The New Quantum Era

Sebastian Hassinger: 00:01

The New Quantum Era, a podcast by Sebastian Hassinger.

Kevin Rowney: 00:06

And Kevin Rowney.

Sebastian Hassinger: 00:31

Welcome back to the podcast. This is Sebastian again, flying solo. We're doing a little bit of a rewind after the last episode where we talked to Paul Cadden- Zimanskyy about the International Year of Quantum. This is now a rewind, to the final episode that I recorded solo at the Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute's launch of their on premise IBM System 1 Quantum Computer. So I did a number of conversations there, recorded a bunch of them, and this is the final one.

Sebastian Hassinger: 01:03

So this is a conversation with Anastasia Marchenkova. She has been active in the quantum industry for a fair bit of time now and has a really interesting background. This is a very wide ranging conversation. I ended up choosing the title Careers in Quantum because I think Anastasia was on it. You know, she did her PhD.

Sebastian Hassinger: 01:24

She was sort of on a more traditional, quantum physics experimentalist kind of track, and then, took a sidestep into startup land, and has sort of gone from there. You'll you'll hear more in the conversation. Super interesting. She's got really interesting perspectives because she's not, from strictly an academic context and not strictly from a large corporate context, which are the two sort of dominant, I think, perspectives, in the industry at the moment. So it's a really interesting conversation.

Sebastian Hassinger: 01:56

You'll notice, I have to apologize here, I was new to the studio setup at RPI, and I was sort of concerned with making sure the recording was actually working. And listening back to the recording, I realized I didn't do a proper introduction. So So I'm giving a little bit more context here because we just sort of roll right into the conversation, and get going. But I think you'll enjoy it. So, let's have a listen.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 02:51

The connection that you build and, yeah, building those bridges, building the connections And, yeah, I tell people, I actually launched a course last summer, and I called it extroversion for introverts.

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:00

Oh, I saw that.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 03:01

Yeah. Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:01

Yeah. Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 03:02

And, turns out it's a big need Yeah. For people in the field. It really does. Exactly. So much of science is driven by connections, and they lie to you in school.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 03:11

They're like, oh, if you don't wanna talk to humans ever, just, like, do science. Do computer science. And then you get, like, 2 years into your career. You're like, oh, now I have to go convince the manager that I need a new hire, or I need Right. Someone to collaborate with me from another team on this project.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 03:26

Like, how do I Yeah. Work that connection.

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:29

Right? Totally.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 03:30

It's It's a it's a hard topic, and I think we lie to people that social skills are not needed. Yeah. And then to me, you know, my pitch obviously for the course is, like, that's more important

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:37

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 03:38

Than the science abilities. Obviously, you know, not entirely true. But I

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:42

need some marketing.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 03:43

But, yeah, you have to. Right? And even as as big as, like, your promotion packets and why like, communicating, my my adviser in undergrad was not a pleasant person to deal with, so we missed out on a lot of collaboration opportunities and papers Yeah. Because of that.

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:59

Back to your hiring thing. Yeah. That's such as, you know, that's a a mystical art of of hiring the right person that you can actually interact with and have, like, you know, a personal connection because you're going to be able to collaborate more effectively. It's just Yeah. Just by definition.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 04:15

Yeah. There's a quantum company I know that they have scientists there that just refuse to speak to people. And I'm like, you you can't do this. Where's the CEO? Who's what like, why aren't these cracking skulls here

Sebastian Hassinger: 04:27

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 04:27

Saying, like, this is not acceptable. You are not in academia. And even then, academia doesn't tolerate that either.

Sebastian Hassinger: 04:33

No. And it well, it to me, it's one of the biggest red flags. Right? I mean, I look at certain companies and certain r and d teams in this space who are saying, like, oh, no. No.

Sebastian Hassinger: 04:43

We don't we don't wanna show any kind of, like, work in progress to anybody. We wanna just launch with, you know, perfect cubits and it's like, guys, that's not like, show me another technology of this kind of, like, magnitude of leap ahead that was done in isolation by any finite number of people. It, like, literally takes the entire planet collaborating on stuff to actually make that kind of leap. It's just not I just don't think it's credible. I think it's to me, it feels like insecurity.

Sebastian Hassinger: 05:14

Right? They don't wanna actually talk about, like, oh, we don't know what we're doing with it. Or here's a problem we don't know how to solve, which is I mean, it's sort of like the what Brene Brown. Right? It's vulnerability as a super rare.

Sebastian Hassinger: 05:25

It's like, we don't know how to solve this problem. Guess what? You just exposed that vulnerability to a whole population that might actually find a way around your your where you're stuck.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 05:34

No. Definitely. If you're stuck or maybe you're not even positioning it properly in and outside of quantum. I work with companies right now in AI and hardware. And, yeah, I push them to, you know, release fast.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 05:45

Right? Because what you're building this for this customer. Your customer customer might not care Right. In the end. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 05:50

Right? And and I think we were just talking at lunch about this is especially in the quantum space, right, we talk a lot about the technology. But in the end, the end customer does not care how you do the thing. You can call it unicorn, whatever.

Sebastian Hassinger: 06:04

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 06:04

It can be a quantum computer. It can be an alien artifact. Yeah. They don't care. Are they getting the results?

Sebastian Hassinger: 06:09

Right. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 06:10

In the end. But then I also you know, there is value in the research and the audience, you know, for what what I've been doing with, some of my clients I work with. I'm like, we have to post about the research because if you're gonna attract the scientists, they wanna know who they're working with Right. What technology they're working on, that they're actually doing real results.

Sebastian Hassinger: 06:25

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 06:26

That's one audience. That's definitely a valid audience. But then there's other side. Right? The customers, the clients, and how do we communicate to them?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 06:32

And Quantum is still so far behind. I've been going to conferences that are less quantum focused. So I was at South by Southwest recently on a panel for quantum sensing, and I I went around to all the quantum panels. Right? And the misconceptions there of even people interested in the field but are coming from outside are still so high, and we are just not communicating well enough.

