Alex Challans started writing about quantum computing right before Google’s big announcement in 2019. Since then, he’s expanded his company from one publication–The Quantum Insider–to four and built a data intelligence company. He shares his assessment of the state of the quantum industry and advice on how to keep up with a steady flow of scientific advancements and patent filings.
Transcript
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.
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?
Veronica Combs: Today I’m talking with Alex Challans.
He is the CEO of Resonance, which is a market intelligence platform that covers fast growth and deep tech verticals. Resonance offers media, market intelligence, and strategic consulting solutions to enterprise clients. I spend a lot of time reading the Quantum Insider, which is one of the Resonance publications.
The company also publishes Metaverse Insider, AI Insider, Climate Insider, and Space Impulse. Alex, thanks so much for joining me today.
Alex Challans: Oh, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Veronica Combs: It’s nice to talk to a fellow publishing person. Usually, we talk to a lot of physicists, which is wonderful in its own way, but nice to talk to a business person too.
You provide a lot of different services to startup companies, some startup, some established. You advise on market fit, competitive landscape, industry trends. Tell us how you go about that.
Alex Challans: Well, I think it’s helpful to kind of go back to where we started.
We started off as a Quantum Daily maybe four or four or five years ago. And now the key insight we had was that, as you alluded to in the introduction, is that there’s a lot of physicists talking to physicists, which is sometimes good, and sometimes it’s quite difficult to understand, right?
And the central idea we had was that actually it’s possible to strike the right balance between communicating really complex technical things to a broader audience.You’ve got to make it accessible, but you’ve also got to make sure that you’re not doing the science completely wrong.
So we had an interesting one today with my team. Anyone who works in quantum technology will know that trying to explain quantum computing in two sentences is a real nightmare.
Veronica Combs: It is a real nightmare.
Alex Challans: And yeah, I imagine you’ve had it too, right? And I think there’s an example where people talk a lot about superposition.
We’re talking about quantum computers working by trying everything at once. And what you find is when you enter these markets, you can explain things in easier terms, but there are certain no-no’s that you can’t do. So in quantum, you certainly cannot say quantum computers work by trying every solution at once.
Superposition isn’t two things being in the same place at the same time. There’s all sorts of tricks and hacks. You learn as you go. And that’s a lot of what we’ve been doing in the markets we operate is making sure we tell the bigger story while also making sure we get the details right.
Veronica Combs: Yes, that’s the really hard balance I find.
Sometimes when I’m talking to a physicist, I will use one of those not exactly perfect analogies. You can see the person wince and I always go, okay, that’s my cue, don’t use that analogy anymore. I think that sort of leads me to my next question about setting the right tone.
Matt Swain is one of your editors. And, he’s always great to work with from my perspective here at the agency. How do you set that tone that gets everything done?
Alex Challans: It’s a lot of learning by doing right. We’re checking, Twitter, we’re checking LinkedIn, we’re seeing how people react to how we communicate things, and, we’ve started to get like rule books, internally on our Slack, of let’s not say this anymore because physicists didn’t like this.
So we kind of oversimplified that. Matt absolutely is driving forward, setting the tone and he’s very clear. He is not a technical writer. He’s a popular science writer, and I think that’s something that’s we’ve really tried to keep throughout the business is that our hypothesis starting this was that it was possible to captivate the casual Sunday reader as well as the physicist and tell the stories to a broader audience.
And that’s been a really critical part of actually making that possible.
Veronica Combs: And again, the other challenge that we run into all the time is the promise versus the reality. Yes, quantum computing can change everything, but not today. And I think it’s hard to talk about the promise without over promising. That’s another challenge. How do you, how does your team take that on?
Alex Challans: I think we definitely lean towards optimism.
So actually I was at Q2B Paris a couple of months ago and I got on stage and said there’s no such thing as quantum hype. And I did it on purpose just to kind of get a reaction. And, the reason we say that is there is absolutely hype and misinformation in markets like quantum.
