Q2B Silicon Valley 2022 was not just the first Q2B event that I attended, but the first quantum computing conference at all. Taking place each year in Santa Clara, towards the bottom end of Silicon Valley, the conference focuses on the business side of the quantum computing industry.
https://q2b.qcware.com/2022-conferences/silicon-valley/
Having just signed my contract with Quantum Brilliance, joining as their first product manager, I hopped on a plane on my very first day to fly from sunny Brisbane (Australia) to the familiar winter rain of the Bay Area. It's been a few years since I've lived here, so it's great to be back and dropping right into such an interesting event at the forefront of frontier technology.
The idea of flying straight into Q2B was to immerse in the business side of the industry at one of the premier events. I caught up with some (new) colleagues in the process, and used the opportunity to make a list of "first impressions" as someone coming into the quantum industry from the perspective of computer science rather than physics. I've done a separate post about first impressions coming into quantum computing to that end.
This experience of using the conference as context for how other newcomers might encounter the industry proved useful when thinking how I might position projects I'm taking over (like the Qristal SDK), or how to better communicate the milestone of Quantum Brilliance deploying the first room-temperature quantum computer to a working HPC care of a partnership with Pawsey Supercomputing.
That mindset also gave me permission to really sit in the persona of "I'm new here" and "what do I need to know" rather than scrambling to remember everything and be an instant expert. So if there's one thing to take away from this post, it's how valuable such industry events can be for context and contrasts.
Overall impressions
Having done hundreds of tech events in my time at Red Hat and then as the founder of Corilla, Q2B felt familiar if more relaxed than I expected. The only criticism I found myself considering was that the exhibition hall felt like many of the vendors were just going through the motions. This might be a factor of having been doing this for a long time, in a nascent industry, with a small and repeat community, but it seemed like the various booths were not engaging the attendees or being particular "active" at all.
The few that stood out to me as a result were the teams at the Classiq, Q-CTRL and IonQ booths. The first two were particularly impressive with their engagement, having that intense startup/scaleup energy, and IonQ seemed to match this despite being an established public-listed company. All had standout branding and marketing communications too, and I was surprised how ready any of the IonQ team was to speak in depth about their concept of Algorithmic Qubits (which is not a common standard in the industry and seems to generate some pushback from other vendors as a benchmarking metric).
Standout talks
The quality of talks was largely high, at least to me as a newcomer, where I've learned to mostly skip events like Web Summit and SXSW in terms of the quality of talks (which have mostly devolved into sales pitches, where the real action is the afterhours meetings). Here's a few that I particularly enjoyed.
Building toward quantum advantage today: an overview of enterprise activity and investment
This was a talk by Matt Langione from the Boston Consulting Group that I found interesting, as much to see the posture that the major consulting firms are taking, as their actual content and insights so far. Being so recent to this specific industry I can't verify any of the claims, but can start to note the metrics and milestones that they are deeming interesting. And like it or not, the numbers and ledes that McKinsey and BCG publish tend to shape much of the executive level narrative, so it's an essential thing for product teams to stay in sync with (to either support, supplant, or subvert as needed in our own organisations).
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95Ucl13xI5M
Q2B 2022 Global Quantum Computing Market Size and Forecast
Another interesting research group insight session, this time from Bob Sorensen of Hyperion Research.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8CeZP0cbao
From POC to Production with the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdtDKx2vBW4
Quantum Science and Innovation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92MQPLhdR9E
Australia; World-Class Quantum Talent and Gateway to APAC
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OOPXzj4OLo
Ask Me Anything with Scott Aaronson
This session was hosted by Anastasia Marchenkova (who does great YouTube videos about quantum computing) and served as a fun platform to unleash Scott's thoughts on the year that passed. Scott Aaronson's quantum blog is one of the more entertaining and useful checkpoints against whatever news or hype has been getting airtime, so it was interesting to hear from him in person too.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SAeYQUQ27s
Wrap-up
TLDR? Q2B is an excellent and maybe even essential part of the industry calendar. Can't wait for next year.