- Chad Rigetti from Rigetti Quantum Computing is a speaker at the event
- Rigetti Quantum Computing is a leading quantum computing company
- They are close to creating a quantum supremacy machine
- The speaker has a love for startups that aim to change the world
- Chad and the speaker had an interesting conversation about the simulation hypothesis
- Rigetti Computing has built a 5-qubit quantum computer
- They are in a race to define quantum computing technology
- Quantum computers have the potential to solve impactful problems in quantum chemistry and artificial intelligence
- Traditional approaches to building large-scale computers are becoming less efficient
- Quantum computing offers a faster and cheaper path to high-performance computing
- Rigetti Computing is a hard tech startup that has had to develop its own supply chain and fabrication capabilities.

- The speaker discusses the development of quantum computers and the challenges involved in creating them.
- They explain the need for their own fabrication and microfabrication capabilities, as well as advanced control electronics.
- The speaker shares their personal journey and passion for quantum computing.
- They describe the potential of quantum computers to store and process information in individual photons, making them more efficient.
- The speaker distinguishes between hard tech companies and tech companies, emphasizing the unique challenges and possibilities of hard tech.
- They highlight the importance of team, communication, and integration in a hard tech organization.
- The speaker emphasizes the impact and value of clear mission statements and communication strategies.
- They discuss the opportunity to create defensibility and leverage through different layers of the quantum computing business.
- The speaker concludes by asking the audience to participate in an activity.

- The speaker encourages the audience to take 10 minutes to reflect on the type of company or organization they want to join or create.
- Hard tech organizations face the challenge of not having the necessary capabilities to achieve their goals, and this tension is even more pronounced in this field.
- The speaker suggests that the process of developing a product and building a company both involve removing entropy from the system.
- Hiring individuals who create order and clarity is important for the success of an organization.
- The Control Data Corporation 6600 machine, built by a small group of 34 people, was a significant achievement in high-performance computing.

- Chad Rigetti from Rigetti Quantum Computing, a leading quantum computing company, spoke at the event.
- Rigetti Quantum Computing is close to creating a quantum supremacy machine.
- The speaker discussed the simulation hypothesis and their love for startups aiming to change the world.
- Rigetti Computing has built a 5-qubit quantum computer and is in a race to define quantum computing technology.
- Quantum computers have the potential to solve impactful problems in quantum chemistry and artificial intelligence.
- Traditional approaches to building large-scale computers are becoming less efficient, while quantum computing offers a faster and cheaper path to high-performance computing.
- Rigetti Computing is a hard tech startup that has developed its own supply chain and fabrication capabilities.
- The speaker emphasized the challenges and possibilities of hard tech companies, highlighting the importance of team, communication, and integration.
- They discussed the importance of clear mission statements and communication strategies and the opportunity to create defensibility and leverage in the quantum computing business.
- The speaker concluded by encouraging the audience to reflect on the type of company or organization they want to join or create.
- Hiring individuals who create order and clarity is crucial for the success of hard tech organizations.
- The Control Data Corporation 6600 machine, built by a small group of 34 people, was a significant achievement in high-performance computing.

Our next speaker is Chad Rigetti from Rigetti Quantum Computing.

Rigetti Quantum Computing went through YC in the summer of 2014.

They are now 1 of the leading quantum computing companies in the world and next year, well I don't know exactly when, they are getting close to a quantum supremacy machine.

I have a particular love for the start ups where they're trying to do something, it's not clear if it's technically possible, but if they do it changes the world.

And it just goes nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then everything is different.

These companies are super fun to work with, and I think they're super fun to work on, which is why I'm so excited Chad's here to tell us about Regetti and also hard technology startups in general, And why it's okay if you don't have a growth graph every week.

Sometimes you just work and work and work, and then everything comes together.

Chad, come out here, cuz I have a question for you.

So Chad and I met on the streets of San Francisco, in walking around the financial district in 2014, and Chad had not yet started his company but was thinking about it.

And Chad and I have actually never spoken about this again, but I think, I hope you remember this, I think Chad thought I was really crazy, because we got into a long conversation about this simulation hypothesis, and if building a quantum computer was actually really bad, because it would use a lot of resources to emulate and shut down the simulation.

I didn't think you're crazy but I had just moved to San Francisco and to Silicon Valley from New York City and that is not a conversation you can have in New York City without people thinking you're crazy.

