Communication challenges for quantum tech startups

​I’ll be giving this talk at the Quantum Education Summit in Barcelona in early December. I wanted to share it with KW folks first!

​I‘ll provide coffee/tea and City Cafe bagels. There will be plenty of time and space for folks who want to hang around and chitchat after.

​Abstract

​Communication for quantum tech startups is tricky. The obvious challenge is the complexity of the technology. Quantum computers are harder to explain than food delivery apps, right? 

​The familiar advice is that startups should focus on the problems they solve for customers, rather than on the technical details of their hardware or algorithms. This makes sense in principle, but it's difficult to follow in practice. To know what problems customers need solved, you have to talk to them. But when your technology is still in the early stages, it's hard to find a common ground for these conversations. 

​The long development timelines don't just make it harder to talk to customers. They leave startups vulnerable in other ways as they navigate the Valley of Death, i.e., the critical funding gap between the initial R&D phase and the commercialization phase.

​During this time, startups have to communicate with other groups that matter to them (aka stakeholders). In quantum tech, these include investors, industrial and academic partners, policymakers, government funders, their current employees, and researchers and engineers they want to hire. Each have their own language, incentives, priorities, and biases. 

​In this talk, I'll dive into the challenges facing quantum tech startups and outline a communication framework that can help companies overcome them.

​About the speaker

​Dr. Aggie Branczyk is a physicist and entrepreneur with a PhD from the University of Queensland. She spent over a decade in quantum research and technology, holding academic roles at the Perimeter Institute and industry positions at IBM Quantum. Now, as the founder of Quantum Salon, she develops communication strategies for deep-tech startups, especially those in quantum tech. Aggie is active on LinkedIn sharing insights about her journey and ongoing discoveries. She also writes on Substack, both about her entrepreneurship journey and the quantum tech ecosystem. She is based in Waterloo, Canada.