentioned I do LinkedIn Substack? Mm-hmm. Um, There are a few quantum things on Substack.
[00:29:44] The readership is much lower though than on LinkedIn today. True. I keep trying to push people over and they’re reluctant to go. Minimally do something with LinkedIn. I think a lot of the smaller companies just don’t say enough about what they’re doing.
[00:30:00] Veronica: True.
[00:30:01] Bob: I will look because I’ve gone through this experiment and, developing this thing, like they haven’t said anything since April.
[00:30:07] Veronica: Oh, wow.
[00:30:08] Bob: So at least, maybe do a double channel press releases and blogs. Right. And the blogs, you can just say, here’s something interesting I’ve been thinking about, and it doesn’t have to be thousands of words long.
[00:30:19] Right. But aim for something at least once a month. Right. You’ve gotta stay front of mind. There’s a cadence. Don’t talk too frequently, there are other companies with the two press releases a week, they’re too much.
[00:30:32] You stop paying attention. But every month, every two weeks, say something, put it on LinkedIn minimally and then alert other people. Have somebody saying, Hey Bob, we just said this. Right? I get those. And, and I love hearing about them, but there are a lot of people who just tell other people, don’t just throw it down into the ether and hope somebody sees it.
[00:30:55] Right? So for the companies that are smaller and more technically oriented, comms and marketing are an essential part of your business. They’re not support. If they’re part of the core and you learn this at IBM, for example, in other companies, there’s no point developing a product if no one ever hears about it.
[00:31:14] Exactly right. So you have to treat them as important to making your business succeed as you do with the highly technical innovations.
[00:31:24] Veronica: Yes, that’s very true. So your book is “Dancing with Qubits” and you said it’s in the second edition, so I’ll have to look out for that one.
[00:31:32] Bob: Second and final edition.
[00:31:35] Veronica: makes sense. Enough is enough and that this is true. This is true. And drbobsutor@substack.com is your Substack, is that right?
[00:31:41] Bob: That’s right. And you can always find me on LinkedIn and Yep. Happy to chat with people.
[00:31:44] Veronica: Alright, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate hearing your perspective on the industry.
[00:31:49] Bob: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to talk to you today.
Host Veronica Combs is a quantum tech editor, writer and PR professional. She manages public relations for quantum computing and tech clients as an account manager with HKA Marketing Communications, the #1 agency in quantum tech PR. You can find them on X, formerly known as Twitter, @HKA_PR. Veronica joined HKA from TechRepublic, where she was a senior writer. She has covered technology, healthcare and business strategy for more than 10 years. If you’d like to be on the podcast yourself, you can reach her on LinkedIn, Veronica Combs, or you can go to the HKA website and share your suggestion via the Contact Us page.
November 9, 2025
