Brian Lenahan founded the Quantum Strategy Institute to demystify quantum technology for the global business community. As a Quantum Top Voice on Linked In, he does this via informative and interesting posts and through his three-times-a week newsletter, “Quantum’s Business.” In this interview, he explains why every organization needs a quantum strategist and why evaluating quantum solutions doesn’t require a physics degree.
Transcript
Veronica Combs: So if you are new to quantum technology and you really want to get an understanding of this industry and everything going on, one person you absolutely should know is Brian Lenahan.
Brian is the founder and chair of the Quantum Strategy Institute. He has been named a LinkedIn quantum top voice three times. From my perspective, the most important thing about Brian is his newsletter, Quantum’s Business. He writes about everything from space explorations to policy to roadblocks the industry is facing, as well as QRAM and Qdits and, and all the nitty gritty details of, of quantum technology.
He has a free version of the newsletter and a paid version, and you should absolutely subscribe because it is worth every penny. So thank you very much, Brian, for joining us today. I’m really excited to talk to you about your work.
Brian Lenahan: Thank you for having me, Veronica.
Veronica Combs: So, as I mentioned, you’re the chair of this think tank, you’ve written seven books, and you have this great newsletter.
It publishes three days a week, right? And there’s a mix of, as I said, free and paid, editions. How do you keep up that pace and publish on such a regular basis?
Brian Lenahan: Well, I could tell you it’s because my adult children have left home. Or I could tell you that I simply don’t have a nine to five.
But it goes way beyond that. And you know, what I have to say is that it’s not a task and when it’s not a task, it’s easy. I am the type of person who’s just simply curious. I love seeking knowledge and I’ll talk a little bit more about that later in the interview. I’m blessed with never having had writer’s block.
And within the quantum world, and I talk about quantum and artificial intelligence, there’s a huge selection of topics to write about. Typically, where my core area is the intersection of advanced technology and business, because that’s what my background is. That’s where I’m most comfortable. But I do love to expand out a little bit into other topics.
Veronica Combs: I think that’s what makes your newsletter so engaging. You could tell that you enjoy it. One thing that we talk about a lot in the podcast is how you talk about quantum technology, not debating what kind of qubit is best or talking about error correction, but just how do you bring more people into this industry and open the gate and be more welcoming? As I said, your newsletter comes out three times a week and there’s always a great headline. You recently wrote about the quantum altitude chart, which was really fascinating. When you’re working with companies, how do you get them to talk in this welcoming, simple, direct language?
Brian Lenahan: Well, I do it in a number of ways. Through my consulting, I help young companies see their potential. When they are looking at the core offering that they have, I really enjoy getting them to expand their mind. Think about competition. Think about what’s out in the marketplace.
Not to the point where they’re afraid of the competition, but where they’re really understanding what the competition is doing. When it comes to my writing, I’m trying to inspire leaders in organizations, whether profit or nonprofit oriented, to think about quantum in the most simplistic ways.
I know, I’m a 25-year banker. I am not a Ph. D. in physics, but what I’ve done over the last five years is really trying to understand the potential, the core practicality of quantum, sure, but really trying to understand its potential for business. And then when you mentioned some of those headlines, I really do try to get to simple headlines.
I don’t try to get into clickbait headlines. I really am not a fan of those kinds of things. What I’m trying to do is make it as simple as possible to be respectful of the time that people are taking to read my work so that if they can see a simple, concise headline that attracts them, that interests them, I think I’ve done part of my job.
Veronica Combs: One of the really helpful things in that newsletter is your advice. Stay close to the customer, ask customers what they need. That customer part, it’s, it’s easy to lose, but it’s so important.
Brian Lenahan: You can race down the wrong path quite easily. So much that’s going on in a research lab or in academia that seems so exciting and brand new, and it may be the first time ever, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re solving a real problem that a consumer or a customer might have. And so why is that important? Well, because you need to be able to scale your ideas.