Sebastian Hassinger: 06:54

Right. Right. Honestly, that's why I think what you're doing is so vital. Right? I mean, you have a scientific background.

Sebastian Hassinger: 07:00

You have a PhD.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 07:02

I actually don't. I dropped out of my PhD.

Sebastian Hassinger: 07:04

Okay. You were enrolled in a PhD.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 07:06

I was enrolled. So my mentors were like, this is the perfect thing. My startup mentors, they're like, you're smart enough to get into the PhD, but smart enough to get out. And they're like, it's perfect.

Sebastian Hassinger: 07:17

Perfect. Perfect. But, yeah, I mean, there's this huge chasm. Right? I mean, if we only cater to what the customer wanted, we would be doing generative Ai

Anastasia Marchenkova: 07:31

Some have pivoted to that.

Sebastian Hassinger: 07:33

Some have pivoted and that's there's

Sebastian Hassinger: 07:36

but like I think it's people like yourself who can help bridge that, like, imaginative gap between, you know, like the physicist not understanding that the end customer just needs a solution to a problem and doesn't care how it gets solved and the customer understanding that the physicist is working on something that's really, really hard to understand and and has potential of being, like, super disruptive and super powerful but needs patience. Right. Yeah. And needs that sort of, like I said, that bridging function. I mean, that's it feels like that's a lot of what you're trying to do.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 08:12

Yeah. Definitely. I mean, through my own platforms, the idea was I just kept getting asked the same questions over and over, and I got tired of answering them Right. Over and over, so I decided

Sebastian Hassinger: 08:21

to start

Anastasia Marchenkova: 08:21

writing. Right? I actually started writing pretty early. I think it was I was still in grad school. It was 2014, 2015.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 08:27

And that's really what when I started getting into the security space as well because I was living in DC

Sebastian Hassinger: 08:32

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 08:32

Which is very intense in in that. I was not a US citizen at the time too, so that was also very fun. But, it was a lot of these okay. We we've heard about Quantum. We know there's some overlap, but what is that overlap, and how do you explain that to the to the audience?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 08:49

And to your point as well, I work with a lot of startup founders right now through incubators. Right? First thing, you get a pitch deck, and it's just 30 slides of the technology. I'm like, I don't care. I mean, I kinda care because, again, I'm a scientist, and I think that's super cool.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 09:03

Yeah. But in the end, I'm like, your customer doesn't care. The investor doesn't care. Yeah. It's what value are they gonna get out of it.

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:09

Which is such a startup mindset. Right? I mean, that's that's like the lean startup. That's like MVP. It's like, you know, release and, like, test with customers and all that kind

Anastasia Marchenkova: 09:18

of stuff.

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:18

And that's, you know, where this this field is emerging out of a scientific domain. And a lot of the people who are leading that are brilliant scientifically but they have no experience with bringing products to market like and and in fairness it's not really a product yet. It's an idea of a product. So it's very tricky even like technologists are struggling, you know, like product people are struggling with how to deal with the state that Quantum is in right now, it feels like. Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:51

Do you see like, how do you think, like this whole sort of stage should be positioned? I mean like is it because you know, you see like you said startup incubators, sometimes I worry that that's it's sort of too early to start incubating startups depending on on what their actual value proposition is. But it's we're still pretty far from real economic, like, value generation. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 10:15

Yeah. I this is really interesting. Right? So I've actually I so I don't know if you know my background here. I why my my career went off the Yes.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 10:24

Rails in some way, but I I did my undergrad. Yourself. Yes. I'll introduce myself and my crazy career journey, and I I'll try and tell the story in an in a way that makes sense. But I think one of the big things in my career that I was very lucky with my mentors is that they pushed me to try things because what's the worst thing that could happen.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 10:45

And so my undergrad actually so, I mean, I science all my life. My dad was a physicist. Right? So I always had that. I went to a magnet math and science high school because I wanted to work on the robots.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 10:54

And, again, very lucky to have that experience where I had that support. I went to Georgia Tech early because I realized I'd kind of finished all the high school classes. I was like, this is not gonna help me pick a career. And as I got into it, I was like, what? Classes don't really help you pick a career.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 11:09

So I got into labs very early, and I actually started right after my first year in a quantum telecommunications lab.

Sebastian Hassinger: 11:14

So I

Anastasia Marchenkova: 11:15

did neutral atom quantum memories for 3 years, which was really great to just have an adviser who got that early in.

Sebastian Hassinger: 11:23

That was Georgia Tech, you said?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 11:24

That was Georgia Tech. And, this is a question people ask me a lot. Why how did you pick quantum computing? How did you know this field would explode? It's a very frustrating answer to them because I said I emailed 1 professor in the lab.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 11:36

It was a biophysics lab. And they said, no. You need to have taken optics. And I was still just finishing my 1st year. 2nd lab, again, I'm just, like, randomly reviewing people in the department.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 11:46

2nd lab, quantum information. I told them I could solder because I'd done that with robotics. They're like, great. Come in tomorrow. And that's how I got into Quantum.

Sebastian Hassinger: 11:55

Because of soldering.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 11:56

Because of soldering. Right? And it's just like those little bets and those little things. And, again, I I was lucky because having someone in academia, I knew how this works. Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 12:05

Right? You know, it's like, how do you get a lab position?

Sebastian Hassinger: 12:07

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 12:07

They're not posted anywhere. You have to just go.

Sebastian Hassinger: 12:10

Yeah. Be be useful. Yeah. Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 12:11

Ask, be useful, and just, like, put in a lot of hands on words.

Sebastian Hassinger: 12:14

You know, we had Dori Darnov on, and we asked the same question. How do you get into sort of quantum information theory? And she said the per I think he he was her adviser already, or she was considering, doing her PhD with him. Just handed her, Deutsch's paper and said, you should read this. It's really interesting.

