The following interview is a conversation we had with Matthew Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $150 Million Raised to Build the Future of Quantum Technology
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines. Building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Matthew Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion, a quantum technology company that’s raised over 150 million in funding. Matthew, welcome to the show.
Matthew Kinsella
Thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
No problem. Super excited to have you here. Let’s start off with just finding a bit more about what you’re building today.
Matthew Kinsella
So Infleqtion’s roots go back to some Nobel prizes that were won in the late nineties, early two thousands, mid two thousands, all out of Cu Boulder. And Cu Boulder has historically been a hotbed of innovation in the physics world. And so many of those prizes basically had to do with how to precisely control atoms with lasers. And what we do when we control those atoms with lasers is we can isolate their quantum properties. So some of the very strange things that happen down at the world of the very small, and we can then take advantage of those quantum properties and use those to build products that can perform better orders of magnitude better in many cases, than existing standards out there today.
Matthew Kinsella
So in 2018, I seeded the business back at my former role as investor and was on the board from 2018 to earlier this year, helping to build the company out and move it from the research world to the commercial world to take some of that foundational research and start to build products based upon the foundational research, and then stepped in to join as CEO at the beginning of this year. And our mission is to commercialize quantum. And we really need to show that quantum can do things orders of magnitude better, like I said, than existing standards, and we’re well on the way to do that.
Brett
So, as you were going through your career as an investor, was that always, like, the master plan in the back of your head? Like, if the right opportunity came up, you would go and, you know, seize that opportunity? Or, like, what changed in your world to say, okay, I’ve been an investor for, what, almost two decades now. I’m going to go and run companies?
Matthew Kinsella
Yeah, very much not. No master plan whatsoever. So I grew up in Illinois. I went to Notre Dame, and then I started at a firm called Maverick Capital, where I was for, as you pointed out, close to two decades, 18 and a half years. I’d say that career was split into two equal parts. First half was in New York doing public equity investing, so investing in the stock market, and then the second half was out in San Francisco, investing in early stage companies and Maverick ventures. Areas of focus were really threefold. One was healthcare, it one was B2B software. And then finally, the last was deep tech.
Matthew Kinsella
And based upon that deep tech mandate, I got really curious about quantum in 2017, and I started to go down the quantum rabbit hole, which, if you ever go down it, you’ll find out, is deep and winding. And I met with many of the quantum computing companies that were active at that time. And I walk away with the conclusion that it was probably too early to pick a company, let alone a modality. In other words, how you’re going to do this quantum, that it may be the best risk reward, was to start a company from scratch. And so I started to go around and meet a number of professors who were doing the cutting edge research in the quantum space. Ultimately led me to Dana Anderson, who was a pioneer in this modality called neutral atoms. And that’s those Nobel prizes had mentioned.
Matthew Kinsella
Dana worked in a number of those teams, and Dana was providing some of that foundational technology you needed to do neutral atoms in the research world. And I became enamored with that technology because unlike many of the other modalities to do quantum, this is a highly flexible modality. So one of the critical things you need to take advantage of those weird things I talked about that happened down at the quantum level is you need to remove them from all external noise. And so one way to do that is to freeze them. And the most common way to freeze something is to put it in a freezer. And so most of the quantum companies back then and today freeze their materials that they’re using to put in the quantum state by putting it into a giant chronogenic freezer. That kind of makes them good.
Matthew Kinsella
For one thing, that’s to sit in the data center and exist. And you see pictures of these that kind of look like chandeliers. They’re beautiful, and they go into these giant freezers. Dana’s technology did was it froze atoms by shooting them with lasers. And if you think about what is frozen, the lack of motion of molecules. And so we can hold these molecules in place, and they are the coldest place in the known universe based upon how much they’re not moving. But the glass cell that they live in, the ultra high vacuum cell they live in, is at room temperature. So that allows you to do a lot of really interesting things with these.
