Welcome to the 79th episode of “Decode Quantum”. We continue our “international episodes”, this times with the cofounders of the US startup EeroQ, Nick Farina and Johannes Pollanen, which aims to create qubits with electron spins, electrons being shielded from controlling electronic circuits by a layer of superfluid helium. This is the only company doing this.
Nick Farina is the CEO and co-founder of EeroQ in 2017. Beforehand, he worked as an business angel investor, and an entrepreneur, launching multiple tech startups (GiftedHire for online job search, Voltage Digital a digital agency, JetZet providing itinerary management tools to business travelers). He’s the one bringing business acumen to the company. He is also a Quantum Computing Governance Member at the World Economic Forum since 2021. In 2000-2003, he was a caddie at a golf club (Biltmore Country Club) where he spent summers watching people cheat at golf and lament their losses in tech stocks.
Johannes Pollanen is a co-founder and the Chief Science Officer of EeroQ. He is a researcher from Michigan State University (MSU) where he holds the Cowen chair of Distinguished Chair in Experimental Physics. He is also Associate Director of the MSU Center for Quantum Computing Science and Engineering. He runs the Laboratory for Hybrid Quantum Systems, which is focused on hybrid quantum technologies involving superconducting qubits, superfluids, trapped electrons, and other condensed matter systems. He developed the EeroQ electrons on superfluid helium architecture. He did his PhD at Northwestern University with Bill Halperin and contributed to the discovery of new quantum phases in superfluid helium-3, which influenced his later work in designing quantum computing platforms. He then was a post-doc at Caltech, with Jim Eisenstein, working on exotic many-body states in ultra-clean semiconductor systems.
And as usual the transcript :