Wrangling Qubits in the Colorado Quantum Ecosystem
Overview
Colorado has a full-stack quantum hardware ecosystem: home to companies making all the components that go into a quantum computer as well as companies making the computers. Vescent CEO Scott Davis and his team are right in the middle of this vibrant ecosystem. In the latest episode of The Quantum Spin by HKA, host Veronica Combs talks with Scott about how his company helps scientists and engineers control qubits to build better atomic clocks and other precision equipment. They also discuss the contributions NIST and other government research institutions “turn on money” for the US economy.
00:00 Introduction to Quantum Spin Season Four
00:29 Interview with Scott Davis: Vescent’s Journey
01:11 Challenges and Successes in Photonic Integration
03:20 Quantum Technology and Business Insights
07:03 The Importance of Precise Clocks in Quantum Systems
09:40 Quantum Systems and Real-World Applications
11:24 The Vulnerability and Future of GPS
14:32 The Quantum Ecosystem in Colorado
16:46 Colorado’s Quantum Ecosystem
17:26 Aerospace and Manufacturing in Colorado
18:23 Elevate Quantum: Building a Quantum Consortium
20:47 The Three-Legged Stool of Company Success
25:16 Trends in Quantum Technology
30:40 Conclusion and Future Outlook
Scott R. Davis, Ph. D., CEO and Co-Founder Vescent
Dr. Davis is a physicist entrepreneur with an emphasis on new technology transition from the laboratory to manufacturing. He has spent his career inventing, developing, and commercializing a wide variety of technologies. As a co-founder and VP of Technology at Vescent he led the development of non-mechanical beam steerers and oversaw the asset sale of that technology to Analog Devices for the autonomous vehicles market. He spent three years working at Analog Devices before returning to Vescent as CEO in 2020. Since then, he has been leading the development of technologies and products, such as compact laser systems for trapping and cooling atoms, compact and deployable frequency combs, miniature spectroscopic standards, and other tools aimed at furthering the development and deployment of quantum systems. He has over 30 papers published, has co-authored two book chapters, and has twenty-seven patents pending and/or issued.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Veronica: Hello, I’m Veronica Combs, and this is the Quantum Spin by HKA. For season four, we decided to do something a little different. In March, we attended the APS Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. We took advantage of this amazing event to talk to the leaders in academia, industry,
[00:00:18] as well as the creative folks who helped make the event such a compelling experience.
[00:00:23] I hope you enjoy these conversations that really reflect what’s happening in the industry right now.
[00:00:29] Veronica: Today I’m talking with Scott Davis, the CEO and Co-founder of Vescent. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:00:35] Scott: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.
[00:00:36] Veronica: Tell me what Vescent does and what you do there.
[00:00:39] Scott: Sure. So I am one of the co-founders.
[00:00:42] I am currently the CEO. It started in my garage, so we are a garage startup. It’s an old Victorian house and it wasn’t a garage, it was actually more of a horse stable. And there was a horse tack room that we turned into a clean room and we had optic stables in there.
[00:00:58] And I used to say that we were the coolest laser lab on the block, which I’m pretty sure is true. I think we were both the coolest and the least cool because I’m pretty sure we’re the only laser lab on the block. But it was fun. UPS guys would knock on the door, come in the alley, and they’d open up.
[00:01:10] You’re like, what the heck are you guys doing in here? We started the company as a photonic integrated circuit company making wave guides. And I think like a lot of technical founders, we were naive about the business side, and we also were naive about what it takes to actually engineer and build a product, and especially the new technology.
[00:01:25] And so what we thought was going to be, we knew it was going to be hard, but we didn’t realize how hard it was going to be with this idea of how he could bend light without any moving parts. It was like, Hey, it’s going to be really hard. And so, when we had bills to pay, we didn’t have any outside money in the beginning.
[00:01:38] So how the heck are we going to do this, because product on the photonic integrated circuit side is going to take longer than we thought? And we came out of places like NIST and Jila, when we were at NIST and Jila, people would call us up and say, ‘Hey, how do you lock your laser?
[00:01:51] How do you drive your laser? How do you do this offset phase lock?’ And we were like, ‘oh, we know how to do that kind of stuff.’ And we thought maybe there’s products there. And I hate to say this because quantum is such a big deal now, and I love quantum, I’m all into it, but back then, our nascent quantum product portfolio was a side hustle to help us pay the bills.
[00:02:07] Veronica: Oh yes, yes.
[00:02:08] Scott: But we got it out there and we started selling and we learned tons doing that. ‘Oh my God, like I didn’t know that, Hey, we built this circuit that hit this performance.