We all know it. But it misses the point when we complain about it and that in every single technology we have seen the cycle of getting excited. Oh, it’s not an actual thing, but it is a thing, whatever. And the one thing that we’ve stuck to as a team and is partly because we’re not all scientists, we do have scientists on the team, is trying to keep humble about our ability to predict the future.
We’re really, really, really bad at it as humans in general, and we’re no better or special in our team, even though we work in quantum and we work around these markets. And the beautiful thing around working, this is the element of surprise. At the end of last year, we had QuEra come out with some wonderful news around logical qubits. And then instantly I’m in a conversation where people are going, Oh, well, you know, that’s not quite right. You need to check this. And I think that’s the market we operate in. So there will always be the naysayers and the people who are negative around this and you kind of need it to keep us all grounded.
But I like to think our role in the market is to be that cautious optimism.
Veronica Combs: I was looking through your LinkedIn profile as I do before our interviews. And I noticed that you were in private equity before joining the Quantum Insider. There are a lot of paths to quantum, but I hadn’t seen that one before.
Alex Challans: Well, it started off at university. You kind of choose economics when you’re not quite sure what to do.
And you kind of have a vague feeling that you want to go into business. But the lovely thing about economics is that it was a pretty straightforward topic to do and compared to the real hard stuff like the mathematicians and the physicists were doing. And it gave me a lot of time to read.
You get that first moment you read about quantum physics and it just captivates you. Don’t really think about it much more. I did the kind of safe career banking investment on the private equity side, but there was a conversation that I had when someone mentioned, have you heard of this thing called quantum computing?
And later that evening I was up until 2 AM watching videos around what it was. And it really caught me and it just so happened to come at a time when I was looking for a bit of a career change to go run my own thing rather than investing in other people’s things.
And it was just a time to take the risk. We started off writing the Quantum Daily, you know, I wrote some of the articles. We found Matt, we found James and the team and then Evan, my co-founder. And we decided to run with it.
I say this a lot to people. I’d rather be lucky than smart. And we were absolutely lucky because the timing was amazing. It was just before the quantum supremacy announcement with Google. And when the team first started writing articles, I think what that did is it brought good and bad interest into the quantum industry and it allowed us to ride that wave and grow very rapidly as an organization
I’d also say that. The lovely thing about sitting on the investment side before working in complex technologies is you’re asked as an associate or manager, Do we want to invest in this business? Now, what’s the first thing you do when you see a completely new company? You actually need to understand what it does. And what I realized very early on is the best way to understand what a company does is really go deep. And this is something my firm taught incredibly well, which is to go down to the roots of the technology or the concept, understand the core, basic stuff first, and then understand the market and then go from there. So what it forced us to do as a team is when we got into quantum, we didn’t look at it as physicists. We just looked, what is the industrial structure that’s forming here?
Okay, Google’s taking it seriously. IBM’s taking it seriously. These are pretty serious companies. It told us enough that we could take the risk and go build something in it.
Veronica Combs: Right, definitely. And, quantum computing has the potential to take on chemistry problems and these things that are sort of boring, but important, like fertilizer composition, or predicting weather in a more precise way.
So I always leaned into technologies that are boring, but important. Maybe you don’t understand all the quantum mechanics involved or the algorithm, but you do know, like you said, there is a place in the market that needs this kind of solution.
And it sounds like you watched a lot of YouTube videos when you first got started at the Quantum Insider. Are there other resources that you like now to help you understand the science better? Or just keep up?
Alex Challans: I think the most valuable thing is just speaking to as many people as possible.
So YouTube videos are a lovely, simple way of digesting complex topics. I love some of the companies that are doing these, 3D diagrams and explanations of how everything works. But the best way is just to sit down with a coffee or a beer with someone who really gets it. And there are some really special people I’ve met over my recent career who’ve had the patience to explain this stuff.
And then it sticks. So how’s it been for you, Veronica? How have you found, finding out about this?
