Today’s pick requires a quick backstory. Buckle in.
On Tuesday, May 4, 2010, I met Juan Enriquez at his office in the Prudential Center in Boston.
In the 90s, Juan had been directly involved in financing the first human genome mapping project. I was making an ill-fated documentary film – a follow-up to I.O.U.S.A. – on the role of risk tolerance investors face when they are putting up the capital for scientific projects.
At the time, my subject matter was risk: how do entrepreneurs map out financing for frontier projects nobody has even considered before.
More specifically, in Señor Enriquez’ case, he had helped privately finance the genomics revolution before most investors were aware that DNA was anything other than a footnote in a textbook they’d been forced to read in high school.
Enriquez had directed the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, written a bestselling book called As the Future Catches You, and argued early that genomics would become one of the dominant information platforms of the 21st century.
He did not treat DNA as a medical curiosity. He had treated it as code. And put it down on the list of projects for his firm, Excel Venture Capital, would finance.
Once scientists finished reading the genome, entrepreneurs and investors began asking a larger question: could researchers begin writing biology too?
Enriquez worked with J. Craig Venter after the first phase of genome sequencing and helped finance Synthetic Genomics Inc., the company that pushed the field from reading genetic code toward writing it. The development was seminal to an Exxon-funded project to grow algae programmed to fart methane… then harvest the methane to power turbines and generate electricity.
Juan had previously used his firm to seed-fund the company and helped raise private capital for the work that eventually led to the world’s first synthetic bacterial cell. And… the gene editing technology CRISPR.
Today’s PRO point: In a side conversation during that first visit to his home in Boston, Juan showed me a check he’d received from another one of his projects. “This will pay for my new beach house on Cape Cod,” he said.
Not always, but often, there’s a material payoff to taking risks.
During that same conversation, on the back of the envelope he’d received the check in, he drew a plan for financing the next stage. The plan was stalled because it required breakthroughs in “quantum computing.”
The bet was, at the time, that they could “grow” algae to host and sustain a breakthrough in the actual functioning of “quantum computing.” A speculative and useful tool if your business is mapping massive amounts of “wet lab” data.
Crazy stuff, I admit. And that’s the backstory… done and dusted.
That was the research frontier in 2010.
Scientists had begun turning biology into an information problem. They could sequence, compare, model and eventually edit the instructions of life. But every step required more computing power, more data, better models and faster ways to test what nature had built over billions of years.
This week, frontier AI firm IonQ (IONQ) announced a major breakthrough in quantum computing.
The company demonstrated what it calls the industry’s first end-to-end, real-time quantum error-correction decoder running on a single standard CPU, removing a major bottleneck for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
I’m with you. It’s a mouthful. As an individual investor, you have to be a “generalist” watching the markets… and a curious student. It’s worth your time to understand, especially if you want to make a little money investing in tech stocks.
IonQ’s system handled up to 408 logical qubits and 31.5M quantum operations with as little as 0.02% added delay.
That puts it on track to be one of the leading quantum players – and a sign that it’s only a matter of when, not if, this technology goes mainstream.
Why does this breakthrough matter?
Because quantum computing is still rife with errors. Noise from chips or random static can impact results. Traditional computing chips work alongside quantum processors to check errors as they happen. And they can’t keep up.
Thanks to IonQ’s breakthrough, they can.
AI poster child Nvidia (NVDA) was quick to celebrate the results, pointing out that an IonQ quantum chip was working alongside one of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). It’s deep in the trough, but an early sign of what AI compute is actually going to be able to help scientists, probing life’s deepest mysteries, move faster.
Andrew’s been following the development of quantum for some time, and today’s Pro looks at a way to play the quantum space as new breakthroughs start to occur.
~ Addison
P.S. No Grey Swan Live! this week. We’ve been attending a resource conference out in Colorado with Shad Marquitz. We’ll be back next week with an update on resources and the market.
Yesterday afternoon on the Grey Swan Trading Fraternity, Andrew covered the recent rally in the stock market, why it doesn’t pass the smell test on a fundamental and technical level, and why you want to stay cautious. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t yet.