Sebastian Hassinger: 12:32

And the next day she was like, well, I'm gonna do that now.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 12:35

Exactly. And sometimes it's just like going for it. So I I was in the lab, and my adviser yeah. It was, like, the 1st month I spent building laser locking boxes from scratch, and the first one took me 2 weeks. And then I got a lot better at it.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 12:47

Right? And then after semester, yeah, he handed me some papers, and he went, there's an empty room right there. Build this experiment.

Sebastian Hassinger: 12:54

Cool.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 12:55

And Wow. I mean, amazing amount of trust, right, to to have in an undergrad. But I think, you know, it's

Sebastian Hassinger: 13:01

You must have soldered really well.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 13:03

Soldered really well. Actually, you know, the

Sebastian Hassinger: 13:05

robots, man. Good good background.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 13:07

I mean, honestly, like, those little skill sets made me surprised. And the next year, I remember we had 4 PhD students come in. My adviser was notorious for being very difficult, and I didn't know that. I went to a conference and I told them I was in his lab. People were like, oh, you must work, like, 20 hours a day kind of thing.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 13:23

So he was notorious for this. I didn't realize that at the time. But, Yeah. You did the work. You came in the next year.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 13:29

We had 4 PhD students come in. Only once arrived, the laser locking boxes. So I felt pretty good about myself after that one. And, yeah, if you can kinda get through that laser locking boxes hazing Right.

Sebastian Hassinger: 13:40

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 13:41

You got through it. But yeah. So so he was very open and and, you know, just amazing people in the lab in general. Obviously, the PhD students were amazing. Still keep in touch with them to this day.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 13:52

We had a great great experience there. So I always thought I'd be a professor. I mean, I I even did research actually in chemical engineering for a while on, drug delivery with microneedles. Because, again, I was exploring, and I just knew I wanted to, like, do stuff hands on. And that's the only thing I'd figure out what I'm like.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 14:08

Mhmm. It was a fun lab, but I realized chem engineering wasn't for me because it was it was a lot of data analysis. I was just kinda scaring it staring at the robot arm. Right? And what I was really looking for is something where I struggled

Sebastian Hassinger: 14:20

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 14:21

Which also sounds very obnoxious. But I took Python. I declared as computer science, I believe. Yeah. Computer science major.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 14:28

I took Python, and I got, like, a 108% of the class. And I was like, okay. This is great.

Sebastian Hassinger: 14:34

Now that's a humble brag.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 14:35

A humble brag. Nobody believes I actually know how to do stuff. I promise, guys. I know how to do things. And, you know, I was Georgia Tech too, so it was great deflation.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 14:44

So I was, like, very proud of that. I had some coding experience, obviously, coming in. But I kind of sat there and I went, okay. Computer science is great. Computers are amazing, but I wanna use this as a tool and not as my new main field

Sebastian Hassinger: 14:56

of study.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 14:57

So then I started looking more into the sciences, and I went to bio for a semester. I did genetics. I was kind of interested in bioinformatics. So when I started trying the chem engineering stuff I loved the classes, actually. But, again, that hands on work is what really convinced me that I needed to go try something else.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 15:12

So what's the worst that can happen? You leave after a semester, and you say, like, okay. Well, fun.

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:18

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 15:18

Not for me anymore. Right. You know? And I think

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:21

It doesn't sound like you were in a rush to just get through it. You wanted to find the right path that felt right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 15:26

Right.

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:27

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 15:27

Right. And I I don't think I thought that at the time, but I was like, what's the point if not? And I never really, I guess, thought about the long term career, but I was like, oh, well, like, I grew up around so many academics. I was like Yeah. I'm gonna go apply for a PhD

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:41

and do

Anastasia Marchenkova: 15:41

that, and then I'll figure it out. Right? And I'll I'll always get to work on something interesting then.

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:45

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 15:45

It's It's always gonna be cutting edge. And then I got into physics. I was like, this lab is amazing and just, you know, did the degree there. Then my last year of college actually crashed the servers on my university, speaking of just doing stuff. Me and my who eventually became my cofounder, but one of my high school friends and and college friends, we had this little app that we built, and it became popular.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 16:07

And it was scraping data from the university database. Mhmm. And, yeah. So one night we crashed the servers, and they blocked that IP address on on, like, our app. And we're like, okay.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 16:22

Then we'll just switch the IP address. So we DDOS the school, basically, accidentally. So it was a very, like, Mark Zuckerberg story. We got called to the honor board, and we kinda were like, we haven't learned how to cache data yet. So it was basically re scraping the entire database every

Sebastian Hassinger: 16:36

user. Oh, dear.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 16:37

It was horrible. Not even every user. I think, like, every page. Oh, my god. Horrible.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 16:41

And then we just kept switching IPs. Thank you, AWS. Finally, they figured out how to, like, block the range of IPs and shut it down. But a a professor in the computer science department found out because he couldn't access the systems all night, and they basically had to send a postmortem being like, these 2 idiots, like, did this. It's not our fault.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 17:00

And they're like, if 2 college students can do this, maybe you guys should

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:03

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 17:03

Do better. But he was the founder of a company called Damballa, doctor Merrick First. He was a professor in the computer science department, and he just opened a basically called us up, and he was like, that was amazing.

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:12

I'm writing

Anastasia Marchenkova: 17:13

you a check for seed funding.

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:18

Nice.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 17:18

You're joining. Right? And so I was like, well, this wasn't part of my plan, but it's a summer. It's 12 weeks. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 17:25

I'd already been accepted to grad school, but I can just go over the summer instead of going there early. Why not? I got in there and, really, like and and part of this discussion of, you know, extroversion is kind of important for scientists anyway. I remember coming in. They sat us down and the entire team, and they said, go outside, and don't come back until you've talked to 25 customers.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 17:47

And as an introvert, as a scientist, I was like, I no. I can't do this.