But I'm an open person and I like to learn, so I was very interested in this hypothesis.

Alright, well I hope the company works and I hope the simulation is not shut down.

All right, so Chad is going to talk to us about Righetti.

All right, I'm incredibly excited to be here today and to talk with you guys.

I'm also incredibly honored, So thank you very much, Sam and Kat and YC for having me, giving me the opportunity to talk with you guys.

As Sam mentioned, when we joined Y Combinator in summer 2014, we had nothing.

We had not built a single qubit, the fundamental building block of a quantum computer.

We did not know how we were going to build qubits.

I knew what they needed to look like, and I knew what the fundamental requirements were.

In fact, I'd been working in the field for already about 10 or 12 years in quantum computing.

And this is a 5-cubic quantum computer that we have built at Rigetti Computing.

It's less than 2 years later, and we're about 35 people in a warehouse in Berkeley, about 20-some PhDs, and we're building quantum computers.

And we're in a race to define this technology for the next 20, 30, 40 years.

It is the kind of thing that gets you up in the morning and is worth spending your life on.

Humans have been building tools and technology to store and process information for millennia.

I like to think of the sundial as the original computer.

It takes an input and it does something useful with it and tells you the time.

From the sundial to the abacus and then things like the Babbage Difference Engine, which you can go see at the Computer History Museum.

Those are all systems based on Newtonian mechanics.

And every time our understanding of nature evolves and develops further, we add a deeper level of understanding, our technology progresses as well.

So many great companies were born of this first transition that I'm talking about on the slide.

IBM started as a computing, tabulating, and recording company.

They were kind of born out of this first transition into the microchip era, and they blossomed and evolved and survived through this time to grow into a very, very large company.

Other companies that drove that first transition, who was it?

Fairchild, Intel, And then what's been born in the era of the microchip?

Well, almost everything we see around us.

It's driven the global economy for the past 50 or 60 years.

The amount of leverage you can get from a computing technology is massive.

We've known since 1905 that beneath, there's Newton's laws on 1 hand, and then beneath that there's kind of Maxwell's equations.

And we've known since 1905 that there's a more fundamental description of nature, and that's quantum mechanics.

At Rigetti Computing, we're driving this next transition from microchips to systems based on individual atoms or artificial atoms that we build in the lab.

And That's a very exciting opportunity for us.

Why is it worth trying to build quantum computers in the first place?

Well, the kind of problems that these machines will solve are incredibly impactful.

We think of them in kind of 2 broad categories.

On the 1 hand, you have a class of applications that we think of as quantum chemistry.

So what you're doing in this case is using the quantum mechanical, the quantum computer as a tool to investigate other quantum mechanical systems.

It turns out that that's almost everything in science, medicine, material science.

This is stuff that's going to lead to better drugs, better materials, better nuclear reactors.

Because if you build a quantum computer, you can do simulation-driven design of new catalysts.

Catalysts to capture carbon or nitrogen from the atmosphere.

The other bucket of applications is machine learning and artificial intelligence.

So in this case, what you do is learn to embed a learning problem on a classically intractable physical model that you can simulate on a quantum computer.

What it means is, quantum computers are gonna lead to fundamentally more powerful forms of artificial intelligence.

So when I say more powerful, What do I mean?

This is until about 3 months ago was the most powerful computer on the planet.

It burns about 20 megawatts of electricity.

You guys know how much electricity that is?

It's enough to power about, It's enough to power the town I grew up in.

It's about half the size of a football field.

Ultimately, our approach to building large-scale computers is starting to break.

Lateral transistor scaling, the fundamental measure of Moore's Law, has sort of leveled off for the past 8 years.

The other thing is something that I hope you've all heard about in your computer science classes called Amdahl's Law.

Amdahl's Law talks about the limiting benefits or the diminishing returns of parallelization.

These are massively parallel machines, 3.2 million cores running in parallel.

Only problems that can be parallelized run fast on these kinds of machines.

Now, President Obama has shown some significant vision in sort of driving a return of American leadership in high-performance computing, and he has said that America's gonna build an exascale computer, something about 30 times more powerful than Tianhe-2 by 2020.

That machine will cost about a billion dollars with current technology, and it would require a nuclear power plant to run it.

Ultimately, when you can compute with quantum physics, you have a faster and cheaper path to that level of computing power.

