Innovation Endeavors was founded on the thesis of the Super Evolution: that technological advances across data, computation, and engineering would converge and translate into significant, fast changes for the world. We’ve seen this firsthand.
But more importantly, this era of innovation is made possible by people: changemakers working to revolutionize computing infrastructure, engineering biology, climate, intelligent software, and the physical economy. This Super Evolution Leader series highlights the stories of these innovators and gives you a glimpse into how these entrepreneurs bring their work to light, what lessons they’ve learned along the way, and how they hope to change our world.
We hope their candid insights are helpful for anyone tackling meaningful problems and that their stories leave you feeling inspired.
Some of us are drawn to entrepreneurship from a young age, and some of us answer the call after spending a number of years gaining specialized skills. The latter is true for the CEO of Atom Computing, Rob Hays.
After a long career at Fortune 500 companies, including Intel and Lenovo, Rob began to crave an entrepreneurial role at the bleeding edge of tech. He began his entrepreneurial journey with a board position and advisory role at Atom Computing, eventually stepping into the CEO role when the time came to commercialize the team’s work.
Now in the entrepreneur role he sought, Rob has left the world of Xeon processors behind to build quantum computing hardware platforms.
Meet Super Evolution driver Rob Hays: CEO of Atom Computing
“We’re building our systems out of atomic arrays of neutral atoms. They’re captured in a vacuum with laser beams, and the opportunity is to scale up this technology. Qubits are the fundamental building block of quantum computers, and we think we have an opportunity to scale the number of qubits with quality towards fault tolerant quantum computing over the next few years,” said Rob.
Atom Computing’s technology is newer than its counterparts in the quantum computing industry. The team hopes to lead the charge in a once-in-a-generation transition from classical computing to quantum.
“This doesn’t come around very often. These big transitions. Quantum computing is not going to solve all of our problems. But there are specific types of problems, optimization problems, and simulation of physical things in the world that quantum computing can be really good at. When we get to scale quantum computing with fault tolerance, we’ll be able to solve very large scale problems that just aren’t practical or economical on classical computing systems today,” said Rob.
Ultimately, quantum computing is an incredibly powerful tool that people will leverage to run workloads and applications at a scale that’s yet to be accomplished today. Like much of what we invest in at Innovation Endeavors, quantum computing stands to impact countless industries, including automotive, material science, banking, pharmaceutical, insurance, and so much more.
“Building quantum computers is really hard. The scaling of the technology, the quality control, all of these things are very difficult. And getting people in a team all rowing together and moving in the same direction towards a common goal and solving some of these problems and knocking them off, one after the other, is the definition of grit, in my opinion,” said Rob.
Watch the video to learn more about Rob’s journey to entrepreneurship and what he plans to accomplish at Atom Computing.