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:52

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 17:52

Like, no way. But I wanted to stay in the program. Right? So I forced myself to do this.

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:57

And Well, and you're looking for things that made you struggle. So And

Anastasia Marchenkova: 18:00

I was I was really looking for things that made me struggle. Exactly. And he was one of the first people, and I think this is definitely a problem in education across the board. It's like the kids that are good at school kind of get left not even left behind, but they're like, oh, you're good at it. Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 18:13

Yeah. Yeah. Not jealous. Yeah. We have to help the ones struggling.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 18:16

He sat down. He was like, you're good. You could be, like, you could be much better. And, frankly, like, you're not good enough yet. And I was like, woah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 18:23

Right. Woah. Never heard that before, but it changed my life Yeah. How he kinda took us and was like, you have to learn this. And then I started being around people who did not fit the stereotype, where there was someone who is in the cohort before me, 5 years older, had already started one company.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 18:39

And I was like, I respect this person so much for their technology mindset, but what he could do is he could help people see that vision of his product. And I guess this is also something where it's an interesting mindset now looking back because I was like instead of being like, oh, it's you know, he's naturally charismatic. I was like, well, he's smart, and he figured this out, which means I can probably figure it out. Right? Like, I can just study how he did it.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 19:04

So as the nerd, I started reading books on how to be an extrovert, which is a crazy thing, but I was completely different. People still the reason I built the course was because people are just like, oh, you're an extrovert. I'm like, no. I'm not. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 19:17

I'm not. I have learned to fake it, and I've spent a lot of years

Sebastian Hassinger: 19:21

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 19:22

Studying. And at some point, yes, I stopped faking it, but, actually, I'm still an INTJ on my you know, to these this day, I still test in the no way. Really. I feel like we flock together, the INTJ. For sure.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 19:34

Because because it's supposed to be a rare one, but I I know a lot.

Sebastian Hassinger: 19:37

Go back and forth between t or f. I I score right in between the 2.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 19:41

Interesting. Yeah. I've tested INTJ since, like, age 10. I'm still I, but, like, obviously, I've creeped up over time on the e, but I'm still an I. And and I also look at that in terms of, like, where I get my energy from.

Sebastian Hassinger: 19:52

Exactly. Exactly. You gotta recharge after you're around a bunch of people.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 19:57

Exactly. I I go

Sebastian Hassinger: 19:58

off I mean, I see other people. You can tell in E, they're, like, they're ramping up as they're exposed to other people. Right? They're getting more energy. It's like, no.

Sebastian Hassinger: 20:06

I've got a battery.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 20:07

Yeah. And I love talking to people in the field. Right? Like, it it's such a good conversation. It doesn't seem hard, but, yes, at the end of the day, I'm gonna go back, and I'm gonna be like, I need an hour on my laptop to just, like Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 20:17

Decompress. Yeah. And, like, I I need my Internet Totally. Totally. To be able to go to sleep where it's too much.

Sebastian Hassinger: 20:23

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 20:23

So yeah. So that's how I got into startups. And so we built that startup. I actually ended up we started pitching. So, again, I went through this, like, 12 week really rough process of, like, nothing you've learned actually matters anymore.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 20:36

You have to figure out customers. You have to figure out how to build this. And then I actually ended up deferring my grad school admission for a year because the company was going well. We had funding. So I was like, I wanna kind of see this through.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 20:46

Yeah. And, again, every single time, I was like, what's the worst case? Okay. I defer 1 year. My PhD is 1 year behind.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 20:52

A lot of people stay in extra heat. Right? It's not like I'm behind in life if that's what I still wanna do afterwards. I'm not losing the admissions. Even if I do, you know, I could reapply.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 21:03

Like, I've done this before. Right?

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:04

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 21:05

But here's a new opportunity, and that has kind of stayed over time. And so, yeah, then I went I sold the company, actually. So after that year and a half, we ended up selling the company.

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:17

And this is was this a cybersecurity startup?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 21:19

It was actually an educational technology. So we were helping this was when Coursera and Udacity had just really started.

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:27

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 21:27

And we realized and this was also taken from my experience. As a physicist, you have a lot of skill sets, but you're not the expert in any of them. Mhmm. So one of my jokes is that physicists are great coders. They're horrible software engineers

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:40

Mhmm.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 21:40

Because I like, training training physicists to code, you know, they they can write lines of code and it will work, but you can't put it into production. Right?

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:48

Right. No. It'll produce charts for a paper, and then they throw out the code.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 21:52

Right. And I'm like, yeah. This is not scalable. I was like, speaking of product leaders. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 21:56

I was like, they're like, we can just, like, zip this up and send it to I'm like, no, we can't. Yeah. That is not acceptable as a thing that we're gonna do. And yeah. So ended up selling the company.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 22:09

And with the educational technology portion of it, the the issue was that as a physicist, I felt like I could do a lot of things, but I couldn't pass a coding interview. I couldn't pass an electrical engineering interview. How do we train people up to the next level? Because schools were not necessarily preparing people for careers. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 22:25

You take Java as a computer science major at Georgia Tech. I think it's Java and c, But they're hiring for JavaScript developers. Right? So how do you build up those skills? And so we worked with, like, online educational platforms and the actual so there's the federal regulation, FERPA regulation, where schools can't sell data.

Sebastian Hassinger: 22:46

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 22:47

But because we're a third party app, we could. Right? So we asked our, you know, people in our app, like, do you want us to help you find you a job? We can help you train you up. We you can have free courses.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 22:58

We can help get your resume in a good place. And then to the companies that we're looking and especially coming out of Georgia Tech, it was a good place to hire. Years ago, say, like, we have people qualified and have taken extra

Sebastian Hassinger: 23:09

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 23:09

Classes. Right. It's gonna be much easier for you to hire them out.