Well, these are 2 developmental systems in our lab in Berkeley.

These are, what you see in the big white cans are cooling systems.

Every high-performance computer has a cooling system.

Inside each of those cooling systems is a single chip.

When this picture was taken, we had a five-qubit processor in that machine.

A single chip with about 60 or 70 qubits on it would be more powerful than that entire half a football field size machine.

And 1 of the challenges that hard tech companies, I'll talk about this more in a moment, brings is this challenge of operating in an arena that is not well-defined, that does not have a well-developed supply chain.

You know what you want to do, but the capabilities to do it do not exist, are not commercially or easily accessible.

We've had to develop all of the building blocks, the entire supply chain for this technology.

We have developed new simulation-driven design methods to actually design these quantum chips.

We've had to develop our own fab, our own microfabrication capability.

We've developed advanced electronics that allow you to control these chips.

You can think of a quantum computer something like a nuclear reactor, where you have the core, where the reaction's happening that generates all the power.

But then there's this really complex traditional engineering system around it that stabilizes it and extracts the computational capability.

And that thing is very expensive and it requires very advanced control electronics.

And then ultimately, we serve access to these machines over the cloud and so we have to have cloud software and applications and that's a lot of work.

There's a lot of different things you've got to tie together in 1 organization to do this.

This slide is frankly a synthesis of the past 15 years of my life.

I've been working on this problem my entire adult life.

I was a junior in college in Saskatchewan, Canada.

I was a junior at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, and a physics major.

I was very, very frustrated because I didn't understand 2 basic things that I thought every human on the planet should understand.

How do they actually store, process, represent information?

About the same time, I read about a field called quantum computing.

There's 1 field that I can learn instead of having to learn 2?

I've been working on that ever since and that was in 2001.

I heard about these people at Yale University that had an idea for building quantum computers.

You can build these things out of real individual atoms or ions.

That's really hard because individual atoms or ions are extremely tiny and very, very hard to control.

They said, why don't we build these things out of special electrical circuits based on superconductors that have no dissipation and build them in such a manner that they mimic real atoms, build an artificial atom out of an electrical circuit.

That's such a great idea because what's gonna happen is you're gonna be able to leverage all of traditional semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.

You're gonna be able to build a scalable chip technology someday based on those superconducting qubits.

I spent about 7 years with that group at Yale.

I spent about 3 years in doing further research at IBM in quantum computing.

And in 2013, I started Rigetti Computing to develop quantum integrated circuits.

This is the leap from Newtonian plus Maxwell's equations to Newtonian plus Maxwell's equations plus Schrodinger's equations quantum physics.

And ultimately, I want to offer you a working definition.

If there's any physics majors in the audience, I want to give you a working definition of a quantum computer.

Quantum computers store and process information in individual photons.

Your iPhone, the iPhone 7, uses about 100 billion photons per bit processed.

It may be as much as 10 to the 17, and 100 billion photons per bit transmitted.

Okay, so I want to talk for a moment about the distinction between a hard tech company and a tech company.

First of all, when I say hard tech, I don't mean it's harder, although it feels harder.

What we mean is, every company, and look at the companies on this slide, these are incredible organizations, incredible organizations, incredible companies, incredible products, incredible founders.

A hard tech company has to deal with, in addition to all of the tech, execution, market risk, all the standard things, all the gauntlet that you have to steer your organization through to survive.

You have to deal with that when you're a hard tech company.

That is the signature of a hard tech organization.

Now, there's 2 things I want you to take away from this.

The first is that, well, with all of that risk, we're saying it might not even be possible.

Why the hell is anyone going to invest in your company if it might not be possible to even do it?

Why is it worth it if you're not sure it's possible?

Well, there's 2 things you get from my perspective.

The first is, if and when you are successful, you create monumental leverage and defensibility.

I think of the Manhattan Project as a canonical hard tech organization.

Look at the fucking leverage they created.

When President Kennedy said in 1961, as a nation we're going to put an American on the surface of the moon and return him safely to Earth by the close of this decade.

That's the kind of story That isn't written in quarterly reports and spreadsheets.

That's written in hieroglyphs on cave walls.

That's the kind of stuff that stirs the heart.

That's what you get when you do a hard tech company.

Now I want you to notice something on this slide.