You need to be able to take something that’s a new solution and make it, not necessarily mass appeal, but sufficient to generate revenues for any business that you create on the vendor side. It’s very important to understand what the consumer is saying. And I find it so interesting that the roadmap customers that I talked to who are my clients, and they’re creating a solution, whether it’s an artificial intelligence or a quantum solution, I asked them what have their customers or whether focus groups or what are those groups that would potentially buy their offering said about their offering? And all too often, the answer is we haven’t done that. We haven’t spoken to them.
Veronica Combs: I was reading your quantum altitude chart, which I also found such a good metaphor, and I imagine that’s helpful going the other way, right? Your clients who are building a solution, they may be on the ground level of all the super technical details, but they’re actually pitching to people more at the 50, 000 feet level who are just trying to understand what’s out there.
Brian Lenahan: Yeah, exactly. Or if they’re just simply pitching to venture capitalists or other people with different interests that say, what does it mean in terms of return on investment? What does it mean in terms of market size? All of those traditional business elements that are so critical to each part of the evolution of quantum.
Veronica Combs: You’ve written a lot about space travel and quantum technology and everyone thinks space is cool and satellites and we’re going to Mars and all that really fascinating stuff, but it also feels literally and figuratively far away. So how do you use space travel as a hook to draw people in and then bring them back to earth?
Brian Lenahan: Well, in the last three or four years, I’ve really collected a network of colleagues who are quite ready to call me out. They’re ready to say, Brian, that’s not necessarily true, or prove it to me or give me an example so that I am not simply, you know, going out there and saying, this is a fantasy. So I love this type of question. I think about what’s going on in Mars today. There are 10 man made machines sitting on Mars today, some active, some not active. You take the Perseverance Rover, for example, it’s actively collecting data. The helicopter that was on Mars just recently had some damage, but it had outlived its expected lifetime collecting data. When I think about writing about space travel, I think, what is the contribution of quantum to that journey?
But more often I’m talking to people about what’s available today. Quantum sensing is a much more mature capability. There are several companies already using it for navigation purposes or, looking deeper into the earth or agriculture capabilities.
Navigation is a perfect example of where we need to understand the environment in space. And so having that kind of granularity will become very, very important. Trying to make those connections for the reader, especially if I can inspire somebody to say that’s an area of quantum or an intersection of quantum that I really want to pursue in the future.
Veronica Combs: And sensing and quantum communications, those are so much more tangible than material science or making batteries more efficient; you can really draw people in with those examples.
Brian Lenahan: That’s right. Just a few days ago, Inflection gave its latest roadmap. And while there is a 2028 outlook for fault tolerant quantum computing and whether that’s true or not, their existing products, like their ticker product already available. If a company is thinking about quantum from a roadmap perspective, they should be thinking about not only what’s available 10 years from now, but what’s available today.
Veronica Combs: Roadmaps are so helpful. Just having some idea of the path that they see, not necessarily dates, but the path you’ve written in your newsletters, how to balance what we’re doing today and what we can do versus hype. And that’s such a fine line to balance. How do you advise companies on this is what we can do right now, but not tipping over into hype?
Brian Lenahan: Just a couple of months ago, I was asked to do a presentation to a large corporation, and they were in the area of aviation engineering. They had had presenters in the past who came to talk about quantum and essentially what they did was talk about what quantum couldn’t do. Here’s an organization who’s looking at quantum saying, why should we even bother having conversations about it if it’s really just what we can’t do with quantum yet?
And so, it was almost an interview for me where they said, if you can prove to us that there are tangible, practical examples that we should start talking about. And believe it or not, quantum sensing is actually much more relevant to them than quantum computing. So when I was able to give them those practical examples that are in market today with specific vendors, they were very appreciative and that meant that this wasn’t so far in the future, especially when you’ve got a CTO or a CIO who has to manage a budget, has to manage resources, and they’re thinking about what I’ve already got have spoken for budget.