[00:02:16] Let’s turn it into a product.’ I thought we were 90% of the way there. No, we were 10% of the way there. Until someone has actually gotten something all the way to a product and made not just 10 or 20 of them, but dozens of them, they don’t know. And the old adage of yeah, first prototype that hit specs, you’re really only 10% of the way there.
[00:02:35] That is very much true. Anyway, so that sort of helped pay the bills, kept moving along, it was fun and exciting. We eventually got the waveguide piece working. We built a patent portfolio and that was my baby. I was involved in the quantum side, but it was the waveguide piece was my baby.
[00:02:50] We sold that off. We had a non-mechanically scanned LiDAR. Still the best non-mechanically scanned LiDAR ever built. We had a bit of a bidding war between, this was back in 2016. There were LiDAR and autonomous vehicles was a big deal. And so, we were showing up like, ‘Hey, here’s a LiDAR that can go out 200 meters and no moving parts.’
[00:03:09] And so folks were like, ‘Oh my God, I want that.’ So we ended up selling it to Analog Devices, which is a large semiconductor company. When I say large, 15,000 employees, big companies, seriously large. Many billions of revenue. I knew the quantum piece was valuable. They had no interest in it, so we spun that off.
[00:03:25] I went to work at Analog Devices for three years, and I learned a ton in graduate school. I loved graduate school. I was on the seven-year plan. I learned as much in three years at Analog Devices as I did in seven years of grad school.
[00:03:39] Veronica: Wow.
[00:03:39] Scott: Very different lessons. I learned about process control.
[00:03:42] I learned about the business of technology. What does it take to take deep tech and turn it into a profitable business? And these were things like ERP systems and engineering change orders, and
[00:03:54] Veronica: the other 90% of the equation,
[00:03:55] Scott: the other 90% of the equation. And anyway, so I spent three years in Analog Devices, had an amazing experience still, good friends with a lot of folks there.
[00:04:03] I was in the automotive business unit, so I got to see firsthand the semiconductor business and the automotive industry.
[00:04:09] Veronica: Oh, wow.
[00:04:10] Scott: And it was like, I was like, just drinking from a fire hose. And it was a lot of fun. I tried hard to climb the corporate ladder and I went up a couple steps a couple rungs, but then I realized really my sweet spot is building my own ladder. There was all this exciting stuff happening in quantum. Back then we were one of the founding members of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, QED-C. I was like, I’m going to go back and run that nascent quantum piece.
[00:04:33] And so I started as CTO. I developed a technology, built a patent portfolio around it, sold it off, had a big successful exit. Then I came back now as CEO, so I went a bit backwards. So typically, your technical PhD founders start as CEO and then it reaches a certain point and they go, oh, I got to hire a real CEO and I’m going to go be the CTO.
[00:04:52] I did the opposite but I’m freaking loving it. And so that was in January, 2020, when I came back. And so, what does Vescent do? You asked me a question; I haven’t answered it yet. What Vescent does is we’re a quantum infrastructure company, we’re in Colorado, wild west.
[00:05:05] We wrangle photons or tame photons, or we put all of the systems around the photons to enable our customers to do what they need to do to enable their quantum systems, whether it’s building a quantum computer or a next generation clock, or a quantum sensor, or a quantum network, or do quantum research.
[00:05:21] And the differentiator that we have from other folks is we are applying the lessons that I learned in the automotive and semiconductor industry to lasers and photonics for quantum. And so this means, industrial grade manufacturing. This means uptime without any user intervention for months or years. This means rugged so it can leave the lab.
[00:05:41] You don’t need PhDs to keep it tuned up. It doesn’t have to be on a vibration-stabilized optics table. This means really built by technicians with proper manufacturing controls around it, so things like engineering or manufacturing change order. The R and D, the PhD world, you’re always tweaking things.
[00:05:59] You’re always making it better. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you actually release something into production. You’ve got to make the same thing every single time, and you’ve got to have a great documentation package. You’ve got to have strict controls around if something has to change because a part goes obsolete, or we find a flaw that happens, then it goes through a committee and we go, ‘Hey, if you do that change,
[00:06:22] what are the flow downs into the other parts of the system?’ And then it has to go through production. It has to go through product release again, and it has to go through what’s called DVT, device verification testing. And you’ve got to make sure that it’s still doing everything it does. It’s just a very different environment.
[00:06:36] And for quantum to scale, this problem has to be solved, right? And so I see that as business opportunity. That’s what Vescent does.
[00:06:42] Veronica: So the ultimate real-world test. Something is in a remote environment or doesn’t have connectivity. It just has to work.
[00:06:48] Scott: Like in an oil field in Texas or on a ship.
