Mediaboss Marketing

White had appeared after former Australian of the Year, quantum computing expert Michelle Simmons. She explained how she has made the transition from world-leading scientist, to the CEO of a company that is competing head-to-head with some of the biggest tech firms on the planet.

Richard White says his company could wash its own face from the start.Peter Rae

Simmons has already taken a year to close a $130 million funding round, but said there was good news on that front around the corner. However, the evident difficulties in prizing open investors wallets has not dimmed the ambition of her vision to produce a broadly useful quantum computer by the 2030s.

Simmons was able to explain lucidly why she thinks her relatively small Sydney-based company can beat the likes of Microsoft, Google and IBM to a great prize, and it is this kind of dizzying ambition that Australian governments will be desperate to latch on to, as the resources boom fades into history.

Simmons believes they have settled on the correct materials to base a quantum computer on, have the in-house manufacturing expertise that doesnt come naturally to software giants, and has a significant advantage through its mix of corporate and government-backing.

We knew it was a deep tech play, weve kept the company small and focused and nimble, and basically we are literally gunning to get the prize, Simmons said.

It is a highly competitive field, and theres this question of if it is going to be one approach that takes everything, and my personal view is that it is.

The point is that, while we may be publishing many articles about the tech wreck and start-up failures on our pages this year, market cycles will not make or break the best companies.

One of Australias unicorn start-up founders, Luke Anear of SafetyCulture, summed this up on a later panel, when he spoke about what had made his company stand out in the first place.

In 2010 to 2012, when I was meeting with VCs in the US, they were very fond of Australian companies because we were quite disciplined due to less access to capital, he said.

We had to build companies that were economically sound from the beginning. I think over the last five or six years, there was a mad sort of period, and weve probably lost some of that discipline.

Its been wonderful to see that discipline having to come back, and were going to build real businesses again, that have real customers and make real money, Anear added.

Read the rest here:
Tech wreck forces entrepreneurs to wash their own face - The Australian Financial Review