How can I include yet another technology? Well, if you don’t, the challenge is your competitors might. And there’s where it becomes so important that I’m giving practical examples with source material available to them or links so that they can go and check for themselves. It’s a recurring theme in what I write about is that especially as a former executive in a North American bank, I couldn’t simply make a presentation without having the backup that somebody else could take a look at to really confirm whether that was valid or do their own validation. The same is true in my writing. I want to make sure that anybody who’s reading my material can go check it for themselves.
Veronica Combs: We talk a lot about quantum hype on the podcast, as I mentioned before. How do you go about reading new claims from quantum companies or understanding a new announcement?
Brian Lenahan: People tend to have long memories. If you’ve made a claim, the challenge is that your audience knows that and when you haven’t completed that claim, they remember it as well. When people are creating roadmaps and you don’t meet those milestones, there’s a big challenge there that says, Okay, so is there an inherent problem inside the organization and its laboratories and its resources?
Or is it simply business as usual? And it’s simply, it’s a month extended or whatever it is. And so, some of those are kind of red flags, breakthroughs occur daily in this industry, and that’s okay. I hear about it every day when I’m talking to groups about artificial intelligence.
The big challenge for companies is. There are too many choices. There are so many things going on in that avenue. Well, the same thing is true in quantum. If you’re thinking about hardware, there’s a dozen different modalities. And what does that mean? It means, whether it’s superconducting or ion trap or photonic or some other capability of the hardware, and you’re the market for a hardware, you really need to understand the differences and there’s not a lot of comparisons that are going on. But the importance of vendor advisors, or customer advisors with integrity, people who are willing to look at it on a matrix kind of approach because there’s so many pros and cons to each one of these modalities, whether it’s cost structure or hybrid nature or anything else.
I look for those organizations who are trying to create that kind of flexibility. For their customers to sort of say, we’re going to give you this idea. It does easily integrate into your classical systems because you do need to continue using those systems. They aren’t going to be simply separated forever. And you’re not going to be using your quantum computer for your payroll anytime soon.
So it’s that kind of recognition and there’s no clear winner today. Here in 2024, there is no clear winner. We’ve got a period of evolution, maybe even convergence, that will happen over time.
My guidance, though, to these companies is don’t wait. Don’t simply wait. You need to get practice. You need to understand what this means for your teams, how do you transfer data between your classical systems and your quantum systems? Maybe even a free way through some of the existing platforms, to have your champions inside your organizations get used to the technology. But quite often, the biggest red flag is what we talked about before. Have you really understood the consumer? Have you really understood the people who are going to be tempted to be buying it and what have you learned from them?
Veronica Combs: And you mentioned earlier that you have a group of friends who will poke holes in your argument or, you know, give you some constructive critical feedback.
I mean, that’s, that’s how we improve, right? It’s constructive criticism. And sometimes when we’re working with clients, we’ll have to say, well, if you’re going to make this claim, then you need these three pieces of evidence. Or if you’re going to say this, then you need to be ready for these questions. Is that something that you work with your clients in terms of anticipating the difficult questions that might be headed their way?
Brian Lenahan: Absolutely. And the way that I portray that is if I’m asking you the difficult questions in a comfortable environment, you’re much better off answering the questions now that you are in a situation when you’re in front of a client or you’re in front of the media and you’re having challenges.
Veronica Combs: Right. So you founded the Quantum Strategy Institute in 2021. A lot has happened in the last few years like you said, there’s breakthroughs all the time. What are some of the highlights for you over the last several years of your work?
Brian Lenahan: Well, certainly for me, the biggest highlight was bringing the group together. You know, we did a good job of that. I think in the first two years where I think we’ve really come to in the third year, and I’m very, very proud of this is the fact that we’re at a point where we’re producing full reports. And the first one we did was by our deputy head Danica Hannon, and Danica did a fantastic job creating a report on cryptography and the status of it, particularly in North America.
And these kinds of full reports, in really sort of common language terms, could get a CIO who’s not necessarily familiar with how quantum works today, and especially in their risk aspect, to get it quickly. And really, really understand what that cryptography means to them. So I’d say those are some of the key things that have happened in the first two or three years.