Matthew Kinsella
They can be field deployed, they can be ruggedized, and most importantly, they can be cost down and shrunk, so they can build products that can be put out there in the field. And so I always loved this company. And this is a long, winding answer to your question, was there ever a master plan? The answer is no. But as I invested in the business, were the first investors, and we see the business that joined the board worked deeply with the company. When the opportunity came along to join full time as the CEO, it was sort of one of those once in a lifetime opportunities. I think this is going to be an absolutely game changing company for humanity. Like, this is very important technology to get out into the world, for our country, for our allies.
Matthew Kinsella
And so I felt really, honestly, like a great calling to come do this. And like were talking about before this, I was sort of on a very defined path. You know, I’ve been at my firm for almost 20 years. I lived very close to work. My wife is from San Francisco. We were going to stay in San Francisco, probably moved to Marin ultimately. And this was a pretty big change, so I didn’t make it lightly. And it was, that said, not pre planned either.
Brett
So we’re, what, two months away from thanksgiving? So let’s talk about thanksgiving. Let’s imagine that you’re sitting around the Thanksgiving table and grandma’s there, maybe an older aunt. How would you explain to them what the hell the company does in very basic terms? How do we explain this to grandma?
Matthew Kinsella
Yes, to grandma, I would say, grandma, we live in a world that’s governed by many laws of physics that were discovered over the years, but call them newtonian physics, right? If I throw a ball to you catch the ball. Those are well understood physics, and it all makes sense to us. There’s a whole different set of rules that take place down at the quantum level, and that’s the world of the very small. And those rules are absolutely wild. They won’t make any sense to you. I’m not even going to try to explain them. It’s going to hurt your brain trying to understand them. They hurt my brain trying to understand them. But you must just accept that they exist. And some of those are, that nothing is certain down there. Everything is governed by probabilities.
Matthew Kinsella
And another thing is, weird phenomena happen where in the binary computing world, let’s say something is a zero or a one down. At the quantum level, things exist in all states simultaneously until you observe them, and then they collapse into one state. And then finally, things that are unrelated to each other can entangle so they can become connected such that if you were to disrupt one, the other one feels it. You don’t need to understand why those happen. Nobody understands why they happen. You just have to accept that they do. What our company does is we take advantage of those very strange things, and we can turn those into products that do a lot of things that we do in our everyday life orders of magnitude better.
Matthew Kinsella
So, for instance, our first product that commercialized today, we’ve sold $11 million contract to the government last week, is a clock. It’s an optical quantum clock. It keeps time a thousand times more accurately than anything else out there in the market. It’s because we’re able to manipulate the internal quantum structure of an atom and turn it into a clock. It’s not that far of a hop, skipping of a jump to turn that same atom into an RF antennae. And that RF antenna can receive the entire frequency spectrum. So instead of having to have multiple antennas on your phone or on your car, you can have one, and it can receive the entire frequency spectrum from there.
Matthew Kinsella
It’s not that far of a hop, skip, and would jump, turn that into a computer, and those same atoms can become qubits, which are the quantum version of a bit, and you can perform calculations that traditional computers could never perform. And so if I were to say to a computer, build me a material that is as light as plastic but as strong as steel. A radio computer could never do that because there’s too many possible combinations of the different molecular structures to create. That quantum computer could simultaneously simulate all of those things and then come up with that material and tell you how to build it and give you the recipe. And so the changes to our society are sometimes hard to imagine what will come from this technology.
Matthew Kinsella
But if you think about anything that can do things ten, 100, a thousand times better than existing standards, there’s always interesting things there. So I don’t know if that’s the most, like, easily understandable for grandma. It depends on how sharp grandma is, but I feel like that’s how I describe it and what we do.
Brett
I think grandma’s head may explode. But lately, our audience is not grandma, so they’ll be able to grasp that more. Now, let’s zoom out a little bit. So, like, at least from my perspective, like, quantum seems like one of those things that everyone’s like talking about, like, the future. It’s like flying cars. It’s close, but it’s not here yet.
Matthew Kinsella
Yes.
Brett
You describe the state of the technology today.