Sebastian Hassinger: 23:12

It's a good model.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 23:13

Yeah. So we did that for a little bit. And, Yeah. It was it was a fun time. It changed my life.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 23:19

Right? And then I went back to grad school because I was like, well, I don't know what to do now with my life, I guess. You know, I'm gonna pursue the career path that I always thought I I would want. And then yeah. I mean, I coming in with that experience was really interesting because well, first of all, I was a little more comfortable than most grad students I'm sure.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 23:39

With some of that cash coming in. Like, I had my own apartment

Sebastian Hassinger: 23:41

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 23:42

And luxury building and not living with 5 other people. Right? And I also got the full ride scholarship, so I also didn't have the TA or RA. Amazing. So I was sitting there, and I was kinda like, well, this is kind of boring.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 23:56

Like, what am I actually gonna do?

Sebastian Hassinger: 23:58

Where's the struggle?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 23:59

Yeah. What am I gonna do for the next 5 years? And, again, this is where I, like, was really about seeking out mentorship, and I always looked for that. And I would go into the labs, and I'm like, well, the professor's never here. So I'm gonna sit and lock myself in a basement for 5 years, and I don't think that's a very productive way to do that.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 24:18

And then you asked her thinking about, like, maybe I'm not a fit for this, like, you know, life crisis at that point. Right. And I'd been talking to people there, and they're like, you know, it's looking back, I now understand what was happening. But they're like, you know, maybe industry is, like, interesting to you. So I started looking around, and I was like, oh, maybe I could do software engineering or maybe I could do something.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 24:40

And then I discovered a little startup coming out of in California, just finished Y Combinator, 2 people called Righetti Quantum Computing. And, I'm familiar. You're familiar now. But, at that point, nobody was familiar.

Sebastian Hassinger: 24:54

It was super early.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 24:55

It was super early. So it's 20 I

Sebastian Hassinger: 24:57

guess D Wave had been out for or had been funded for about 3 or 4 years, I think, at that point, but I think Rigetti was the 2nd funded Quantum Star Right. That I'm aware of anyway.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 25:07

So Right. So super early, and I

Sebastian Hassinger: 25:10

Very serendipitous.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 25:11

I reached out, and at that point you know, now there's a quantum industry, but at that point, how many people there that had quantum and startup experience? Probably only me.

Sebastian Hassinger: 25:21

You were a unicorn on a unicorn's wall.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 25:24

Right. And so I left, and I was like, this is a interesting opportunity. So, yeah, I was very early stage at 2014, 2015 at Righetti. And so it was interesting. Like, I moved all around the quantum stack too.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 25:37

Right? So I did quantum telecommunication neutral atoms rubidium. Then I grad school, I was like, oh, I'm gonna get into trapped ions, and then I went into superconducting Yeah. And kinda went up the stack. And over the years after that, again, I just spent all my time being like, here's a gap in my skill sets.

Sebastian Hassinger: 25:52

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 25:52

I need to fill it.

Sebastian Hassinger: 25:53

What did you do at Righetti initially?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 25:55

Everything.

Sebastian Hassinger: 25:56

Yeah. You know? Boy, you

Anastasia Marchenkova: 25:57

it's a startup. You do every I I painted the column, the brand color. Like, you know, I did that, hiring, you know, operations, and then also, you know, in the technology side as well. Right? And at that point, I'd also been, you know, doing coding more and and building all this stuff up.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 26:14

So I started getting stuff like getting all the the lab stuff set up. Early stage, I still remember the that day just getting that delivered.

Sebastian Hassinger: 26:23

It was

Anastasia Marchenkova: 26:23

like a mess. Right? And getting that all set up. And so, yeah, did everything, which is also a very interesting phase. And, yeah, now there's quantum startups everywhere, and I've also moved a little bit into the investing side as well.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 26:37

So I I did an incubator for myself, called VC Lab.

Sebastian Hassinger: 26:41

Mhmm.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 26:41

So just to train emerging folks to, you know, launch funds. And it it's an interesting time because one of the issues I see with quantum startups right now is, like, I feel like the hardware players are kind of already into place Mhmm. Right now. They have the talent. They have the money.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 26:58

Okay. You're gonna raise even even if you do a huge series a. I've seen 15,000,000 series a in Silicon Valley. You're still not gonna really hire the best folks out there. Maybe you can get a good team.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 27:11

Yeah. Maybe there's someone coming out of the lab, but usually their professor is also starting the quantum company already or already has 1 Yeah. On top of that. Right? So it feels like the hardware players are already in place.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 27:22

The software is early.

Sebastian Hassinger: 27:25

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 27:26

Right? And I think that's the thing. It's like, I'm keeping an eye on some teams and startups in in this time, and it's it's just a little early. And like you mentioned, like, the product is just not fully formed yet.

Sebastian Hassinger: 27:39

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 27:39

So what I see that companies that are successful doing right now is, you know, we're in a really rare space where we have that DARPA, the non dilutive funding. Mhmm. And people can actually spend a few years working on that and doing really well in the space. And I do think there's a space right now for start ups kind of in the middle where Mhmm. I warn venture capital folks, like, this is probably not gonna be the $1,000,000,000 company.

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:01

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 28:02

But there's still a lot of opportunity in this space if you wanna do do a company. But, again, you have to build a product. You can't just do a research paper. That's not getting anywhere.

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:10

Of middleware that that helps me with the way you're defining that? Because it's a it's a term that can be used Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 28:15

That's true. Well, I'm thinking of of things like Quantum Benchmark. Right? They got acquired by Keysight, and then they did, like you know, they have a really good product for a very specific case that's gonna be very useful. But the market size of that is just not

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:28

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 28:29

There to

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:30

the company. Wonder about those types of plays setting an investor up with visibility. Right? I mean, because if you have skin in the game, even if the the opportunity size isn't, you know, the the $1,000,000,000 range or whatever, you're in the space and you're seeing it evolve and you're through that startup. You're getting a sense for where the market as a whole is and the traction points and the you know?