[00:06:51] Or on a plane or on a satellite. You can’t send a PhD up to tweak it up.
[00:06:55] Veronica: So, HKA is in the communication business. And so we try to get reporters to understand why they should care about quantum computing and all the different modalities.
[00:07:03] And so one thing that I’ve run into is clocks, why are highly precise clocks important? So that’s a whole other explanation piece. I wanted to get your expert definition, so that I can use that again.
[00:07:14] Scott: So first I’m going to take a step back and go, what do I mean by quantum systems? Quantum is, it’s the underlying pinning of the universe. It is how this whole everything works. It is the way that things at the atomic and molecular scale or down near absolute zero. When you look at the behaviors of these things, it’s just very different than our quote unquote classical world,
[00:07:34] The bottom line is when you engineer systems where you can take that quantum weirdness of the microscopic and the very cold and propagate it to our macroscopic room temperature world, oh my God,
[00:07:46] you can change the world and not just can you, it already has. And so let me give you two examples from the 20th century. I’ll give you three examples from the 20th century. One of them was back in 1927, there was this guy named Felix Bloch. He ended up winning a Nobel Prize. He was looking at this brand-new theory of quantum physics, and he said I’m going to apply that to solid state.
[00:08:06] And he said, oh my God, if there are certain elements in the periodic table and you could somehow engineer a crystal out of them, you’d get these crazy things called a band gap. Right after that paper came out, there are a bunch of folks saying, ‘Oh my God, you can make an electronically controlled switch that’s called a transistor.’
[00:08:18] That’s fundamentally a quantum device. That changed the world.
[00:08:21] Veronica: Yes, many times over.
[00:08:22] Scott: Many times over trillions of dollars, geopolitics. Another example is let’s break the symmetry of space and trap photons in a resonator, either microwave or optical. And then let’s put a quantum mechanical gain media in there where we can have this thing called a population inversion.
[00:08:36] That’s the Mazer or the laser. That’s a fundamentally quantum device. That enabled the computer age and the information age. People go, ‘uh, why should I care about quantum?’ Well, do you care about computers and chips? Do you care about the internet? Has that affected anybody’s life? You should care about quantum.
[00:08:54] And then another one that happened in the 20th century was people always need better time standards. They always need a more stable oscillator. Stable oscillator with a counter is a clock. And so it’s really the stable oscillator, the counterpart’s, not the hard part. It gets tricky when you get really good, but
[00:09:07] the stable oscillator is like God or the universe, or whatever you want to call it, has given us these incredibly stable oscillators and these quantized energies of atoms, and that’s, use that to build your standard. That’s called an atomic clock. Not only does that enable the internet, that enables our power grid, that enables, it enables all of our infrastructure.
[00:09:25] It enables GPS. The United States Department of Commerce back in 2017 did a study and said, what is the economic impact of GPS? And just in the US alone, it’s in the trillions. Not hypothetical, not someday quantum is going to enable a trillion dollars of economic activity. It already has.
[00:09:39] Veronica: Already has. Yes.
[00:09:40] Scott: And so for me, a quantum system is anything that exploits quantum phenomena. This weirdness of the atomic and molecular scale in our room temperature, macroscopic world. And when you do that, you can make the transistor, you can make the laser, you can make GPS. Those were pretty big deals. And so it’s like,
[00:09:59] ‘Hey, maybe we should do some more of that.’ And the answer is, yeah, we’re doing more of it. People have built all of these amazing laboratory systems where they’re exploiting that quantum weirdness to do things that you just couldn’t do any other way. And this is a quantum computer exploiting entanglement.
[00:10:15] Quantum networks, fundamentally secure comms, distributed entanglement, spooky action at a distance. It’s real and we can exploit it and so better timing. And you go, ‘Why should the world care about better timing?’ It always amazes me that people walk around and they live the benefit of all of this technology and they don’t stop and think about what is enabling all this.
[00:10:37] It’s crazy for me to think about this, but there’s a constellation of satellites that have these exquisite atomic clocks in them, and every second billions of virtual atomic clocks are beamed down from space to people’s cell phones, billions of them all over the world. It impacts logistics.
[00:10:51] It empowers the internet. Our power grid would go down without it, and people go, why should I care? Do you need the internet? Do you need electrical power? Do you need, every single financial trade is the timestamp. This trade came in for that one.
[00:11:03] Veronica: That’s a weak signal from space.
[00:11:04] Scott: Atomic clocks. And then you go, okay why do we need better ones? The world. Whenever you come up with a better oscillator, the world always finds applications for it. First of all, GPS or GNSS more generally. GPS is the American version of it. GNSS, it touches everything. It touches, like I said, finance, logistics, national security, defense, I mean everything.