Matthew Kinsella
Yeah. So when people say the word quantum, I think they usually assume one of two words comes after that. There’s physics or computing. And so all of what we do in quantum is all based upon the laws of quantum physics. And quantum computing has been this theorized use case of how you can apply the laws of quantum physics to do really interesting things. And so, I mean, Richard Feynman was talking about quantum computing 50 years ago, right. And like you said, it’s always been somewhere between five and ten years away that we’ll finally get there. So quantum computing still is not here yet in a world that would be considered one of quantum advantage, where a quantum computer can do something that a classical computer cannot do. That said, the rate at which we are approaching that time is accelerating.
Matthew Kinsella
There are a number of factors that need to go into building this quantum computer. The first is how many qubits do you have? And so qubits, as I were saying, as I was saying before, are the quantum analog of a bit, right? Whereas I don’t know how many bits the Blackwell chip has, but it’s probably billions or even how many transistor bits does your phone have? It’s probably billions, but this is the quantum analog of that. And those bits need to be in the thousands before you can start to do interesting things because there’s error rates. So number one would be number of qubits, right. Number two is error rates and the fidelity of how you can actually turn those bits into computational circuits.
Matthew Kinsella
And so the other thing that people are working on are the error rates and the gate fidelities associated with those physical bits. And the magic number here is 100 logical qubits. That is what we need to get to before we have, quote quantum supremacy, where a quantum computer is going to do something that a classical computer can’t do, nor could it ever do. And you, me and grandma would all say, oh, my gosh, I cant believe that just happened. And so were not there yet, but we are approaching there, and the rate of change is accelerating materially. And last December was a very big moment where some very impressive error correction codes were developed that can help shrink that ratio from physical to logical qubits.
Matthew Kinsella
And so where theres always been a huge multiplier for how many physical qubits you need on top to achieve that 100 logical qubit number that is shrinking as the errors get smaller. And so we’re well on our way to marching to 100 logical qubits. We’re still in the single digits today, but I think it very well could be. This next five year timeframe is when we do start to reach quantum advantage or quantum supremacy. That said, that’s quantum computing. There are another class of products that quantum can enable, which are called quantum sensors. And that umbrella is relatively wide. But there are quantum sensors that are working today that are performing orders of magnitude better than existing standards. I’d mentioned that example of the clock to you, our first product that we have taken from the research lab and brought into the commercial world.
Matthew Kinsella
It’s called ticker with a q, of course, because we take the letter q and put it all the places it’s not supposed to be, where there’s the phonetic sound. Cuh, but is out there. We’ve been able to sell it. We’ve sold it to the us government. We’ve sold it to the commercial world. It keeps time orders of magnitude better than anything else out there. And there’s a lot of really interesting use cases and applications that are enabled by having that much more fine grained conceptualization of time. So quantum sensors here today, like, you can go buy one if you want. They’re expensive, but they are available for purchase. You can buy quantum computers. We’ve sold quantum computers, but they aren’t yet at that level of quantum supremacy.
Brett
Maybe help us just better understand, like what would be those use cases where time matters like that? When I think about time, it’s like getting to the airport on time. You’re talking about obviously something very different. Like, what are those commercial or government use cases where I time down to?
Brett
Like, it sounds like millisecond doesn’t describe it more than that. Like, where does that.
Matthew Kinsella
We can go down all the way to the pico second, actually, with our clocks. So if you think about how much of our world is dependent upon time, it is actually so much of it. Every financial transaction is stamped with a highly accurate time stamp at all data centers. Time is a major factor in data centers. How are you provisioning workloads between servers and between data centers and synchronizing those parallel process workloads and then combining them back together? Our entire global navigation system is all based upon time. GPS is basically a time distribution system. At the very basic level, it’s all of those things, but to even greater precision. Whereas GPS today, let’s say, is accurate to a few feet, you could say maybe not even that, and doesn’t work inside.
Matthew Kinsella
With highly accurate timekeeping, it could be down to the centimeter and could work inside buildings and could work underground. And so being able to get a much more highly fine grained concept of time is one of the things that both the military and the commercial use cases are all based off of. And so it enables all sorts of things. But let’s just use the accuracy of GPS as one. One example. There’s a whole other, there’s a whole other thing as it relates to GPS, which is so much of what we do today is based upon GPS. All of our military applications are based upon GPS. Your getting to the airport on time relies on you being able to access GPS to get to SFO. Right. So many different things. GPS is a highly sophisticated but highly spoofable system.
