Two kinds of nonsense
Quantum computing attracts two kinds of nonsense. One camp tells you a quantum computer will break all encryption next Tuesday and cure cancer the Tuesday after. The other tells you the whole field is a physics-department grift that will never do anything useful. Both are wrong, and being wrong in opposite directions doesn’t make the truth the average of the two.
This newsletter is where I try to find the more useful ground. I disappoint the hypers and the deniers in roughly equal measure, which I’ve decided to treat as a sign I’m calibrated rather than a problem to fix.
What I write about
Four things, mostly. The engineering progress in quantum hardware: error correction, logical qubits, and the distance between a press release and a working demonstration. The security fallout as that hardware matures, which means post-quantum cryptography and the migration deadlines regulators and insurers are already setting. Who controls the technology and the supply chain beneath it, which is as much geopolitics as engineering. And the quantum sensing and timing work that will likely reach practical use long before anyone factors a number worth worrying about.
I read the source papers and check each claim against the evidence behind it. What survives, I write up.
Who’s writing this
I’ve spent the last couple of decades on most sides of this problem. As a partner and practice leader, at both global and regional level, I led work across IBM, Accenture, PwC, and KPMG. Inside Fortune Global 500 companies, I served as a CISO and a CTO, which is where you learn that the threat models on the slides and the ones that actually keep you up at night are rarely the same. And before founding Applied Quantum, the consultancy I run now, I built companies in this space myself, starting Boston Photonics and PQ Defense.
Alongside the consulting, I’ve written three books on where this is heading: Quantum Ready, on what it actually takes to prepare an organization; Quantum Sovereignty, on the geopolitics of who ends up controlling the technology; and Quantum Systems Integration, on the engineering reality of making heterogeneous quantum hardware work together. Behind all of it sits PostQuantum.com, which more than a million people (and bots) read every month for the deep technical work under the summaries you’ll get here.
What you’ll get
One or two editions a week. Each is a curated read on what happened, why it matters, and what, if anything, you should do about it, with links to the full analysis on PostQuantum.com whenever you want to go deeper.
No vendor pays for placement here. When I get something wrong, I say so in the next edition, because the readers who hit reply to correct me are doing me a favor.
If you’re a CISO, a CTO, an architect, an investor, or a policymaker trying to tell the real quantum signal from the noise, this is written for you. Subscribe, and I’ll handle the filtering.