Veronica Combs: I had the same sort of preference as you talking with someone, it’s always great when we’re working with clients, when we can talk to the scientists and the engineers, and a lot of them are really good at explaining this stuff to non-experts and just understanding their day to day challenges and, something that. It would seem easy, outside looking in there, they can say, no, it’s taken years or this small percentage increase is actually a huge step forward. So I agree talking with people, that’s been invaluable for me as well.
Alex Challans: You’ve kind of got to just dunk yourself in the market and just try and work out to navigate it, right?
Veronica Combs: So I noticed the other day on LinkedIn, you post about a patent tracker that Resonance recently built, and I don’t know if you have run across 404 Media, it’s a group of journalists previously at Motherboard, now running their own place, and it’s been interesting to hear them talk about building the publishing apparatus. They’re writers, they’re not technologists, but they’re still trying to figure all this out, and I wondered if this patent tracker was this thing you had to build, fit just to your particular purpose.
Alex Challans: With any business, you’ve kind of got to build and sell. And the first business I ever tried on the side, I think it was building an app, right? In my twenties and the massive thing we underestimated was selling and marketing. So when we built Resonance, it was just Quantum Daily at first.
We started off by writing, so people knew about us. We knew pretty early on that to provide the value that we wanted to do, we wouldn’t just be doing marketing services. We wouldn’t just be doing consulting, et cetera. We would actually be trying to collect all this information we’re sitting on and putting it into data.
If you go into Google today, you can actually get pretty much everything one would need, right? What’s really hard is getting structured intelligence on this stuff.
So that’s where we led with this. We’re sitting on all this content. We’re tagging things, but we’re not pulling it all together. We spent a long time. There’s lots of spreadsheets trying to pull all this information together, and we’re now very pleased that we sit on this intelligence platform where we can search for any entity in quantum. You can track every single piece of news, and it’s all interconnected in a lovely way.
The patents post that you saw recently is from listening to our customers. What do they want on top of that? So when you search for Q-CTRL, for example, and you want to understand where they sit in the quantum value chain, yes, you can get that. But actually, it’s quite helpful to know what papers they’ve put out.
It’s also helped to know who they’ve partnered with and what patents they have. I’m spotting companies all the time that I didn’t know worked in quantum. They’ve just put a patent out, but it’s also useful for our clients who specifically want to go that next level deeper to understand their competitive landscape.
Veronica Combs: And that really makes the business connection. I think too, because being in a lab and pursuing an interesting concept is worthwhile, but if you’re patenting some of that work, then that’s a different level of activity.
Alex Challans: That’s right. And what I love about it is that you will find companies that you may not have expected, particularly around like when you look at quantum security, you go, ah, there are some individuals there who are taking this seriously and, you know, seriously enough to go register a patent.
That’s stuff that is often missed in the news.
Veronica Combs: And I feel like we need an arXiv tracker too.
Alex Challans: That’s coming.
We’ve built the technology to do it.
And the fun thing is just extracting all the companies. So you’ll see that Multiverse will put out a paper with the university, right? What we’re trying to do is make sure we extract both the university, multiverse, and it all sticks together.
Veronica Combs: Wow, that does sound really great. I know that another recent project of yours is the Space Intelligence Program.
Is it easier to talk about space technology than quantum?
Alex Challans: Luckily, I’ve got great people on my team who are far more knowledgeable about space. And the reason we chose space is that we looked at markets that were really complex, similar to quantum, really complex, sometimes misunderstood, but clearly on a growth trajectory.
Space is not easier to talk about, but it’s, I think, a little bit easier to understand when you’re having that conversation at the dinner table with friends. We’re covering intelligence on quantum. What the heck does that mean? We’re tracking rocket launches. Ah, yes, okay, I can understand that, right? So it’s a bit easier.
The other thing about space is, and this is why I say there’s not that much hype in quantum, when you look at the pure numbers, is there’s about, I think, I might have to correct this later, but I think there’s about 100 billion dollars of government funding going into space annually. That compares to about 5 billion dollars in quantum.
