Why quantum has been "10 years away" for 30 years | E2316 artwork

Why quantum has been "10 years away" for 30 years | E2316

This Week in Startups

July 24, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PayPal Open https://paypalopen.com DigitalOcean https://do.co/twist Rippling https://Rippling.ai/twist   Today's show: *For three decades now, we've been told that breakthroughs in quantum computing are right around the corner.
Speakers: Jason Calacanis, Kazuhiro Nakashoji
**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back. It's This Week in Startups from Tokyo.
Yes, we're at Founder University. I'm back in Tokyo. I go twice a year. I go in the summer. It's 96 degrees and 100% humidity. It's the exact opposite of what happens in January when I come here to do Founder University and ski for a week. But I love coming to Japan. If you're a founder or an investor, and you're in the This Week in Startups or the launch or Syndicate Family, you can join us for Angel University. You can apply for that. We do that twice a year here in Tokyo. If you're a founder, you can apply for founder.university website. You'll see Japan, you'll see Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, and then you'll see the US edition. You can come to any of those editions you can apply. It's a bit competitive to get in. We like to look for teams of two or three founders. For Founder University, you don't even have to be incorporated yet, but you should have a project, a product, in market, maybe one customer, a pilot. And then for our Launch Accelerator, you need to have a couple of customers, and that's where we invest in companies. And finally, we have the syndicate.com, where if you're an angel investor, you can join. And twice a month or so, we share one of the deals we're investing in it, and with you. And as an angel investor, you can put as little as $5,000 or $10,000 into a deal, well below the cap or the minimum that most founders charge.
So, join us for any of those programs, and make sure you subscribe to This Week in Startups as well on your podcast player. When I'm in Japan, my team looks for the most successful, the most inspiring founders for me to meet while I'm here. And we're very lucky today. We have Kazu Nakashoji. Nakashoji?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:52)
Yeah, absolutely.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:53)
Oh, I got it.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:54)
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**Jason Calacanis** (2:32)
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
Visit paypalopen.com to get started.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:37)
And you're with a company, Yakumo. Yakumo, which is spelt Y-A-Q-U-M-A. And you're building quantum computers.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (2:47)
Hardware.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:48)
Yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:48)
Hardware. And hardware is hard.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (2:51)
Hard, yeah, of course.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:52)
Hardware is very hard. Quantum computing has been five to 10 years away for the past 30 years. Why is it taking so long?

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (3:02)
That's a good question. More self-difficulty part is coming from hardware itself. Ah.
Yes. So we try to generate very special caricature units, QPU, quantum processing units.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:17)
Quantum processing units.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (3:19)
Yeah. That's why you call it QPU instead of CPU.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:21)
Got it.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (3:22)
Right. But it's really hard to create those kinds of things as a hardware. And we have to make it a bunch of number of QPU to do very useful caricature.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:32)
And from my understanding of Qubits, this is instead of one or zero.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (3:40)
Yeah.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:41)
You get to have one, zero, or neither, one or zero.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (3:47)
At the same time.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:48)
At the same time.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (3:49)
Yes, same positions.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:50)
So you could have each of those positions simultaneously.

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (3:53)
Technically, yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:54)
Technically, yes. So explain to founders in technology who use GPUs and CPUs all day long, why is this the white whale? Why is this the holy grail of computing? Why is this the next paradigm?
Why is it so powerful?

**Kazuhiro Nakashoji** (4:13)
Thank you very much. So first of all, I think there is some big misconception about quantum computer. Okay. Once we use quantum computers, maybe people believe that, oh, maybe we can do more nice, very fast carication compared to CPU or GPU. But this is first of all, it's not correct. Yes, we can apply quantum computer for particular questions or problems. For example, combinations or RSA clip door. Yes. Those kind of difficult question.

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