Matthew Kinsella
And those spoofs are happening more and more. It was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago about how airline pilots are flying in what they know to be over Europe, but their GPS system is telling more over Asia. That’s because they’ve gotten either purposely targeted or been caught up in a GPS spoofing attack, usually if they’re anywhere near the Ukraine or in the Middle east around a hot war, but they’re happening outside of hot war zones as well. And so the military is freaked out about the loss of GPS. If there was ever, God forbid, a hot war with China, let’s say, over Taiwan, first shots fired would be to take out each other’s gps to the side. That could navigate and synchronize in a GPS night environment would have a massive strategic advantage.
Matthew Kinsella
And so there’s an element of redundancy as well. Even though these clocks are significantly more accurate and precise than the clocks that are in the GPS satellites, having them locally makes you not susceptible to a GPS denied environment in which you can actually have that concept of time at that level of accuracy without having to access the GPS system. So there’s a couple of examples.
Brett
How do you think about, like, are you a defense technology company like would you identify as a defense technology company?
Matthew Kinsella
We’re squarely a dual use company. And I think if you look back through history going back to the forties and the fifties, going back to the seventies for the Internet, this cutting edge tech often does start in the government because it does require government funding to get off the ground. And a lot of the use cases that require that level of precision are military in nature. And so a lot of our early funding came from DARPA or IARPA. And in fact, our clock, for example, started off as a DARPA program several years ago called Rimrock, which was a rack mounted rubidium optical clock, I think is what it stood for. And that never existed before.
Matthew Kinsella
DARPA said we need one, we built one for them, and then we turned that into a product, and now we can sell that in the tens, twenties and hundreds and volumes. And so our history is very much in us government research. And I kind of view it as this conveyor belt on where we take these products from the research world and into the commercial realm. And so in commercial, I define as selling many of one thing. And that commercial realm is divided into two. Part is to the DoD and then part is to the commercial world. And so yes, we are a defense tech company, but very much dual use because there’s all sorts of commercial applications that require highly accurate clocks. If you were to look in the telecom networks, there’s highly accurate clocks, there’s cesium atom clocks or an old technology.
Matthew Kinsella
And this is what I, when I say a thousand times more accurate, that’s over a thousand times more accurate then. But, but those help basically time division multiplex all of the wireless signals that are passing through the network, right? If you look into data centers, there’s all sorts of highly accurate clocks in there that help you provision those workloads between servers and between data centers. And really what we need to do now is just swap our 3000 times more accurate clock out for those existing clocks. And that’s the beginning of showing quantum supremacy and timing.
Brett
You know, that brings me back to a conversation I had with, I can’t remember his last name, but it’s Ori. And he invented the computer fingerprinting technology for identity protection. And it was all based on time. Like that was the innovation. We had all these different computers, and if you could just pinpoint the exact time on the computer, get them to ping that back, that’s how they were able to eliminate fraud. I think it was that Amex, before branching out and starting his own company, sounds very similar just in terms of, like, time accuracy matters.
Matthew Kinsella
It does. And like you said, we are always stuck in what level of accuracy and precision matters today. Right? And so if you go back to, like, England in the mid 19th century, every town had a clock that wasnt synchronized with the other towns clocks. And as long as you knew your local time, thats all that mattered. But once railroads started to connect those towns, you actually needed to have some sort of synchronization between those clocks, because youre going to leave one place and arrive at another. So there had to be some consistency there. And so there was a huge, probably order of magnitude improvement in time, accuracy and precision there. And I think this is going from micro milliseconds to picoseconds, and we don’t at the moment, as lay folk think about how much depends upon that really highly accurate conception of time.
Brett
I mean, even when I was trying to articulate it, I couldn’t get further than a millisecond. I didn’t even know a picosecond was a thing.
Matthew Kinsella
So, yeah, there’s picoseconds, femtoseconds, there’s very, very small seconds.