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:55

I mean, I think you have to be pretty close to the industry to understand, for example, you know, the just taking, you know, whatever, the neutral atom logic logical cubits, the LDPC superconducting logical cubits, and now the Honeywell Mhmm. Trapped ion logical cubits. They're not all the same thing. They're really different.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 29:14

Yep.

Sebastian Hassinger: 29:14

And you have to be really close to it to start to understand like what does that mean for the the forward progress and and is it just in one direction? Is it just we're heading towards logical cubits or actually those three things sort of pointing in 3 different directions? Like, do do you think you get that kind of like, an investor can get that kind of insight by by being, like, onboard with a a startup at this point?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 29:39

That's interesting. I've I actually consulted recently for a VC firm, and I not sure they made the right decision, right, on that. Because, usually, I would just be like, call me. I'll tell you everything. Like, we'll we'll just have a talk, and I'll I'll tell you where where we are in the market.

Sebastian Hassinger: 29:52

Have given away the information for free?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 29:54

Yeah. I mean, they they called me anyway to talk through the the pitch deck. Right? Because, again, a lot of the investors, they they get a deck, and they send to me. They're like, I don't I have no idea what these words are.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 30:05

But it's interesting. Yeah. I'm seeing a lot of, companies popping up right now. Well, not popping up. They've been around for a couple years, but coming in from the cryogenic side

Sebastian Hassinger: 30:13

Mhmm.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 30:13

Yeah. Which, again, right, you start seeing being so connected. Yeah. So I could see the venture capital folks also looking at that. In the last few months, a lot of acquisitions in the photonics space.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 30:23

Yeah. Right? So unless you're kind of plugged into the market, you don't really I'm curious. Right? And and you you because we see the research and these things, you're like, oh, and now I think I know where they're going.

Sebastian Hassinger: 30:35

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can connect the dots.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 30:36

Exactly. But it takes a long time for an investor to kind of get into the space and especially the higher level. And, of course, at the higher level, they're gonna be looking for the market traction and and just making sure that they have the talent and and everything to actually succeed. But there's a lot of pressure. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 30:52

It it's a lot of pressure. And I think a lot of quantum startups don't think enough where, you know, I see some of these deal sizes. I'm like, you just raised a $15,000,000 round. What revenue do you need to get to the next stage? What's your runway?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 31:04

Mhmm. And how are you gonna get there? Like, I'd be stressed because I know how this works. Yeah. You can maybe raise off vapor, but the industry has changed.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 31:14

The market has entirely changed right now. And be careful. And latest company I started was Bootstrap for that reason because I was like, I don't wanna deal with this, you know, for it at this point. Eventually, obviously, for hardware, you do need a lot of funding. And, again, there's the the talent issue right now.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 31:31

You know, Google can buy up whoever they want. IBM can buy up

Sebastian Hassinger: 31:34

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 31:34

Whoever they want and just put them there and just be like

Sebastian Hassinger: 31:36

Yeah. Hang out.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 31:37

You hang out. At least you're not working for the competitor. Right? That's that's a strategy that companies have used in the past.

Sebastian Hassinger: 31:44

You you mentioned DARPA. I just wanna, like, return to loop back to that for a second. Like, do you think especially on the hardware side, as you said, there's sort of you get to b or c rounds, and you're talking about huge amounts of money. Mhmm. The the private capital markets are not the most welcoming right now.

Sebastian Hassinger: 32:04

Do you think that makes the public sector sources of funding even more important at this point for for on the hardware side in particular?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 32:12

I think so. Yeah. I I think so. It's, again, it's non dilutive funding Yeah. Which is amazing.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 32:16

They're kind of your first customer Yeah. Guaranteed. Yeah. In the contracts, there's always a licensing agreement if you can get to a point, which is great. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 32:24

And if you get connected in those spaces, that's a you know, I I talk to people about, like, what do you actually like, why do you actually wanna start a company? Right? And especially for scientists, sometimes they don't realize what that entails. It's like, do you actually wanna be a CEO, or do you wanna step away? Or do you do you wanna be in the lab?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 32:41

Like, that's truly Right. These are totally valid pass, but, like, what do you actually want? Do you wanna build a company for 3 years, sell it for 10,000,000, and, like, have a chill life? Totally valid. But that's, again, not a VC.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 32:52

Like, I would not go for VC if that's your goal.

Sebastian Hassinger: 32:54

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 32:54

Yeah. And having been in the space now for a long time and seen it over and over. Right? It's it's so mind boggling to me. Like, being in Silicon Valley, we're both there.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:03

Right? The I've run sell selling companies for 100,000,000,000. They get 0. Yeah. And everyone's like, people do nothing.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:09

They're amazing. Congrats. Like, we're gonna go party, and they're like, I am miserable. I spent 10 years of my life on this. None of my employees got any cash out of it.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:19

You know, they may have gotten a bigger lift.

Sebastian Hassinger: 33:20

The cap table. Yeah. I know.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:22

And and I'm like, well, my friend sold their company for 10,000,000, and they kept 90% of it. Yeah. Yeah. They're actually doing better. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:29

But it's not, like, the trendy thing. And

Sebastian Hassinger: 33:31

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:31

People are chasing around trends and, yes. And so, yeah, I mean, those funding options are fantastic. And I think a lot of these it's actually a meme that I I posted not long ago, which is, like, you're hiding an engineering services department in your deep tech start up, aren't you?