One more, I guess I would add, we believe that there is a role in business called the quantum strategists. And I’ve been talking about this for about three or four years now, and the reason why I think so is because there’s this combination of technology and business acumen that really needs to go together.
So if you are pitching, you’re a quantum strategist and you’re thinking about your organization, the first thing you’re doing is you’re talking about your KPIs, your goals, your objectives, and it’s not necessarily a quantum solution. So you really have to understand where your organization is going, but then really observing those opportunities for a quantum solution being, whether it’s a POC, perfect concept or a pilot or something like that.
And so what we did was we created a competition, a case competition called the International Quantum Strategy Day, which takes place just after World Quantum Day. We ran our first competition in 2023. And it was great to see how individuals or groups would bring together a strategy based on, in the first case, it was a South African, automotive business that we created as a case study.
And the teams that brought together such a really interesting way of thinking about quantum strategy. So these kinds of templates, these kinds of ways to think about quantum are part of a quantum strategist role going forward.
Those key skill sets, being able to tell the story of quantum inside your organization in a comfortable way that is primarily focused on the company’s objectives, but inserting those capabilities for the future.
Veronica Combs: I think about subject matter experts as someone who could transition to that role, right?
They know the ins and outs of their business, but they’re curious and they see the potential of quantum and they can make that connection between their biggest problems. And then the potential of quantum technology.
Brian Lenahan: Couldn’t agree more.
Veronica Combs: I was reading your newsletters. And I realized at the bottom, you call yourself a quantum generalist. I was curious why that shows up at the end of each newsletter.
Brian Lenahan: Well, I think this comes out of my banking background where we generally work together in teams.
It was my responsibility, as the lead from the business side, to bring together the resources and I knew I wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. I knew I wasn’t the most technically astute person in the room, but I knew I could bring them together. And so, what I wanted to be able to do was bring the knowledge of our project, our key objectives in the bank, but do it in such a way that I was sufficiently aware of what some of the big challenges were for our IT teams so that we could expedite the learning curve in any of our projects. And that sort of transitioned into this generalist concept.
I would consider myself a seeker of knowledge. And once I have found that knowledge, I like to point people to that knowledge. It doesn’t mean, I’m an expert in any way, shape or form, and I don’t pretend to be, but what I found through the comments from my readers and through my interaction with those people is that they’re quite often inspired because I’ve brought together a couple of concepts that they hadn’t thought about in terms of their intersection. And that’s really exciting to me.
Veronica Combs: So I think this is the first year for the Lenahan Prize in Quantum Leadership. Is that right? I think that’s a brand-new initiative.
Brian Lenahan: It is. It’s a brand-new initiative and it really takes place at the end of 2024. And in that case, the one person that’s always inspired me in my life, was my great-great grandfather.
And, while I never met the gentleman, he lived to a ripe old age of 97, he came from Ireland, Wexford County, back in the 1830s, came right to Ottawa, although it wasn’t called Ottawa at the time, and he was a bridge builder. He went from bridge building to being a local blacksmith, and you know the thing about blacksmiths, they were some of the original chemists, taking different materials and bringing them together.
So I wanted to honor him with this prize and the idea behind the Lenahan Prize in Quantum Leadership. You have lots of technical quantum prizes that are out there these days and growing, which is great for the industry.
But to be able to bring a prize for leaders who are starting to apply quantum capabilities within their organizations.
Veronica Combs: Wow. He was a pioneer in all the real senses of the way. I think your most recent book On the Shoulders of Giants, 10 Quantum Pioneers of the Past, you wrote that with Kenna Hughes Castleberry, who we had on the podcast a few episodes ago. It must’ve been a fun book to write.
Brian Lenahan: It was, it was so much fun. What I would say is the concept came from me in the sense that I had been writing about individuals because I think it’s so compelling about how individuals in various different areas of science have contributed to the evolution of quantum. So we quite often hear about Einstein and all of his colleagues. But Satyendra Bose from India, incredible intellect, Al Khwarizmi who algorithms are named after, back in, you know, 800 AD, and so, stories were compelling. And I think what I would certainly tell you is most of my writing has been nonfiction. Oriented with a very technical approach. And so I didn’t think I was the right person to actually tell these individual people’s stories.