Brett
Going back to the defense tech side, I don’t know if you’ve watched this. There’s a series I found on Amazon. It was like the secret history of Silicon Valley, something along those lines. And it told that story about how it’s really founded on military contracts. And you work.
Matthew Kinsella
Now seeing that, yes, I believe it was.
Brett
Lockheed Martin basically invented Sunnyvale, and like, all of that town’s employees or citizens, like work for Lockheed Martin at one point, something along those lines. I guess the question there is, you know, what I’ve seen is like a shift. Five or six years ago, it seemed like a lot of silicon Valley didn’t want touch defense technology. There were a lot of protests, things like that. Now it seems to be shifting. How do you think about that from a culture perspective? You know, are you having those conversations up front to say, yeah, we are going to have applications, they are going to serve defense? Like, what are those internal conversations like?
Matthew Kinsella
Because it’s always been such a big part of our history, it’s not a surprise to anybody here. And I think we have it a little bit easier than maybe someone who was building missile systems or something that was going to be used, like, almost certainly to take human life. Right. I think there’s a big differentiation there. We’re supplying the military with clocks that are going to go do a bunch of different things, but it’s mostly to synchronize operations. So it’s. But it’s several orders, you know, removed from the actual fighting. And similarly with our rf signal, like we could use that for covert communications, et cetera. So it’s never really been something that’s come up here from an ideological perspective because I think it’s just so ingrained in the culture.
Matthew Kinsella
And pretty much every quantum company has had some sort of interactions with the military because that is where this early funding has come from. But I definitely agree. I remember very well five years ago there being lots of protests against defense tech, and now there’s a lot of large, well funded defense tech companies that even operate way more in that we’re the sharp end of the sphere realm. And so I guess that’s how I’d answer it. It just has never really been an issue here internally because it’s not super controversial, I guess, in what we’re doing, but it is of absolute national security, utmost importance because the side that has these capabilities will certainly have a huge advantage. And that’s anything ranging from just the ability to operate in a gps not environment, or the ability to communicate covertly.
Matthew Kinsella
And then once you have quantum computers, threats are off. And so I like to think of it as honestly, like, the knowledge that we have this would be a deterrent to any kind of conflict just because it would be such a big advantage. And so if you know your adversary has this, you’re less likely to want to compete against it. And that is how I think about it. Personally, I’m very proud to be like, doing something that I think helps our nation.
Brett
I just got back from a tour a few hours ago. All it up here, it’s a drone, but I had someone on the podcast and they invited me to come tour the factory and it was really cool. They had all these drones lined up. He let me talk with a few of the people working there and everyone was just so fired up, so passionate. The Founder I met, he was so fired up and also so passionate. He was just saying like, there’s a real mission here.
Brett
Like, we’re not just building like the next, you know, consumer app for shopping, things like that. Like, the team is very aligned around the mission, very motivated by the mission. And I just think that’s very cool, and I think that’s very important.
Matthew Kinsella
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And our mission is to commercialize quantum. And many people here have a lot of pride in that. They’re doing that for our country and humanity because I think it’s going to help everybody.
Brett
What about winning those contracts? So I think more and more people that are listening in founders I’m talking to, everyone’s kind of open to this idea of the government as a customer, which I don’t know, about five or six years ago, if people were even thinking that way, if they were open to that, like, what advice would you have for founders, for builders who are trying to go that route and win some government contracts?
Matthew Kinsella
Yes, I will answer that question as best I can, but I would want to call it to your audience. If anybody has any good tips, please send them my way. Also, because it is a very different go to market motion than anything I have experienced before. So I’ve been on a very steep learning curve. And let me cut it a couple of different ways, because there are actually, there isn’t just a government go to market. There are several different ways to go to market to the government. So the easiest thing to do, if you’re a very early stage startup, is to respond to calls for what are called SBIrs, and those are small business innovation research grants. And that is what I was talking about before, how ticker got built. It was an SBIR for rubidium optical mounted clock.
