I am starting a new role within the University of Bristol with the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I still intend to remain very connected to the quantum ecosystem because it’s exciting and there is a huge amount of stuff happening!

In this blog, I want to give some retrospective reflections on my time in quantum; specifically about the general collective mindset of commercialising this technology and how it has changed in the last few years.

Bristol is a focal point for quantum technology companies. To date, companies formed from or helped by our pre-incubator, Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (QTEC), have raised over £57M in funding and investment, and created nearly 200 jobs. Alumni from QTEC form a third of the quantum related startups in the UK since the programme’s inception.

The £35M funded Quantum Technologies Innovation Centre (QTIC) has also formed during this period and is home to KETS Quantum Security and Phasecraft amongst others who continue to grow rapidly. Many of you will also be familiar with the Quantum Technology Engineering Labs, which generate world class research, and that Bristol has one of only two Quantum Engineering Centres for Doctoral Training in the UK.

It was 2016 when I moved from nanoscience into QET Labs to become the manager of a new project focussed on commercialising quantum technology. EPSRC had issued a grant of £4.4M for the University of Bristol, along with Cranfield University, to run a new type of fellowship programme – very experimental – as part of its recent Skills and Training Hub call. This programme was QTEC. Instead of being a centre for doctoral training with a 4-year PhD award, QTEC was a single year fellowship with the sole focus of taking someone with a good idea and helping them to start up their own business.

The offer on the table for the unhired fellows was, I thought, pretty compelling. As a fellow you would receive a postdoc level salary, £12.5K seed funding for consumables, a desk and most importantly around £260K’s worth of practitioner-led training. All with absolutely no equity claimed in your company – you get to keep the lot.  Compared to other accelerator and incubator programmes this was an unbeatable offer.

QTEC was funded as part of the national quantum technology programme to address the issue that world class research was being generated from the UK but not making the jump through to the commercial sector. For the UK to realise the full potential and value of quantum technology it was, and still is, important that discoveries in the lab are translated into systems and services that people outside of the academic environment use. To this end EPSRC was bridging the gap between benchtop to business and providing the funding for scientists to take the chance on building a company. Given the emergent nature of quantum technology and the comparatively sparse number of experts in the field it was felt that the people with the best chance of making compelling business propositions would be those who had developed the technology. All we had to do was give them the business training to enable them to realise it.

In the early stages of developing the programme we discussed what backgrounds and skill sets our ideal candidates would have. Jane Garrett became our Enterprise Director and crafted a business training course that I maintain still is second to none. I remember Pete Turner, then director of Bristol’s QE-CDT, stating “It’s going to be easier to teach business skills to quantum people within a year than the other way around – there’s a reason the PhD is 4-years long”. I appreciate this sounds dismissive to any MBAs and founders reading this who have spent sleepless nights on an accounts sheet. Perhaps a better way of rephrasing this statement is that we understood that a year is a short time to get a company up and running without also having to develop the technology from scratch. For the project to be successful we wanted some early wins and the best chance of this lay with enthusiastic academics who fully understood their own creations and could work quickly, with business guidance to turn it into a minimum viable product. As part of the national programme, we also wanted to make sure we could support and help the academic talent coming out of the four national quantum hubs.

Within about a week of starting the job the director of QTEC, Prof. Mark Thompson, called me into his office and told me he was leaving for Silicon Valley and founding a quantum computer company. This was great news for me – an instant promotion of sorts and total autonomy and power on this project! A microsecond later I suddenly realised I was going to have to deliver an entirely new endeavour in a scientific field I wasn’t particularly an expert in. I do remember thinking “wow, being a Prof seems like a cushy number, I sure hope he knows what he’s doing giving all that up”. As it turned out, yes he did, very much so.

I joined in April 2016 and had only until September that year to recruit a cohort of quantum trained candidates willing to leave academia and gamble on starting their own companies. Despite the great offer many potential recruits wondered what the catch was. It also became quickly clear that commercialisation was something many scientists had simply never even considered as being an avenue for developing their scientific work. Worse still, there was a vague notion that forming a spinout somehow meant you’d washed out as an academic or that the business environment would potentially be more cut-throat.

These assumptions are absolute fallacies - and we have worked hard at QTEC to promote attitudes to show the true benefits of starting up. The truth is that it’s a fun and exciting environment where everyone I have encountered so far has truly been genuinely supportive and helpful. There is a notion that somehow remaining in the warm soft embrace of the University is much safer than striking out in the harsh world of commercial ventures. This is simply not the case.

Let me present an example of how cultures can be good and bad in all sectors. In academia there is a fractal architecture of competitive behaviour for finite research funding that presents down the scale from universities to the department, group and individual levels. As a nanoscientist we used to refer to the quantum lot as the “smoke and mirrors” people – interchangeably denoting our observations of lab practice or of the hype surrounding the science. When I left my previous position, a student of mine attended a conference a few weeks later in Canada. During the acknowledgements section I heard he thanked me personally, which was gratifying, but replaced my face with the classical portrait “Kiss of Judas”. This was some top-grade snark and I fully respected it – yes Alex someone snitched on you. Similar manifestations of group to group competition is not something I have seen in the startup world.  I have personally seen a number of investors, business mentors and successful business people go above and beyond to support individuals starting out on the entrepreneurial journey. One stand-out example was seeing Jamie Urquhart, former Chief Operations Officer at ARM and now investor with Pond Venture Partners, risk missing the last train out of Bristol during the “Beast from the East” snowstorm so he could complete his lecture course to our cohort. Getting stuck in Bristol for the benefit of our fellows is not something a person of Jamie’s experience and status particularly needs to do. However, it was clear to our cohort how much Jamie, and other experts we have been lucky to have involved with, are enthusiastic about starting up companies.  

The point is, making the jump into the startup scene is not like jumping into a bear pit. For those who want to explore options in this arena there are many individuals, incubators and programmes who will give you help. Options exist that will enable you to make the transition to entrepreneur at your own pace and to explore if your idea really is worth turning into a company. More and more people are taking this option, and having personally worked with startups I need to stress again how much fun this can be. Perhaps my opinion is skewed as in my post I have gotten to watch but not go through the stress myself. That said I can’t imagine the feeling Matt Hutching’s got when he closed a $22.5M funding round for his quantum computing start-up SeeQC.

Looking at the various quantum business news feeds there is a clear trend of investments accelerating and the number of new companies being formed is growing exponentially. This new and emergent technology is starting to diffuse into the mainstream and to have impact on existing business models. Beyond publishing papers many scientists are now getting involved with pushing the science into the publics hands and that’s a true measure of impact and importance.  My call to action at the end of all this is to look at what you are working with and have a chat with someone about if something is there.

If you work in quantum get in touch with my colleagues at the Quantum Technologies Innovation Centre and they will be more than happy to steer you in the right direction.