[00:11:24] And it’s incredibly vulnerable. It’s these very weak signals from space. There’s this famous story of an employee that was getting, being tracked by their employer and didn’t like it. And so he built a really noisy oscillator to basically block it jam GPS,
[00:11:38] and he drove by the Newark Airport and shut down the airport. And at the time, generals in the Pentagon were like, ‘Who did what the what now?’ Huh. And there is, so there’s someone we work with in the Air Force, he told me that, not if, but when GPS goes down, it’s going to make Covid look like a joke.
[00:11:54] Veronica: That’s what I keep thinking.
[00:11:56] Scott: Yes. And it is such a vulnerability and not only can you jam it, you can receive that weak signal from space. Amplify it. Transmit it. Then the asset will lock onto your stronger signal, and then you can guide that wherever you want it to go. Oh, this is called spoofing.
[00:12:09] This is happening right now. There are institutions that are tracking spoofing events. This is happening in military theaters. It’s happening in civilian ships, using it to get around trade embargoes. It’s real. And so we need a backup. So one, you’ve got to have more robust, more reliable timing solutions that don’t rely on weak signals from space.
[00:12:30] And so that’s, and that’s a big market opportunity.
[00:12:32] Veronica: Right.
[00:12:33] Scott: And two, let’s do even better than those clocks that are up in space. Let’s enable faster communications in the data center. Let’s enable, people keep talking about this amorphous thing called 6G, and it’s still not really well-defined, but they don’t know how the timing solution’s going to work.
[00:12:48] Every single cell phone tower out there, they used to have their own atomic clocks on them. They all rely on weak signals from space. Those are all vulnerable. It’s amazing how vulnerable our world is. But I look at that and I go, there’s a business opportunity. Let’s be part of the solution.
[00:12:59] Veronica: Right.
[00:13:00] Scott: And so we can make clocks that are orders of magnitude better than those clocks up in space or we the quantum community, using Vescent stuff. First of all, we’re going to have a more reliable, ground-based backup to this fragile system, these weak signals from space.
[00:13:13] And that’s already a giant freaking market. And then you go, ‘oh, we do way better than we did in the past.’ There are new things you’re going to be able to do with it. And that has always been the case through history. So I’m incredibly excited about that. And then the quantum sensor piece, the inertial sensors, the field sensors.
[00:13:27] It’s freaking awesome. There’s amazing stuff, but none of it’s going to happen unless we solve the wrangling photon problems in industrial ways. And so that’s why Vescent exists.
[00:13:34] Veronica: Got it. Got it. There is a series, I think it’s on Netflix, called Zero Day. Have you heard of that one?
And so, they didn’t say it was disrupting GPS that caused utter chaos across the world, but that just one little narrow window into what might happen was pretty, pretty terrifying.
[00:13:51] Scott: It would be a Black Swan event. It would be a, my God, it’d be a wake-up call, right?
[00:13:55] Veronica: It would be a wake-up call for sure.
[00:13:56] Scott: And you know, there are people who are talking about putting, so right now there’s, I think GPS is, 12 satellites and one general said there, they’re big, fat, juicy targets in space. Everyone knows where they are. Chinese can knock it down. There are folks talking about doing much, much bigger constellations that are in what’s called low-earth orbit.
[00:14:10] So they’re going to be harder to knock out. You get more redundancy, there’s, it’s going to be a multifaceted solution to do this. There’s going to be ground-based backups, there’s going to be LEO, low-Earth orbit backups. It’s an important problem, and quantum is central to it. And then those same lasers and those same systems that are going to enable those, they’re going to enable quantum computers too, and they’re going to enable different types of quantum sensors.
[00:14:30] And I love that as a business model.
[00:14:31] Veronica: Got it. So you’re based in Denver?
[00:14:34] Scott: Yeah. Technically Golden, just west of Denver, south of Boulder.
[00:14:36] Veronica: And as you mentioned, NIST is there, Jila is there, there’s other quantum computing companies there. And I think the ecosystem seems more important in quantum than in other technology.
[00:14:46] So can you tell me how you benefit from that ecosystem?
[00:14:50] Scott: Absolutely. And so, we benefit in multiple ways. And let me just do a shout out to NIST in terms of sort of federal dollar spend, NIST is a rounding error. Their yearly budget is something like $1.5 billion dollars.
[00:15:01] And you think about without NIST, we wouldn’t have GPS and that contributes trillions of dollars. As a businessperson, we should do more of this. We should fund this more. This is turning on money for our economy. It’s adding jobs to our economy.