Matthew Kinsella
And so we respond to that. We want it. And you have to put together a proposal, and then effectively you recognize it as gap revenue. But its basically non dilutive funding, where they give you money and you bill them mostly on a time and materials plus like a 10% fee. And so those are the easiest kinds to get because that’s a well oiled machine. DARPA is sending those out a lot. Arpa is sending those out a lot. As you get to know the program officers at DARPA or the other agencies, you develop a better trust so they know what you’re good at. And so they almost can sometimes, you know, you can read between the lines that this was maybe written with you in mind, because they know you could do a good job.
Matthew Kinsella
And so I would say that’s a really easy way to start. Those are small, though. Those are going to be anywhere from like one hundred thousand dollars to two million dollars. But they’re often phased, and so winning a phase one sbir can lead to a phase two could lead to a phase three. And that could be many millions of dollars over the course of several years. So thats the first and probably the easiest way to go to market to the government. And so for anyone in deep tech who is just starting up, its a great way to get the wheels going. And the most important thing about it, honestly, is that you’re building the relationship with those buyers of the technology. And so, you know, theres demand for that. And knowing that helped us have confidence to turn that.
Matthew Kinsella
I built you one rubidium optical clock. I know there’s demand for a lot more of those. So we’re going to actually invest in the resources to build the manufacturing capabilities to sell that. And then we just signed a $10.9 million contract for those clocks last week. And so there’s a real kind of art to knowing how that works. Okay, so that’s one that’s like sort of the SbIr conveyor belt to a commercial product. The next way, and this is where you want to try to get bigger and bigger is to work yourself into an existing or start a new, what’s called program of record. And that’s something endurall has done an absolutely fantastic job about. So one piece of advice I’d have is try to talk to those guys and see how they did it.
Matthew Kinsella
But what a program of record is you are now the product that the military procures from. So let’s just use the ticker as the example. If were to win a program of record, which is what we are trying very hard to do, we would now be the new standard for clocks that any certain program of the military was ordering. And so let’s say we want a program of record with the Navy. We could be now the clock that the navy buys instead of some other clock. And once you’re in for a long time, my friend and mentor, a gentleman named Tim Day, started a company called Daylight 20 years ago, and he had figured out a way to use lasers to basically caused missiles to explode.
Matthew Kinsella
And so he worked, work, but finally worked himself into the program of record for flares on helicopters, where they no longer bought flares. They bought Tims laser systems because they were more effective at protecting the helicopters from missiles that have been fired at them than the flare system that theyve been historically using. It probably started as a supplement, but ultimately it is now something thats on kind of autopilot and goes for years and years. So I guess first advice, we start with SBIRs. Next would be really try to work yourself into a program of record that is not easy to do. It requires lobbying on multiple fronts. And this will lead me to the third way in which you can go to market to the government, which is sort of tied into number two.
Matthew Kinsella
It’s really a multi pronged sort of pincer movement that you need to do. So you need to be understanding the specs for the product down at the level of the person who orders it, which is often a kernel, and they often work in the Pentagon. So you need to understand, what does my clock need to do? What size does my clock need to be? What are the power consumption restraints of this clock? What temperature range need to be able to go through? You have to understand all those specs and make sure your clock matches up against those specs. And then you need to lobby Congress. So the other part of this is coming in over the top to make sure the budget items are appropriated to fund those purchases.
Matthew Kinsella
And those are completely unrelated, because those people who are making the decision cant lobby on your behalf, nor can they tell Congress that they want to buy your stuff. You need to then get written into the bill, the funding to buy rubidium optical clocks, and then the purchaser will then make that purchase from you. And so its unlike any go to market motion ive ever seen. Its very strange. Its convoluted, but its just the way it works. And Im still getting up the learning curve. There are some ways to shorten. Im from San Francisco, like you. Im trying to find ways to hack system. It’s a very hard system to hack. There’s not a lot of ways to hack it. You just have to play the game.
Matthew Kinsella
And one way to hack it, though, maybe, is to work your way into being one of the components that one of the existing primes. So like a Boeing or a Lockheed. So we could say, hey, Boeing or Lockheed’s already supplying a position, navigation and timing system to the army. Let’s say we could try to just get in to become the timing aspect of that, which is a little bit of a lower lift. But you still need to convince the buyers at the prime that they should use your product. So its a lot to learn. Its fascinating because its something ive never spent any time on, but its worth doing because once you get the government as a customer, they can be kind of on autopilot for a long time.
