The 65 is back with a special edition, and we are talking about technology and a company that I'm pretty sure everybody has heard about, and that is quantum computing and IonQ. Basically, quantum computing — you know, we can debate when it's going to happen, but it's going to impact virtually every aspect of applied sciences, whether it's chemistry, materials science, national security, logistics, financial services, and I'm sure a lot of things we haven't even discussed. Daniel, great to see you.
Yeah, it's great to be here. It's great to have a special guest with us — someone that, you know, we've gotten to know both personally as a friend, someone that we both worked with, someone that we followed the journey very closely, and now in a new chair. I really, Pat, couldn't be more excited, and this couldn't really be more timely. I mean, we've had, what, six months of this kind of yo-yo: quantum on, quantum off. Yeah, is it going to accelerate? We're going to ask all these questions, we're going to hit them up, we're going to make it. Let's bring him in. I mean, Niccolo, great to see you.
Great to see you, Niccolo. Great to be here, guys. Great to be here.
Yeah, look, look at you. You've been CEO of many companies, and here is another. You know, you didn't take a few months off — that would be a joke — but it's great to see you in the seat. Thanks for coming back on the show. You and I did a show under the Moore Insights Strategy brand, I don't know, a few years back, but great to see you, my friend.
Absolutely. I think we did a couple of them, and you were there at the IPO, Pat, and I think you were there a couple of years too. So this is just the next update in IonQ's exciting growth.
Exactly. Yeah, it was great seeing you on CNBC on the same show that Pat and I do, you know, telling stories, spinning tall tales. But let's start with that path. You know, you were recently named president, CEO. You were involved in the IPO, you've been on the board a long time, but it was pretty sudden — it happened pretty quick. Talk a little bit about this journey to this role.
Sure. Yeah, I mean, look, as you guys both know, I'm a physicist originally. Did physics undergrad at Cambridge University and grad. And actually, I first saw the founder of IonQ, Chris Monroe's research, back in the mid-90s. Chris Monroe was the first physicist who demonstrated that this theoretical postulate that Dr. Richard Feynman had in the 70s could actually be turned into a physical reality. Since about 1995, IonQ has been plugging away at solving — first of all, solving the physics problems it takes to build the world's first functioning and best quantum computer. But then it moved on to sort of engineering, I would say, once the company spun out of Chris's lab in sort of 2015.
You know, I actually had my own, you know, I guess doubts in the early 2000s up to 2010 about the speed at which quantum computing was going to commercialize. But that changed, I'd say, after 2015, when $2 billion of venture money flowed into the quantum computing space and these lab spin-offs got capitalized. So as Pat, you'll remember, you know, I started diligence in this space in 2019. You know, from an IPO perspective in 2020, you know, we selected IonQ mostly because the entire industry agreed that IonQ was going to commercialize first and had solved the fundamental science issues and was on to kind of the next stage of very challenging engineering challenges to address, but nevertheless in the engineering zone as opposed to the physics breakthrough zone.
So we could have taken almost any quantum computing company public, whether it was divisions of companies, private companies all over the world, and we selected IonQ because I learned actually in my own academic career that engineering problems are pretty reliable versus physics breakthroughs. And the example I'll give both of you — you guys understand because you cover a lot in the semis space — you know, my master's degree is in next-generation electron beam lithography. No one's really talking about that today, but they cared a lot about it in the 90s because we thought Moore's law would be violated because of quantum interference effects as we shrunk the features on chips down. And we were like, oh, here's an idea: we'll take an electron beam and raster a chip. Now, of course, that technology never actually commercialized. What happened for ASML and TSMC and everybody who makes actual foundry stuff today is we've pushed forward extreme ultraviolet techniques, and now we can do it in 3D.
And so, like, big light bulb for me in 2019 and 2020 was: well, if IonQ has solved all the fundamental physics issues and we're just on the engineering phase, don't ever underestimate how far world-class engineers can push an existing technology. I mean, we're 25 years on, still doing extreme ultraviolet stuff, you know, in space. So look, I mean, IonQ has been a big part of my life, you know, in some ways for 25 years, in other ways for a solid five years since I've been the chairman of various committees since the initial IPO closed. I've been working closely with Peter Chapman, our executive chairman and my predecessor, every step of the way. Peter and I have made all the key strategic decisions together, and so, you know, it's been a very seamless transition.
Not to say Peter's going anywhere, to be clear. I mean, Peter is committed to being here for years, or I wouldn't be doing this. And he and I are dividing and conquering on a daily basis. So, you know, I'm grateful for his support, and ultimately, because we agree on everything, we've made all the big decisions together. And at times, as I think you guys have been aware, you know, this has been a half-full-time job for me the last five years. My joke to Peter was: well, you know, you've been asking me for a couple of years to do this more full-time. You know, I guess after doing it part-time full-time for five years, like, I might as well get paid for this, right? So here I am. We made the change at the full-year results — that's usually the best time to do these things — and we also made the change after we doubled the company's TAM by making a couple of acquisitions in the quantum networking space that we're very excited about. So maybe we should talk about that a bit.
Yeah. So, Niccolo, I appreciate it. It's a great history lesson and kind of putting it in perspective. You just didn't show up out of nowhere. That's right. You've been in and around the company for five years. One of the biggest questions that Daniel and I get from enterprises, investors, CSPs is commercialization, right? And that's kind of a loose term, right? Definitions go from quantum advantage to, hey, I'm able to do this, you know, same workload with a traditional compute infrastructure a thousand times better or just better. And I'm curious to get your take on this. I call it the quantum continuum. What do you see as the timeline to commercialization? And probably a good place to start is: how do you define that?
Yeah, so IonQ — and this is why we took them public — has been focused on commercialization earlier than everybody else, and it's because our machines work today, and they've worked for five years. So a statistic that I like to remind people of is: when we did the IPO, which was four and a half, five years ago, IonQ was the only company in the world that had its machines accessible publicly on the Google, Amazon, Microsoft cloud, and that was our Aq11 system, I think, five years ago today. We're still — I'm not exaggerating — four and a half, five years later, we're still the only company in the world that has our machines available publicly on the Google, Amazon, Microsoft cloud. Now, the fact that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft don't put their own machines on there, and the fact that nobody else has their machines in all three clouds, you know, that should give people something to reflect on. We are here, and we are solving useful problems for commercial companies like General Dynamics, Ansys, Airbus, Samsung, AstraZeneca, you know, on a global basis, and we're generating real revenue.