Sebastian Hassinger: 33:47

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:47

Right. So, again, these are different business models. Right? It's like, what is actually scalable? Obviously, the first company that builds a quantum computer is not gonna have problems with customers.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 33:56

Right. I just think it's gonna be very hard for a new company to take over at this point. And again, the software is early, but I think a lot of quantum companies are also missing using that classically. So Mhmm. We were talking recently about I'm working with some companies in the AI space, but they're actually shifting to a new computing paradigm, thermodynamic computing.

Sebastian Hassinger: 34:20

So they

Anastasia Marchenkova: 34:20

came out with the Google Quantum Groups. Super interesting. Right?

Sebastian Hassinger: 34:24

Done. Right? You're Guillaume, I think?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 34:25

Actually working with Normal

Sebastian Hassinger: 34:27

Oh, okay.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 34:27

Who's, Patrick Kohl's Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 34:29

Competing with Guillaume. Competing?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 34:33

2 players

Sebastian Hassinger: 34:33

in the thermometer computing space.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 34:35

Yeah. It's a it's a spicy, topic there, there, but it's super fascinating. Right? And I think one of the things we've been talking about at this conference we're at is how much quantum is enough to teach. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 34:48

What can quantum actually be applied to? And, again, customers don't care if it's quantum, if it's thermodynamic, if it's anything. Are we getting the job done? So I think there's some of these companies that are actually doing something very smart as they're saying, where can we apply this to classical technology? Or is the simulator enough?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 35:07

And we're kind of we can still sell that product and wait. Right. And those are the companies that I think are gonna have more longevity in the space. Yeah. So it's super interesting.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 35:17

I was talking to a company recently about that where they've built a very specific simulator, 200 cubits, not a universal. Obviously, that would take so much RAM Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 35:27

Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 35:27

To run that before their very specific customer and use case, it's a game changer.

Sebastian Hassinger: 35:32

Right. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 35:32

Now when they have the hardware Right. Flip it on.

Sebastian Hassinger: 35:35

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 35:36

Right. And it's gonna be huge.

Sebastian Hassinger: 35:38

And that was the BlackSimo value proposition in a sense. Right? It was, like, purpose built machines that were not universal, but they were tailored to a specific algorithm or use case.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 35:47

Exactly.

Sebastian Hassinger: 35:48

I thought it was super smart. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. But you're you're actually getting more expensive in saying, like, take something learned in the quantum information science space and apply it to a thermodynamic or some other kind of exotic, maybe even just straight classical, technology and and get the the economic value out of it that exists right now.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 36:08

Yeah. Why not? And I think that's something that I've started approaching problems with where it's and this has been my theory. So I worked in graph theory in HPC for a while, and it was because so as a startup, this company I worked for, we had we were one of the top 25 Google customers and spent like, we spent 1,000,000 a month on Google Cloud. So it's a lot of money Mhmm.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 36:31

Because of all the data we are processing.

Sebastian Hassinger: 36:34

And I

Anastasia Marchenkova: 36:34

learned this. I was like, this is a lot of data. Like but we have to do it right. Right now and this is still happening, but because I was in that space, I see this, like, little lining starting to appear where a lot of companies just throw GPUs, CPUs at problems still. They can get away with it.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 36:52

They don't have that much data. But the amount of data is growing. Mhmm. I'm seeing the companies that are running up against it, whereas, like, we had I was part of the r and d team, and it was, like, 2 PhDs in computer science and 2 physics people. We're locked in a room, and we're told, like, this is slow.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 37:06

Go, like, figure out math Right. To fix it. Right?

Sebastian Hassinger: 37:09

Yeah. Math is up.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 37:11

Like, spend 3 months on one problem.

Sebastian Hassinger: 37:13

Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 37:13

Right? And it was funny sometimes that they're like, oh, you only submitted 1, like, one line of code or, like, one commit in 3 months. I was like, that commit saved $2,000,000 a year. Commit in 3 months. I was like, that commit saved $2,000,000 a year.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 37:22

Leave me alone. But that's you know, data is not gonna get smaller in the world. It's only gonna get bigger. Yeah. More companies are gonna start running into it.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 37:33

So I'm like, the ones that need it really need it already, and that number is just gonna expand. So what do we do? I mean, we're working on a level down on the hardware. We're still in the cloud, so we're, you know, still switching chips. But I was like, what what if we build an application specific classical for that?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 37:48

Right? And so the thermodynamic computing value proposition is very specifically for AI energy consumption. Huge issue. Like, already running into that. Costs are prohibitive.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 38:00

Honestly, I've been talking to folks that, you know, who are doing it. They're like, we're running out of we don't have, like, chips Yeah. Anymore. Like, I don't I don't know what we're gonna do. This, like, is gonna end very soon.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 38:10

Huge problem to solve. And now everyone's using AI. Right? And so I'm, like, stepping back. I'm like, everything needs like, it feels like the next error is just gonna be application specific in general, whether it is quantum.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 38:22

Mhmm. Right? It's an And optimization. Right.

Sebastian Hassinger: 38:25

Like, resource optimization. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 38:26

And that's all, like, we've been working on with quantum, but I'm like, let's take a step back. This is huge.

Sebastian Hassinger: 38:30

It's a bigger problem. Yeah. Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 38:32

This is so important to do. And, Bliximo, we've always said this, but even now, there's been more of this, like, QPUs.

Sebastian Hassinger: 38:40

Mhmm.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 38:40

Right? They're they're gonna work alongside supercomputers and data centers. They're not gonna be just in the research lab. You're you're gonna have to work with all these other chips, and I think that just market is just gonna expand over time.

Sebastian Hassinger: 38:54

Mhmm. Okay. So we're that's a very good setup for a closing question, which is okay. So, I mean, you you've described this, this narrative in in terms of your kind of personal path, what do you see as your next, what do you want as your next struggle and what do you, what do you want to be when you grow up? I mean you've done so many different things.