Brett
And what about lobbyists? So I had another defense tech company on, and I was asking him for advice. And his advice for other defense tech companies was hire lobbyists. He said, its a great roi, or theyve seen a great roi. How are you approaching lobbyists, or whats your lobbyist strategy? I guess?
Matthew Kinsella
Yeah, its a hot topic right now inside the company. And so two and a half weeks ago, I was in DC kind of doing the job of a lobbyist. We work with someone internally named Christina, who is our government affairs person, which is kind of like a lobbyist, but works for you. And she set up a wonderful slate of meetings. We met with a number of legislators. And really, my job there was to be an evangelist for Quantum and talk about the mission of how quantums here and now. And it has big important use cases for national security. But I’m only one person. I can only be there every so often. And so I do think given, you know, the pincer maneuver I had talked about earlier, it is really helpful to have people who live in Washington who are lobbyists.
Matthew Kinsella
My guess, it’s probably better to have them on your own payroll. But there’s also firms who do a really great job as well. And those people can be there every day. They can be walking the halls of the Senate buildings and the House buildings and having these conversations with the staffers or legislators themselves. And I do think Washington is still very much a who, you know, place and having someone talking in the ears of the legislators and the staffers and lobbying on behalf of the industry and the specific company, it’s a valuable way to invest your money. So I would agree with that person, because those same people can then also do the other part of the pincer maneuver, which is walk the halls of the Pentagon, talk to all those decision makers, understand what the specs are, et cetera.
Matthew Kinsella
So being on the ground in DC is very important. And I think if I look at the companies that have been successful in defense tech, they’ve probably been world class of the lobbying efforts.
Brett
What about cost plus contracting? So I follow Lockheed Palmer a lot. I think he’s fascinating. I’ve read all of his big interviews. He obviously is very kind of evangelizes against cost plus contracting. What are your views on that topic?
Matthew Kinsella
Well, I’m not as dogmatic on it because I think when you dig into the reasons why the military is the way it is and these procurement contracts are the way they are, there were good reasons for why they started. They have ballooned into a very inefficient, slow moving, and I love the mission of Andrews to kind of turn that all on its head and get us into the level of technological development that we should be. But I think there is a time and place for time and materials, or a cost plus type contracts. And I’ll tell you where I think those lie when you are doing. Are you familiar with the TRL system? Okay, it stands for technology readiness levels. And so lower number means it is less technologically mature. Higher numbers mean it is more technologically mature.
Matthew Kinsella
I think cost plus models for higher TRLs make absolutely no sense. Things should be done on a fixed price, and you are on the hook to deliver something for the price that you set it. You should, because you should be able to predict your business and run your business like a real business. To know that is a lot harder to do at the lower TRL levels. So when were first building a rubidium atom mounted optical clock, no one’s ever built that before. And so if were to say, yes, we will build you a rubidium rack mounted optical clock for $2 million, actually wouldn’t be able to tell you if you do that for $2 million.
Matthew Kinsella
And so I think it does stimulate innovation at that very cutting edge, low TRL level where it is appropriate, because otherwise all of these startups would go out of business because they’d never be able to know how to do it. And so I think for that really cutting edge stuff, there’s a place for it. But as you mature and grow larger, it doesn’t make any sense to me either. And I think it just simmy’s innovation. And there’s so many strange unintended consequences to those types of contracts, because there’s no incentive to bring your cost down. There’s actually incentive to spend all the money because you’re earning a 10% fee on the money you spent. Right. There’s no incentive for people to work harder because you can only bill 40 hours a week per employee on these contracts.
Matthew Kinsella
And so it gives all sorts of completely unintended, very negative consequences. But I do think it served its purpose. And this is the reason why it was brought about to be that way, is because there’d be less innovation. In a vacuum of not having good venture funding you’d never be able to take one of these government contracts and take a flyer on building something in quantum. If you were on the hook for delivering that, you didn’t know if you could do it. So thats what I would say. I don’t like them in general, but I think for those specific use cases, I understand why they exist. And a lot of our company’s history goes back to those I asked every.