[00:15:12] And so they are a national treasure. And then the University of Colorado, they do, so Jila is a joint institute between the University of Colorado and NIST. It’s a very special place. There have been multiple Nobel Prizes out of it. I joke with some of my colleagues, I couldn’t get in now, that’s where I went to graduate school.
[00:15:29] Carl Wyman, Eric Cornell won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating Bose-Einstein condensate. My co-founder Mike Anderson, he was the postdoc on that experiment. He helped build that experiment, was the first human to see a BEC. Jan Hall. John Hall, he goes by Jan, he was the guy who taught the whole world how to wrangle photons like how to apply control theory to lasers.
[00:15:47] Veronica: And so you’re an exceedingly good company, is that what you’re saying?
[00:15:49] Scott: Exceedingly good company. And Jan won the Nobel Prize and our CTO was Jan’s last grad student. He was before Jan retired.
[00:15:55] Like he was the last one taught by the master. And so that’s a big part of why we’re there. And so, the talent and the workforce is a big piece of it. It is also, and I think because of that breakthrough research. Dave Wineland was at NIST and he built the first trapped eye in quantum gates, and he won the Nobel Prize,
[00:16:12] and so because of that and because of the sort of photonics/physics intersection background there is, and I think a lot of it is because these are Department of Commerce labs, so they’re not behind the fence.
[00:16:25] Department of Commerce is supposed to be helping commerce, and so they’ve got a mindset of, we’ll partner with industry. We’ll teach you how to do this, which is great. It’s not classified. There’s a strong cluster of startup companies and established companies in the Boulder, Denver area, and across the full value chain, all the way from base components.
[00:16:46] People who make optics and polarization optics and beam splitters and do coatings and things like that. Some of the best in the world are there in Colorado. Then there’s people like us who take those components a lot of times, buying them from folks down the street, and then we integrate them into systems to wrangle the photons, and then we sell those to other Colorado companies that are using them to build a quantum computer or a quantum sensor.
[00:17:09] And so that full stack where you’ve got that high-speed iteration. We got a customer saying, ‘Hey, I got a problem.’ We got a system that we think we can do it, and we bring it up there the afternoon and we set it up on the floor and it’s oh my God, all of a sudden their uptime goes up 30 fold and
[00:17:22] Veronica: Wow.
[00:17:22] Scott: Then they’re like, I want to buy this. And that happens on a time of days.
[00:17:25] Veronica: Wow.
[00:17:26] Scott: And Colorado also has an aerospace history, and so Lockheed Martin has a presence there. Ball now, BAE is there. And so there’s a manufacturing and precision manufacturing.
[00:17:38] And so most of our employees are not PhDs. Most of them are assembly techs in the factory, on the production floor, but being able to get folks that know how to build things. And so we’ve got the best of the best scientists. And then we’ve got, whole supply chain and all the way from end user customers to components to subsystem integrators, which is where we fit.
[00:17:57] And then you got manufacturing base.
[00:17:58] Veronica: The perfect ecosystem, everybody, you need in one spot.
[00:18:00] Scott: Everybody you need in one spot. And so it’s great. Now, not to say that there aren’t great things happening in other places.
[00:18:05] What’s happening in Munich is amazing. Silicon Valley’s still Silicon Valley. There’s great stuff coming out of Boston. But Colorado is great too. And our partners in New Mexico are great. We got Sandia, we got Los Alamos, right? We’ve got Kirkland Air Force Base, there’s just a lot of talent and assets and smart people who have been working hard on this stuff.
[00:18:21] So it’s a great place to, it’s a great place to be.
[00:18:23] Veronica: I know Elevate Quantum is a new industry group for companies in the Rocky Mountain West.
[00:18:27] And I think you were instrumental.
[00:18:29] Scott: Yeah. We were instrumental. We helped write the proposal. And this was great because we partnered with a company based in Denver called Maybell Quantum, their quantum infrastructure on the cryo side. They make dilution refrigerators and we’re on the laser side.
[00:18:40] And so it’s oh, let’s just freaking control the quantum infrastructure Corban Tillemann-Dick who’s the CEO and founder of, or co-founder of Maybell, just a force of nature. He was like a driver. And Zach Yerushalmi, he was the CEO of Elevate.
[00:18:51] He’s just been spectacular. Built a whole consortium and pitched the EDA, which is part of the Department of Commerce, but they’re the Economic Development Administration. So their metric is jobs.
[00:19:02] Veronica: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:02] Scott: What are the jobs? And then we did an analysis. You look at how many quantum companies in an area and you looked at, the QED-C, the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, and you look at where are most of their members?
[00:19:15] I’m on the steering committee there and I’ve been involved since the get go. Celia’s great. QED-C is great. There are more QED-C member companies in Colorado than anywhere else in the world.