So it gives you an idea of the magnitude of these markets. Space is a real, mature market that we started off in the 1950s, let’s say, if we’re being generous, 1950s, 60s. And now we’ve had an inflection point, with the reduction in payload, cost per payload through SpaceX. And now it’s opening up an entirely new complex, interconnected market. Which has got real companies making huge amounts of sustainable revenue. But it’s far further along the maturity curve than I would say quantum is, so it makes it different to talk about, not necessarily harder or easier.
Veronica Combs: Right. Right. I think I saw a headline about time zones for the moon or something like that. I don’t track it as closely as quantum, obviously, but you do see little flickers of, wow, it is really moving fast and it is a lot more mature than quantum as you said. I did also want to ask you about the Metaverse Insider.
Before I started with HKA, I did a lot of writing about technology and it was in the middle of the pandemic and everybody was at home and at the time, I could see some potential in the metaverse. I wonder what you think the status of the metaverse is today.
Alex Challans: The bubble has absolutely burst in terms of this terminology called metaverse.
Alex Challans: People got very excited with the change in name from Facebook to Meta. It was all caught up in the crypto bull markets where people were like, well, okay, you can connect blockchain to Metaverse. You can connect all these concepts together and have some kind of interoperable persistent universe that sits outside of reality and look, I think that will absolutely be a thing.
However, it doesn’t exist today. What we’re finding with our clients in the metaverse is actually they typically are going within a subsector there. So it’s either digital twins, or it is augmented reality. It’s virtual reality. Our clients in this market are very much focused on these sub sectors where there is real value being driven, but again, you can compare it to quantum more, way more funding and way more money is going into this ephemeral term called the metaverse.
Even though the term on that, the bubble has burst, it’s still way bigger than quantum. You know, digital twins alone are a much bigger addressable market. Right now than, selling QPU units to governments.
Veronica Combs: Right. And there are augmented reality applications that you could certainly see have promise in the business world for training or simulation or just experimenting.
I was looking through a recent announcement from residents about your advisory board and, If I had to make a pie with wedges for each sector that you needed advice on for a quantum computing company, I have to say your advisory boards would be a great fit. You’ve got people from the US, the UK and Asia.
Deep tech product management, semiconductor, the space ecosystem.
How did you get such a great group of people together?
Alex Challans: One of our new hires, the first thing he said is that, it’s absolutely remarkable given the size of the company that you are, that the kind of clients that you keep, like we work with large corporates and national governments.
And he says every other company that is operating at this level typically has a very senior advisory board. Why don’t you? I was like, okay, sure, let’s go for it. And so that’s exactly what we did.
So, you know, we’re very lucky to have people who believe in the story, understand these markets and have been invaluable in helping guide us through this. I think what you find, you go from writing a blog on quantum to advising national governments on these deep tech strategies at some point, however hard you work and however much you think, you’ve got to lean on people who have just gone through it all and know how to navigate this stuff.
Veronica Combs: Since you do come from private equity, I would like to ask a few finance-centric sort of questions. I think we’re finished talking about quantum winter, at least in the short term. But do you anticipate consolidation this year?
There’s not as much funding. It seems at least at this point in April. And still lots of startups.
Alex Challans: The funny thing about deep tech is everyone is always raising. You’ve got very expensive hardware, lots of things to do. And there’s no shame at that. Like I think most people get it.
There was definitely a VC winter, from a very high base, from 2022 going to 2023, and depending on how you cut some of the funding rounds, particularly around the $500 million in sandbox, it’s otherwise a massive drop or a massive increase in 2023. And I think what that tells you is it’s just so small compared to the broader VC market in general, that it’s hard to make data driven assumptions around the flows of capital here.
I think our data shows that quantum made up less than 1 percent of total flows, VC flows into the overall technology markets. And deep tech is like 10 to 20 percent of the total, depending on how you cut it. So what does that all mean? There is absolutely going to be a consolidation in my view. Currently, we track 60 quantum processing unit companies alone.