At some point, the defensibility and leverage that hard tech provides and the incredible passion that you engender by working on problems of that scope and impact leads organizations on the left to pushing into hard tech in order to access those things.

Think of Uber moving into self-driving cars.

Think of Google, with now 100 seedlings, hoping to turn something into a long-term defensibility.

Microsoft built software and has started working on quantum computing.

That's what you get with a hard tech company.

Now, there's also significant challenges, and I want to talk about 3 of them for a moment.

So first of all, Build in an organization that has world's experts in XYZ.

All of the things that you need to master as an organization is incredibly hard.

You're going to have to interface to the best scientists and engineers on the planet in those various fields.

You're gonna have to bring them all into 1 company.

And you're gonna have to find a way to impedance match them, to allow them to talk to each other under the roof of 1 organization.

And that leads into this integration challenge.

Integrating an organization that does all these disparate things.

We have a Rhodes Scholar who's been doing research in quantum computing for 10 years and is 27 years old.

We have someone teaching a course at Caltech who built the communication systems on the Mars rover missions.

We have an incredible organization and 1 of the problems we've solved is that we have people who can all have a conversation together because they all have developed a shared language.

That level of integration becomes a long-term weapon for your organization.

Huge amount of value can be created by it.

We're not doing this because quantum computing is interesting.

We're doing this to cure cancer and to solve global warming.

How you talk about what you do as an organization is incredibly impactful.

I encourage you to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I did this a few years ago, and I decided that our mission as an organization, when there were 3 people in the company, was we're on a mission to build the world's most powerful computer.

It gives you something to sink your teeth into.

It's a little more tangible than photons.

We did this exercise again in the past month with the team fully built out, well, partially built out at this stage.

We're building the most powerful computers in the world to solve humanity's most important and pressing problems.

That can be very impactful for your organization.

Now, the other thing you get with integration is the opportunity to create all this defensibility.

So the chip, the quantum integrated circuit is 1 part of it.

That gives you an Intel kind of business for the quantum computing era.

Because no 1 is competing at all these different levels today, and we have an opportunity to build moats around the entire thing.

The next layer up is to build the system, become master system integration.

And then ultimately, to own the software and platform, add in the Microsoft-style business.

Ultimately, I want to go full stack and also include the Google style business of applications and designing new drugs to save people's lives.

All right, so before I move on to this, I want you all to do something for me.

After this, at the break, when you go home today, during your meditation, whatever you want to do, I want you to take 10 minutes and Look in your heart, and I want you to ask yourself the question, what kind of company do I want to join or found?

What kind of organization resonates with me?

And when you do that, spend that 10 minutes.

When you do that, some small fraction of you, it won't be many, some small fraction of you will say, you know what, I wanna do the thing that stirs my heart.

I wanna do the thing that calls to me, that is worth spending your life on.

So 1 of the special challenges that a hard tech organization faces is the capabilities to do what you need to do don't exist.

If they existed, it wouldn't be a hard tech organization.

So there's this tension that exists in all companies but is especially accentuated in hard tech.

A tension between developing the product, take your product from concept to market, get the product built, ship the product.

With the things you need to do to enable that at each successive stage of evolution.

Company development, build the capabilities and create organizational clarity.

That's your job as a founder and a leader.

Well, I found that there's a useful framework.

I thought about this problem for a really long time because I was spending every day trying to balance these 2 competing tensions.

Ultimately, these are both processes of pumping entropy out of the system.

I know what this quantum computer wants to look like.

It's all, you know, we, but it doesn't exist.

There's all these questions we have to answer.

He had an idea for what this rocket was gonna look like.

There's a gazillion micro decisions that have to be made to actually manifest that thing in the real world.

That is a process of pumping entropy out of the vision.

Creating this organizational clarity, building the capabilities, answering the question, are we gonna do our own fab, are we gonna outsource fab, are we gonna partner with IBM to do the fab, how are we gonna do the fab?

Ultimately, that is a process of pumping entropy out of the system.

There's a lot of things that this leads you to.

Some people create order and clarity in their wake.

They create systems, They execute systems, they reinforce systems, they train other people how to use those systems.

Hire people who pump entropy out of your vision for your organization.

So this is 1 of my favorite pictures I've ever seen.

This is a picture of the Control Data Corporation 6600 machine.

What I love about it is, look at how kludgy it is.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Chad Rigetti at Startup School SV 2016