[00:19:24] Veronica: Oh, I didn’t know that. Wow.
[00:19:25] Scott: Not normalized by population. Just flat-out numbers.
[00:19:28] And it’s not even close. And we did an analysis like how many people in the private sector are working in jobs in Quantum in Colorado? And I was like, oh, it’s 3,000.
[00:19:36] Veronica: Wow.
[00:19:37] Scott: It’s not the tens or hundreds of thousands in semiconductor yet, but it’s again, more than anywhere else in the world.
[00:19:42] And then Elevate, was, we put together this big proposal and there was competition between other great places. Chicago, they’re doing great work up in Chicago. We ended up being the only quantum one that won.
[00:19:54] And so this brings in resources. Elevate Quantum is a nonprofit. It is a consortium. The idea is that it’s supposed to, or it’s going to, it is it is helping to accelerate tech transfer and commercialization and what the ESA’s eyes on are, how many people are you going to hire? And so who is, what are you going to do to the economy?
[00:20:15] This is jobs. And so we raised our hand and we’re like, we’re going to do manufacturing and we’re going to be hiring not just PhDs, but people who know how to solder and, double ees and folks and glassblowers and people know how to weld and, all those folks. And our supply chain, we work with machinists, we work with PCB
[00:20:32] fab houses we work with, it’s pretty big and it’s only going to grow.
[00:20:36] Veronica: Sure. Absolutely.
[00:20:36] You mentioned that you have all sorts of folks on your team, and I noticed that you’re looking for staff scientists with expertise in laser systems. So what does the, what are all the different teams at your company?
[00:20:47] Scott: If any of my employees are listening to this or any of the Vescent employees are listening, they’re going to be like, oh, Davis is talking about the stool again. I think of the company as a three-legged stool. And I think, and when I look at companies that fail, their stool is out of balance and it tips over, I think one leg is R&D and engineering.
[00:21:03] So I learned a lot working at Analog Devices about manufacturing and process and business of technology, and Vincent Roche, the CEO of Analog Devices, just doing a killer job. One of the things that he would like to say is that success can be a sleeping pill, and there are graveyards full of companies that rested on their laurels.
[00:21:19] Blockbuster, Polaroid, Kodak. The list goes on and on. You’re like, ‘I’m making money do what I’m doing. Why should I do something different?’ You always have to be innovating, especially in the tech space. You need that. Then the other leg of the stool is manufacturing. You have to be able to produce it, at a profit, and then the third leg is sales and marketing.
[00:21:36] You have to be able to tell the world about what you’re doing. And then as the company grows, I’m always, ‘Is the stool in balance?’ And when I look at companies that topple over, typically one of their legs is too short and often it’s the manufacturing leg.
[00:21:49] Scott: They will hire a whole bunch of PhDs and they’ll do amazing prototypes.
[00:21:53] But they don’t know how to build it and when it comes time to build it under tight process controls under true manufacturing. And so that transfer from R&D to engineering to production is something we spend a lot of time on. And then sales and marketing, that was actually where our stool leg was too short.
[00:22:08] So I came up as a scientist and as a scientist, we don’t brag and like it’s not in our nature. Let the work speak for itself, right?
[00:22:14] Veronica: And show me the data, show me the data, and like read the paper
[00:22:16] Scott: and it’s yeah, the average Joe Blow is not going to read that scientific paper.
[00:22:19] And so you need that too. And, um you absolutely do, and you’ve got to be. You’ve got to, you can build the most amazing thing, but if you don’t have a customer who is willing to pay for it, it doesn’t matter. And if you can’t manufacture a profit, it doesn’t matter. You need all three of those. When we look at our team,
[00:22:33] it’s a combination of folks that have either just a high school degree or undergrad degree. They some of them have a degree in history and like now they’re building lasers for quantum.
[00:22:41] The staff scientists, they work in the R&D group. So we got a PhD that is leading new development programs. Things that are maybe going to be a product on, up to a five-year timeline.
[00:22:50] And then there’s a group of what we call research engineers that work underneath them. These are typically folks with an undergrad or master’s degree. That’s a big deal, a staff scientist Vescent. Well, big deal to me.
[00:22:59] Vescent staff scientists have to be smarter than me. They’ve got to be the type of people that every time I talk to them, I learn something. And we are very persnickety on who we hire there and then, and so the things that they work on don’t all work. But some of it does, and then it transitions to engineering and then we’re going to say, ‘Hey, we’re turning it into a product and then doing a stage gate process on how do you do, who controls the inventory?’