Sebastian Hassinger: 39:16

It feels like, you know, you you got your choice of just about any path forward if you'd like.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 39:21

And, honestly, it's a very obnoxious problem to have, but it still is a different problem to have. And I literally last night, I was, like, changing my Twitter and Instagram bio. I'm launching it. I'm gonna be launching a new series. You you can hear it here first because I actually haven't talked about it anyway.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 39:37

Excellent. Yet. But the idea is, first of all, I wanna start talking outside of quantum. Like, you know, I'm so enthusiastic about these chips and the thermodynamic computing and other other hardware. I work a lot with deep tech startups.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 39:49

So I just I wanna expose more people to that. So I wanna launch 1, like a more like a series on very, very deep tech topics outside of just quantum. So thermodynamic computing coming up soon. Talking to a few folks in the space being like, can we do, like, a broader industry thing? And then I wanna do lab tours series.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 40:10

I wanna get the cameras into the rooms and being like, this exists. And this is part of the I have a business right now helping companies with media. It's like with hardware startups, I'm like, you're overthinking this. Put a picture of your hardware on Friday. People love it.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 40:25

Right? Like, once you actually show the hardware, it's real.

Sebastian Hassinger: 40:28

Right. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 40:29

And I think just getting more exposure to deep tech, making it cool. Again, like, I connect to the investor space. They're always, like, tell me the new deals kind of thing. So I wanna really reach out. My friends are working on such cool companies.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 40:42

So I'm gonna launch that and then do deep dives on these, like, new industries, cutting edge industries. Go through the papers and be like, this is the hallway conversations

Sebastian Hassinger: 40:51

Right. Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 40:52

That we have. Besides that, I'm pretty in some ways, like like you mentioned, I have my pick, but I'm also unemployable because I have too many of my own ideas, and nobody wants to deal with that. They want me to sit down and, you know, do this thing. So, yeah, over time, you know, I definitely want to you know, I'm going deeper on the investor side. I don't know what that's gonna look like over time.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 41:15

And, there's regulations that say even if I knew, I can't talk about this. So that's that's one aspect of it. And,

Sebastian Hassinger: 41:23

Well and, I mean, it sounds like, you know, communication and, trying to connect those disparate kind of communities back to where we started. It's trying to connect the, you know, the scientist or the technologist to the end customer and explain both sides to the other. Right? Yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 41:37

Exactly. And I have this, like, deep desire. I'm like, I kinda wanna start a venture backed company again. Desire. I'm like, I kinda wanna start a venture backed company again, but I'm trying to really first step back.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 41:47

You know, one of the cool things about being online is getting exposure to all these sort of different problems and industries. If I find the right topic, I might I might do that. But 10 years is a long commitment. That's how I look at it. And so I'm excited to kind of take this space to the next level and really help with brand position and branding, helping scientists get the word out there because that's how I feel like I can 10 x myself.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 42:09

Like, I've created a platform. I think I've done hopefully a decent job explaining quantum to people in a way that, like I haven't been banned from quantum conferences yet, so I might be doing an okay job so far. But how can I enable other people to do that as well? Yeah. And that is helping scientists launch their companies, telling them how to do the pitch decks, making sure they raise properly, making sure they build the companies properly, talk about the value.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 42:35

And that's kind of my, like, expansion on there. And, yeah, having fun so far while I'm doing it and having a good time. Still, like, sit down sometimes, and I'm like, I wanna write a paper or 2.

Sebastian Hassinger: 42:47

Right. You still have a scientist inside?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 42:50

Oh, I I do. I do. But, yeah, I have this, like, long term I've been really, like, trying to think about Brian Johnson. I saw him on Friday in Santa Clara last week or Saturday. They were doing a roast of Brian Johnson.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 43:05

And he says something really interesting about how he doesn't work for the approval of people today. He works for the approval of the people in the 25th century.

Sebastian Hassinger: 43:14

Wow.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 43:16

And I was like, that's interesting. Like, what do I build on that? You know? And and for me, education has always been a big component of it. Like, you know, helping companies.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 43:25

What does that 25th era look like? I have this video game. I love Alpha Centauri back from 1999 that I still play from time to time. And there's a faction called University of Planet

Sebastian Hassinger: 43:37

Oh, yeah.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 43:37

Yeah. Or the, you know, the the researchers. Right? I'm like, I need to build that tech tree. Like Right.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 43:42

What if we create a university of, like, the high-tech topics? Mhmm. We talk a lot about AI software eating the world, but I, you know, I don't remote all this. People are always gonna live in houses. They're always gonna need stuff.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 43:56

Manufacturing is huge. So I wanna make sure we have education in that Yeah. Space as well and and build that up. I don't know how yet. But in some way, that's, like, something in

Sebastian Hassinger: 44:06

the back of my head. Questions are more interesting than the answers in some way. There there is your struggle. Right?

Anastasia Marchenkova: 44:11

That's the

Sebastian Hassinger: 44:11

thing you're trying to set up.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 44:13

It's it's yeah. Thank you

Sebastian Hassinger: 44:14

so much. Because I feel like we could keep on going forever because there's so many topics, but, I really appreciate your time. And this is a great conversation. And I'm sure all of the things you are doing, you're gonna have fun and do all kinds of valuable stuff for everybody. So thank you.

Anastasia Marchenkova: 44:29

Thank you.

Kevin Rowney: 44:32

Okay. That's it for this episode of The New Quantum Era, a podcast by Sebastian Hassinger and Kevin Roney. Our cool theme music was composed and played by Omar Khosda Hamido. Production work is done by our wonderful team over at Podfi. If you are at all like us and enjoy this rich, deep, and interesting topic, please subscribe to our podcast on whichever platform you may stream from.

Kevin Rowney: 45:02

And even consider, if you like what you've heard today, reviewing us on iTunes, and or mentioning us on your preferred social media platforms. We're just trying to get the word out on this fascinating topic and would really appreciate your help spreading the word and building community. Thank you so much for your time.