There are two hypotheses there. One is that there are going to be 60 QPU companies in 10 years-time, or some of them are going to fall out and not work. And then some of them are going to be acquired. Now, I imagine it’s going to be a little bit of a combination of the latter two that there will be some who don’t succeed, we know what startup failure rates are.
I like to think there’s going to be plenty of successes there. And indeed, there will be those who realize that they have got some really cool technology, but they need to be part of a bigger whole. We’ve already started to see acquisitions at the start of this year. You’ve seen, I think Infleqtion do a couple, you’ve had Orca Computing do one as well.
And what you’re finding is, as they’re trying to build these really complex devices, they’re spotting ingredients that they need, that others have. So I think there’s absolutely going to be more acquisitions. IMQ have specifically announced that they are going to do it. That’s all public. I’m just excited to see the next movements.
Veronica Combs: Another thing that attracted me to the quantum industry was it is so international, right? There’s not just one hub. There are spots all over the world, investing money and attracting talent. Are there any cities that you keep particular eye on?
Alex Challans: Well, I’m British, and live in London for much of the time. I’m obviously very interested in the UK ecosystem. But my wife is Canadian. And so, I spend a lot of my time like right now in Toronto.
I think the Canadian ecosystems are going to be interesting, but then to complicate matters, most of our customers are American. So I spend a lot of my time in America. What’s fascinating is to see some of these regional hubs start to emerge.
So in the U. S., you’ve got various states and regions who are starting to push forward their own initiatives, partly through chips and science, partly through the NSF funding. And you’ve all got all sorts of models starting to appear in various European countries where they’re trying to pull together these innovation hubs, which align with economic development initiatives.
So I think what’s going to be fascinating is to what extent these regions, cities, countries need to reinvent the wheel and do everything. Again, I kind of take a 10-year view on this. Will there be 60 QPU companies? I think we do agree, maybe not. Will every single country have a full stack strategy across every qubit modality and quantum sensing, computing and security, probably not.
I think you’ll find that the US leads at some things. Canada has leadership in other things. We’re starting to get the hints of how that will look and who is going to do what. But I think at the moment, most people are trying to work out the positioning and the hedging their bets.
Veronica Combs: Yeah, that is really interesting. Where will superconducting emerge versus trapped ion? Yes. Lots of interesting work ahead. Here at HKA, we’re always tracking the media, seeing who’s writing about quantum, seeing who we’ve broken through with and gotten them to cover a company or a trend. We’ve seen a few signs that the broader media business communities are starting to pay more attention to quantum.
What signals do you track to gauge that broader sort of interest?
Alex Challans: You guys do a fabulous job and so it’s partly due to HKA that the broader media and the broader community is hearing about it. I think one of the key things that we need to do is get out of the echo chambers of talking to ourselves.
For us, we get very excited when we see more enterprise users coming into the market. What do I mean by that? People who are paying real money to go into trialing quantum computing or sensing or whatever.
So in our platform, we have a section on quantum computing use cases and then enterprise users. And what we’ve seen is that blow up. We started at maybe a hundred corporates who really announced that they were interested in quantum and now tracking about 400.
So that is really starting to kick off. I think what we’re also seeing is it coming up a lot more in the mainstream media as well. I think after the Google quantum supremacy announcement, people have started to, at least at the dinner table, understand that there is this thing called quantum. And I’m now spotting another kind of pseudo metric is “How many people at least can give the three line explanation of what quantum computing is”?
It was like no one back in 2019, but now I’m pleasantly surprised when, I don’t know if you found this Veronica, but when you bump into people, they’re like, Oh, that’s the thing with qubits that can do things that normal computers can’t. ou start to pick up that a broader set of people start to have heard of it.
Veronica Combs: Right. Right. At least the highest level of awareness, if not many details. Yes, it’s true. My related question is about technical or business milestones. For a while, I was trying to find, what’s the metric that people care about? Or what’s the metric that actually means something?