[00:23:20] You’ve got to have an interface control document. You’ve got to know what the inputs and outputs are. We’ve got to have the user, you’ve got to have sales and marketing input, you’ve got to have manufacturing input. You can’t build something that can’t be put together. And as a PhD. I built lots of those things and like I built one, but now I’ve got to build a hundred or 500 and guess what?
[00:23:39] I can’t build all of them. I’ve got to have this tech build them or automate. Real test of success.
[00:23:43] Veronica: The real test of success.
[00:23:44] Scott:Yes. And then the production folks are, again, they’re good folks, good with their hands. And so the staff scientist position is this is someone who’s going to be leading. So part of our products, we do frequency combs, we do CW lasers.
[00:23:56] We do all the controls that you wrap around them. And we sell products that enable our customers to trap and cool atoms, interrogate them, make cold atom clocks, make cold atom inertial sensors, cold atom gravimeters, and so this is someone to work in that space that’s that current job opening.
[00:24:11] Veronica: There’s so much debate around federal funding now. And I think that maybe our national labs, maybe their marketing leg is a little,
[00:24:19] Scott: Their marketing leg is way too short.
[00:24:20] Yes.
[00:24:21] Veronica: Way too short.
[00:24:21] Scott: The broad American public doesn’t know what an amazing deal they’re getting from NIST.
[00:24:26] Veronica: Yes.
[00:24:26] Scott: And they should be up in arms about, you’re kidding, you’re cutting NIST? This is a problem, and it’s a tough one because. As scientists, you don’t want to be folks that beat your chest.
[00:24:35] You don’t want them to be, out there claiming things that aren’t real. But so much of what they’ve done has been so incredible and so impactful and the broader public doesn’t know. And so I do think that’s a problem. For whoever’s listening to this podcast, it matters. It does matter.
[00:24:50] Veronica: It really does matter.
[00:24:51] And drawing, telling the right story and explaining why it really does affect you.
[00:24:54] Scott: It does. And like China is rapidly increasing their funding for science and tech and engineering while we’re cutting ours.
[00:25:01] Veronica: Right, right. And
[00:25:01] Yes. Long term implications.
[00:25:04] Scott: Short term as well, we’re going to be paying for this for generations.
[00:25:06] I worry.
[00:25:07] Veronica: Yes. I have a 16-year-old and a 20-year-old. I worry that about that too. So from your perspective as a CEO of a company, what, um. trends, developments, projects, are you tracking in the industry?
[00:25:21] Scott: We have taken some outside money.
[00:25:22] Now, not a lot. We’re very careful and strategic about that. But one of our investors, he’s actually a very active investor. He’s our CFO now, a guy named Russ Fein. He’s got a cool quantum blog.
[00:25:32] Veronica: Yes, I love his quantum blog.
[00:25:33] Scott: His quantum blog is great. Russ is great.
[00:25:34] Veronica: His modality post, I recommend that to everyone.
[00:25:36] I love it.
[00:25:37] Scott: Yes, shout out to Russ. When he was looking at us and he was thinking of he wants to get into quantum, because he loved it and he looked at, I had a slide of teeny fraction of our customers, like maybe 40 or 50 of them.
[00:25:48] We have like over a thousand customers. Oh wow. All over the world. And he was like, ‘oh my God, you’re sitting in a catbird seat. You have visibility into everything in the quantum space.’ The DOD primes (contractors), the privately funded companies, the government labs, the other country government labs because we sell to everybody.
[00:26:04] And that gives us an interesting perspective because sometimes you’ll see a company that you know, makes headlines, but they’re not buying that much. And then another company that never makes any headlines, but they just keep coming back with the POs. And the POs are getting bigger and it’s okay, that’s cool that was in The New York Times, but this is cooler because the business is growing and so that visibility is interesting and so things that we see in trends so clocks, next generation, quantum clocks, which is a fancy word of saying atomic or molecular clocks. That world is about to get disrupted.
[00:26:35] And there are the technologies that exist out now, something called a cesium beam clock or a Mazer. Those have been around for 30, 40, 50 years and they really I hate to say they haven’t gotten better, but they’re ripe for disruption.
[00:26:46] Veronica: They’re ripe for disruption.
[00:26:50] Scott: And they’re a path where you can make things that are orders of magnitude better and cheaper and get, make them more rugged and deployable.
[00:26:54] And that’s coming, that’s happening. And I want to support and benefit from that. In quantum computing, there’s been in the last 12 months, there’s been an interesting shift.
[00:27:02] Quantum computers are going to disrupt the world. But I didn’t know what that was going to look like or the timeline. But there’s been a shift. And of course, we would sell things to help customers build quantum computers, but it was like you going to build two.
[00:27:12] That’s not super exciting.
[00:27:14] Veronica: You’re not coming back to me in a year.
