The road to quantum advantage with Rigetti Computing | The Next Big Thing

Mobeen Tahir (0:01)

Quantum computing may represent the most fundamental shift in the history of computing. Classical computers have one constraint that has never changed, their basic unit of information. The bit is always either a zero or a one. Quantum computing shatters that entirely. A qubit can be both at the same time, and when you harness enough of them together, you can tackle problems so complex that no classical computer on earth could reach an answer in any meaningful time frame. Governments are now on every continent, committing billions, the race is on, and one of the companies at the center of it is Rigetti Computing.

I'm Mobeen Tahir, Director of Macroeconomics and Thematic Research at WisdomTree. With me is my co-host, Chris Gannatti, WisdomTree's Global Head of Research. We are absolutely delighted to be joined on this episode of The Next Big Thing by Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, President and CEO of Rigetti Computing. Subodh, welcome to the show. How are you?

Subodh Kulkarni (1:05)

Thank you for the invite and I'm doing good. I hope you guys are doing well too.

Mobeen Tahir (1:10)

We are very well and we are very excited to have you on the show because it's such a fascinating topic and we are very excited to get into it.

Where we'll start for the benefit of our audience, a quick introduction of yourself, Subodh. We know you started your career at IBM and 3M and then built and sold companies in the semiconductor industry before joining Rigetti a few years ago back in 2022 We would love to hear how your own career journey, having previously studied chemical engineering, has brought you to quantum computing, a company at the center of this new exciting technology, and particularly how your experience in the semiconductor industry has shaped how you think about this sector and the road ahead.

Subodh Kulkarni (1:59)

So sure. Again, thanks for the invite. You did hit upon the key points of my career quite correctly. I am a chemical engineer by training. I grew up in India, did my undergraduate in IIT, Bombay in chemical engineering, then I came to the US to do my master's and PhD at MIT. That was both in chemical and electrical engineering.

Basically, I was a semiconductor scientist working on interfaces.

That led me to IBM, where a lot of CMOS and DRAM type R&D discussions were R&D work was being done. IBM, after all, is the inventor of CMOS technology. And I was with Yorktown Heights and Fishkill, New York, where we were working on the fundamentals of CMOS technology. And that led, as is typical in any of our career paths, particularly in the high-tech space of semiconductors. One thing leads to the next, and opportunities open up differently. So I went with 3M, who was doing things in those areas, and then eventually into management. And for the last decade before Rigetti, I was the CEO of a publicly-traded company called CyberOptics, making sensors and systems for semiconductor manufacturers, as well as electronics manufacturers. And that company did get... It was a publicly-traded company, did really well. I mean, I had to go to the company, the stock was about $4, I think, when we eventually sold it. Nine years later, the selling price was about $54 a share. So very good outcome for everyone, including myself.

Right after that, transaction was consummated. I got a call from Rigetti. And honestly, my first question was, why me? I'm not a quantum physicist. And I would think this should be. But when I did studying and saw why the board had called me, I quickly realized the reasons why they were calling me. At the heart of quantum computing, particularly superconducting quantum computing that we'll be talking about here, is a chip. And it looks and feels very much like a semiconductor chip. Yes, there are some specialized materials and some specialized processes that we use because it's a superconducting chip. But besides that, fundamentals of the chip are very, very similar to semiconductor industry.

It's built on a silicon wafer. It uses all the standard kinds of semiconductor equipment, whether it's AMAC tools or LAM tools or TEL tools. Measurement inspection is done with very similar things like KLA or form factor and those kinds of things.

Well, for various reasons, as you can imagine, quantum computing has been dominated by physicists for the last couple of decades.

It's time, now that we are getting close to commercialization timelines, it's time for engineers to step in. Physicists are wonderful, don't get me wrong. But they tend to focus on the fundamental physics, on publishing articles in nature and those kinds of things. Their heart is not into building products that are consistent and reliable and those kinds of things. And it's always the natural progression of things. I shockingly invented a transistor, but it took several hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of engineers to convert that invention into a computer and eventually to what we are using right now. And this evolution is not very different. Richard Feynman, considered to be the godfather of quantum physics right now, came up with the concept. And it's taking a lot of people like myself and many other people from the semiconductor industry to bring the knowledge we have in semiconductor industry, leverage it in quantum computing. And that's the way we are going to get quantum computing out of the lab and into the commercial world. So I think my timing was really good from the bold standpoint. They realized that people like myself, with a deep background in semiconductor science, come into the field, help take an invention in the lab and basically what was a lab prototype type device and make it into a product that we can ultimately put in data centers in a reliable way. So that's a quick summary of my journey and why I, as a chemical engineer or material scientist, am leading a quantum computing company right now.