Brett
Guest that comes on about fundraising. Im especially excited to ask you because you’ve been on both sides of the table. So, in general, let’s talk about deep tech. What advice would you have for founders who are building deep tech and are looking to raise funds?
Matthew Kinsella
So I think I would say this advice is broad based, but I’d say it’s hard. There’s no doubt about it. So never go into a fundraising process sugarcoated. You read about all the Sam Altman’s in the world who can go raise $6.5 billion on a $158 billion valuation. But for every one of those, there’s 100 that are down praying over stones, shaking hands, kissing babies for months and months. That said, don’t get discouraged, because one of the things I have come to learn on both sides of the table is there’s just so much money out there. There are so many people with capital who want to invest it, and it’s just you got to put the legwork in to find them, and you might get lucky.
Matthew Kinsella
And this is how I always framed it to all of my companies that I’ve worked with and at this company, like we might get lucky, probably a 15% chance. You get lucky and you meet that investor where all the stars align and you all are simpatico and they to do a deal together early, but most likely the 85% case. This is going to be a long process. You got to go meet a bunch of people. And id say thats especially true in deep tech because you need to find someone who believes in the version of the world that youre trying to bring about, and you dont necessarily have ARR or net dollar retention or gross churn numbers that they can pair up against benchmarks and say, oh, this is a tier one, tier two company, then I know how to value it.
Matthew Kinsella
This is a lot different. So you need to be an evangelist for what your version of the future looks like. But don’t get discouraged because there’s tons of capital out there. That’s what I would say is my advice.
Brett
Perfect segue to our final question. And that question is vision. So paint a picture for us. What’s the big picture? Vision. We can go three to five years out, we can go ten years out. We can go 20 years out, however far out you want to go. What’s the vision?
Matthew Kinsella
So the vision is that quantum technologies have permeated all of our lives, and we don’t even care that they’re quantum. It’s just enabled precision levels and computation levels that have never been possible for humanity. Mainly because let’s think about computers. We talked about Blackwell. Before even Blackwell, the most powerful ships out there are boiling the way the real world works down into zeros and ones. Right? It’s a heuristic for the way the world works, but the world doesn’t actually work that way. The world ultimately works based upon quantum physics. Like, that is how it works at the most basic level. And so were able to model the world and measure the world at that quantum level of precision. And that’s going to enable all sorts of incredible things. But let’s just say GPS.
Matthew Kinsella
We are no longer relying on GPS because there’s a highly accurate clock on every single vehicle, every single person. It’s everywhere. And we can now do extreme precision in navigation based upon that, from computing perspective, we’re able to build an elevator to the stratosphere, because we’ve been able to design a material that’s light as plastic but strong as steel. And so we are able to specifically model how drugs will interact with every molecule in your body. We’re able to create new drugs because we can actually do chemistry at levels we’d never thought was possible. Based upon our existing computational power, we’re able to model protein folding very accurately. So things that just were never possible before are going to be possible. And that’s all brought about by harnessing those very strange things happen down at the quantum level.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. I really love this conversation. It’s been a lot. I’ll probably have to listen back just to digest a few things that you’ve said.
Matthew Kinsella
Sorry I blew grandma’s brain up at that Thanksgiving. I really would love to find a very simple way to explain all this stuff, but ultimately, it just is pretty darn complicated stuff. And if you hear me explain it relative to some of our quantum physicists, you would think I explained it pretty simplistically.
Brett
No, you explained it well. Well enough, I think, for our audience, they’re gonna be able to grasp it. And no, this was just an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat.
Matthew Kinsella
I agreed. Brett. I loved it. It was really nice being here, and thanks for having me.
Brett
Where should we send people if they want to follow along with your journey? Where’s the best place for them to go?
Matthew Kinsella
You could connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with Infleqtion on LinkedIn. Those would probably be the two best ways. That’s how we mostly try to get the word out.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks again. Really appreciate it.
Matthew Kinsella
All right, thanks, bro.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media. Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episodes, search for category visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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