[00:27:15] Scott: You’re not coming back to me in a year or in a month or in a couple weeks. But there’s been a shift where people are doing what are, they’re, and almost across the board, all of our customers that are doing quantum computers are saying rather than just building a laboratory demo that we can get on the cloud, we’re going to be doing what are called on-prem quantum computers on premise.
[00:27:31] And I love that because that means some volume. Now these are going to be expensive items. They can be high ASP, average sale price, ticket items that we sell into them, and it’s meaningful business for us. But they’re coming to us with ‘look, your system has to be running 24/7 for six months straight.
[00:27:47] We can’t be having folks going in.’ And that is music to my ears. It’s like that’s what we’ve been working on, some of our timing customers are like, ‘this is going to go on a satellite and it’s got to work for years.’ I was like, ‘oh, you’re going to be in something like a data center and it’s got to work for six months.’
[00:27:58] It’s a piece of cake. And so that’s that business has been ticking up and so I’m very excited about that.
[00:28:03] There are national security issues and we need our own computer to be playing with this and getting up to speed on it. And so that’s incredibly exciting to me. Then I think in the quantum sensing space I think the field sensors are very interesting, but they still have some ways to go.
[00:28:17] And then the quantum networking is I mean it’s all fascinating. It’s, but I see we’re seeing a big pull from timing now, and it’s not just. Stable oscillators. It’s timing distributions and ways of doing that and using quantum tricks to do that. And that’s potentially big business. And then the on-prem quantum computers are the big things.
[00:28:32] And then the quantum research, we help researchers accelerate their quantum research like just buy from us. Don’t build your laser system, it can be up and running in a week.
[00:28:39] Veronica: Yes. I keep watching some of the quantum networking because that’s, yeah. People understand that.
[00:28:45] That’s easy to explain and you could see the benefit right away as opposed to some other technologies.
[00:28:49] Scott: Yeah, that’s right. And, here’s where the atomic clock community has done a poor job at communicating just how vital that is.
[00:28:56] Veronica: And some of the on-prem stuff, even if you’re not giving tours, you can still point at it and say, look, that’s right. That’s what we have, which helps the marketing leg of your three-legged stool.
[00:29:04] Scott: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right. And it’s funny when you talk about what, how do you value a company?
[00:29:10] That’s a very subjective thing, and I see two bounds to that. And one of them is a Warren Buffet style, quote unquote accretive value. You can go, ‘How much do you sell? What’s your profit margin? Do you know what’s called an EBITDA analysis?’ And they go. ‘Oh, if I were going to buy this entity, how long would it take me to recoup my investment and then start making some money?’
[00:29:30] And that’s and you can run those numbers and they’re well-established things. And that’s how you would value, like if you’re going to buy a liquor store or something like that.
[00:29:35] Veronica: Right? That’s sort of the base.
[00:29:35] Scott: And then the other end is, hey, here’s something that’s brand new and potentially disruptive, and the sky’s the limit.
[00:29:42] And if you’re an enabling piece in that, then that has the valuation, the calculus is different. And so there’s, there are many multiples on your revenue, it’s not just, two times EBITDA or something like that. It is it is much, much bigger. And so the timing space, it doesn’t get written up in the New York Times.
[00:30:00] It actually does GPS vulnerability, but people, I don’t know, it’s still not in their minds, that has real value. Look, we’re going to, there’s a way we can get to a hundred million a year in business in this. That’s awesome. The quantum computing space, even if the volume’s not there, it’s got that kind of sex appeal.
[00:30:13] And so that speaks to a strategic value. And so both are important and you got to be doing both. And that, like you said, it’s part of our marketing. It’s all connected.
[00:30:22] Veronica: Yeah. It’s all connected. You have to have some of that vision for the future. And a little bit of faith in the science and technology and engineering to get us there.
[00:30:30] Scott: That’s right. And then some prove to the world. It’s not just vaporware. You’ve got real revenue and real products you’re shipping now that you’re making real money on.
[00:30:37] Veronica: Yep, yep.
[00:30:38] Scott: And I think that combination is incredibly powerful.
[00:30:39] Veronica: Yep. Yep. It’s been so great to talk to you. I clearly need to come to Denver and Golden and Boulder.
[00:30:46] Scott: I would love to give you a tour. We can suit you up if you wanna get in the clean room.
[00:30:48] Veronica: I would love that.
[00:30:50] Scott: They don’t let me in the clean room. They might like if I’m giving a tour.
[00:30:54] Veronica: Well, Thank you again for your time. Thank you so much. It was great to talk with you.
[00:30:57] Scott: Yeah, it was great.
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 27, 2025
Leave A Comment