It’s hard to measure. all the different modalities and the different companies. I don’t think just the sheer number of qubits really tells you as much as many people think it does.
Alex Challans: Even the concept of algorithmic or logical qubits, I actually think, is not particularly helpful as a metric.
I was chatting to my commercial director on the team today and I said, we’re basically discussing the understanding around quantum. I said, do you think most people can give you the engine specifications of a Boeing 787? There are people who will always be interested in that.
But most people don’t care. And what do you care about is does the plane get you from A to B? So what that tells you, and obviously it’s a slightly glib comment, but I think what that tells you is the real metric that we need to be looking at is revenue. Because it’s something that’s quite hard to fake, right?
You can talk about partnerships and as much as you like, you can talk about algorithmic qubits. You can talk about quantum supremacy, business case supremacy, whatever you want to call it, but what you start to really want to track is revenue. It’s quite hard to publicly look at this.
Now we have plenty of clients we know are generating real revenue in quantum. The question is what flavor is that revenue? Is that revenue, pseudo government funding? Is that revenue a proof-of-concept project, which won’t happen again next year? Or is it stuff where people are paying licenses every single year to access solutions?
It’s only when you get to that last bucket that you start to see a mature market. So when I can start to see, if you look at the public companies where it’s perfectly easy for you, or I, or anyone to quickly Google how much revenue a public quantum company making, most of those are going in the right direction.
I think the milestone in my head is a billion dollars of revenue for one or two companies. I think that’s when we know we’ve started to have a real market here until then. They can just be proof-of-concept. They can just be early stage use cases and they can be big lumpy contracts, which may not recur.
Veronica Combs: I think if you can explain to someone, well, Pharma companies can use this technology to find the most promising drug candidates that then they will go on and test, narrowing the field from 2000 to 200, that gets you a closer to understanding. But like you said, until you can actually say, yeah, we use this every year and we’re pursuing these four, categories, it’s still an interesting idea, but I agree
Alex Challans: Completely, but I also may contradict myself here. And this is what makes quantum so exciting is that if we really think that quantum computers can do the thing that everyone’s promising. Let’s take drug discovery as an example. We really think we can speed up narrowing down drug candidates or even simulate things that we haven’t been able to simulate before.
It’s very hard to put a dollar value on that because we haven’t done it. We really haven’t. We’ve got examples where we’ve used AI to speed things up. There are dollar values we can put to that, but I think what makes quantum so profoundly interesting is the potential to go a lot further than that.
And that’s why it’s such a difficult market to think and analyze and try and get your arms around because it is so exponential if it works. If we genuinely think we can completely change how we do drug discovery, then we’re not talking hundreds of millions. We’re not talking billions. We’re talking trillions in value, but it’s also zero if we can’t.
So that kind of goes to the economic models. Does a quantum computer have to show consistent enterprise revenue going $100 to $200 to $300 million or do they simply need to solve one absolutely heroic problem? That is what’s going to change it
Veronica Combs: Right. Right. Well, it’s good that we have an optimist in you to guide companies and keep us focused on the promise.
Is there anything coming up for Resonance or the Quantum Insider or any of your other publications that you’d like to mention?
Alex Challans: The big thing we’re looking at the moment is, as these markets get bigger and more complicated, how do we collect all that data in a more automated way? And a lot of what we’re doing is saying, actually, we will use AI to cut through a lot of that noise and try and make insights for our clients. So that’s one of the big things, trying to integrate AI into actual data rather than just having a thin application layer of using Chat-GPT.
As the market gets more mature with big sovereign interests, big government interests, that’s where we’re starting to see a lot of interest around: Are we really going to have every single country doing the same thing?
How do we look at positioning the relevant regions of countries to excel at what they’re really good at?
Veronica Combs: Well, it’s been great talking with you today. I appreciate your time. And, I would say if you don’t subscribe to the Quantum Insider, you should.
Alex Challans: It’s much appreciated.
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.
May 8, 2024