And I knew that Kenna was a great science communicator, but she was also a great storyteller. And so, bringing Kenna into the project, she did a fantastic job of telling these stories.
Veronica Combs: Yes, they might have been winners of the Lenahan prize if they’d have been around in their time.
Brian Lenahan: Exactly right.
Veronica Combs: I’ve been tracking sort of the different ways of evaluating quantum hardware, mostly hardware, and quantum volume was sort of in vogue and individual companies have their own measurements and to be fair it is difficult to pick one metric and as you said there’s no clear winner right now so you can’t have a one set of criteria to evaluate claims in terms of capabilities of quantum hardware, so I am curious how you look at all those different measures of hardware performance or qubit capabilities. How do you evaluate those different claims? And is there a metric that you like, or is there a combination of them that you like?
Brian Lenahan: If I’m going to use a technical approach, then what I’m most likely to do is refer to something like QEDC’s application oriented benchmark.
They recently came out with a report, an extensive list of various different benchmarks for different types of applications and qubits. So that’s from the technical perspective. Here’s the challenge: company CEOs don’t think about the number of integrated circuits they have in their computers.
They just don’t. They think about what those computers can do for them. There are some quantum vendors that have actually measured things in terms of ROI, savings, efficiencies, cost structure. And so, these are particularly in the areas of computing. Early days of portfolio optimization, traffic optimization, those kinds of things. We’ve seen some very interesting returns from using computing. And I think D-Wave is a great example. It is constantly talking about their return from their investment, not just the number of qubits. And so when I speak to leaders who are engaged on their quantum roadmap, they’re saying, Brian, what can it do for me? Why shouldn’t I continue to use my classical systems? And remember, classical systems are continuing to improve all the time.
And so it’s a moving target against which you’re benchmarking and particularly if companies or corporates who have millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars invested in their infrastructure in classical. So, it’s important for them to be looking at quantum on that moving scale.
It’s not an easy task, but it’s certainly a worthwhile task, even if your classical systems are out-competing those quantum algorithms today, you still need to look at those capabilities as they migrate and improve.
Veronica Combs: Right. So I guess, to go back to your quantum altitude chart, if you are a generalist at the 50, 000 foot level, you don’t need to worry about those specific measurements so much. You just need to start learning about the lay of the land.
Brian Lenahan: Absolutely. Just recently wrote in a publication called Inner Sanctum about the relativity between Y2K, and Y2Q, years to quantum. And, it’s important that organizational leaders understand the potential impact of a quantum computer on your existing cryptography. And it’s important that they start today. Doesn’t mean they’re investing necessarily today, but it’s very important for them to understand it really needs to start moving down that altitude chart to much more tangible actions.
Veronica Combs: Well, thank you so much for your time today. You have the competition coming up in April. Are there any other institute events that we should look out for this year?
Brian Lenahan: We have a very interesting report coming out on the quantum environment in Asia. This came out of a LinkedIn post by Duncan Jones, who started to talk about a half dozen different countries and their approach, whether they were investing or not investing, as of that moment in time. And we thought we’re going to expand that.
Veronica Combs: That does sound good. Like you said, there’s just so much going on. So that report will be coming out from the Quantum Strategy Institute. Quantum’s Business is Brian’s newsletter on Substack. Subscribe. I’m a paid subscriber and you should be too. And, Brian’s on LinkedIn, where, as I mentioned, he is a quantum top voice and his posts are fun to read and informative.
So if you’re not following him on LinkedIn, you should be. Thanks again, Brian, for all your time.
Brian Lenahan: I want to say thanks, Veronica, and it’s so important the work that you’re doing at The Quantum Spin. I really hope this podcast continues and grows. It’s great to see the work you’re doing.
Veronica Combs: Thank you so much.
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.
March 16, 2024