Building Y Combinator's Hottest Quantum Computing Startup | ConductorQuantum, Brandon Severin

Shamil Malachiyev: Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this week's episode of The Founder's Code podcast. With us today, we have an incredible founder who is going to help you stay on the very cutting edge of the technological world: Brandon Severin. Hi, Brandon.

Brandon Severin: Hey, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Shamil Malachiyev: Loving it. For our viewers and listeners, can you tell us a bit about Conductor Quantum, and what is the vision of the future that you are trying to help create?

Brandon Severin: We're building quantum computers on silicon chips, and our AI software that we're developing will create qubits on those chips a thousand times faster than current methods. The future I see is that everyone has access to a quantum computer from their desk. I think we've seen what access to the world's largest LLMs has done for society, and I think that's kind of just the tipping point of then entering real-world, groundbreaking compute, and what that can do for everyday humanity.

Shamil Malachiyev: And can you correct me if I'm wrong? Because in preparation I was talking to ChatGPT, and I'm a noob when it comes to quantum computing, because it's a very complicated field. So I said: okay, this is what Brandon does, try to explain it to me in more human terms. And what it came up with was interesting. What your software is doing is, for example: we have a magical instrument with thousands of strings, which does fantastic things, does simulations, does all of this magic. And whenever you want to play it, every time you have to tweak every single string, which takes a lot of time, to make sure that it plays really well. And what your software does is use an AI to help tweak all of the strings at once, to make sure that each time you start, you get the most out of your quantum computer's capabilities. Is that somewhere around it?

Brandon Severin: Yeah, exactly, actually. That's a great way of putting it. And I think the other thing is that it's not each time you play your instrument; it's each time you finish a song, you're going to have to retune that instrument. If you listen to some of the old famous electric guitarists, like Jimi Hendrix or Clapton, you can hear them tuning their guitar mid-song, because they've just come out of this blazing solo. And that's really where our AI comes in. So we tune up, rather than strings, the actual voltages and power sources that are applied to these tiny little... you could call them strings, but they're metal gate electrodes on a silicon chip, and we use that to isolate qubits, basically, which are in the form of individual electrons.

Shamil Malachiyev: Quantum gaps.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, yeah. It's funny, because the science... you're going to get me on a roll now. The science is based on maybe chapter four of introductory quantum mechanics, which is the particle in a box: solving that infinite potential well, where you have an electron, it's in a box, it can't hop to the left, it can't hop to the right. What are its energy values? And you have these quantized, as you say, gaps between different energy levels. Similar to how a string will resonate at different frequencies based on its tension and its mass.

Shamil Malachiyev: It took me a while to even wrap my head around the concept of trapping electrons in order to allow them to do something useful. But let's step back for a bit. What was your childhood like? What showed signs of you moving in a high-tech direction?

Brandon Severin: Childhood was great. Even though there were bits and bumps, I ended up here and I'm happy, so I kind of wouldn't change it for what it was at all. There wasn't much, let's say, high-tech to start with, but there was a lot of entrepreneurship. My mom ran many of her own businesses, and similarly with other family members, uncles and aunts.

Shamil Malachiyev: Was it a family business?

Brandon Severin: In some cases, yeah. Parts of the family would have a real estate business and develop property. Other family members would maybe do consulting. Some family members were making orange juice. And that was my life. I would go to school, come home, do my homework first, squeeze orange juice, wake up the next day, deliver it to hotels, because they wanted freshly squeezed orange juice, go to school. Rinse, repeat.

So not very high-tech at all, but I saw this world of: you can do what you want, you can work, you can earn money. And the effort we put in had a direct impact on our standard of living. So it's kind of a self-reinforcing feedback loop. But the high-tech stuff probably happened in school. I was doing sciences and I was like: oh, this is really cool. Physics, maths, chemistry, biology. I just couldn't believe it was possible to understand what was going on at the fundamental level. And then I quickly realized: oh, actually, we don't really understand what's going on at the fundamental level. And then you pull on that thread and you end up in quantum.

Shamil Malachiyev: So even starting from the very early years, you had a lot of experience of how grit and a hard work ethic are the norm, something that's standard in people's lives.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, 100%. From the beginning. And I think it's two things: it's my family's culture, and I think it's also partly immigrant culture as well. My family's from the Caribbean. My grandparents moved to the UK post-Second World War, as part of the great migration to the motherland; they were part of the Commonwealth. And funny enough, they moved with British passports. The Caribbean island they left wasn't independent, so they were born with British passports, even though they weren't born in Britain. It's crazy, right? And you go to England and it's like: okay, you want to make something work. And their kids were born into that. My mom, my aunt, and so on. And then I was born into that. And I think I see a similar sort of behavior in the States, where you look at some of these amazing companies that have been built: people land here and they want to make a dream work. I guess top of mind is Jensen Huang, right?

Shamil Malachiyev: Because that guy, he used to be a janitor at some point, right?

Brandon Severin: Yeah, he was working in Denny's.

Shamil Malachiyev: And just looking at a story like that, you think: if he can do it, anyone can. But you have to be able to sacrifice a lot for a long period of years and just keep doing it. Because even NVIDIA's success didn't happen overnight, right?

Brandon Severin: No. Like 20, 30 years. And I think the other thing about Jensen, what I take away from it, is less the work and the sacrifice. I feel like the work is kind of obvious, and maybe that's just me. It's more that no job is too small. Sure, now he's probably like: okay, I don't have time to clean toilets. But when you consider where he started, it was: this is what I have, this is what I need to do.

Shamil Malachiyev: And is that something that you take into building your own startup's culture? Do you take a lot of lessons from stories like that?

Brandon Severin: Yeah, I think a lot of them are kind of ingrained in me as well.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you tell me about them?

Brandon Severin: I think it's these small things, where culture is less about what you say and more about what you do. And I can delve into that a bit more, because it's really just clicked for me. But it goes back to childhood. For example, this orange juice business: it's the same person on the phone to the hotel, selling, doing presentations, saying we're going to have grapefruits and birds-of-paradise flowers for the breakfast table if you want those, and the same person going to the port, harassing people to clear the goods as quickly as possible, and lifting these oranges. It's the full stack, right? And you almost have to know the full stack to then optimize it. You can't really just come in and go: oh, I don't touch that, figure it out. Unless you can find someone who's already adept at that skill and been through it, and you can hire them and manage them really well. But even then, there's still an element of trust you have to put in.

And it's the small things, like: the label tag on this bottle, is it straight or not? That was my job. I had to make sure the labels were straight, and I remember my mom just like: come on, the labels aren't straight. Because I think the way you approach certain things is how you'll typically approach everything. Obviously there's always the case where you have a so-called genius and their room is messy, but they come up with general relativity. But that's often in their own world. When you're trying to build a well-oiled machine, you want to make sure that everybody's on the tracks and the train's just going. So it's the little things: make sure there's paper around, easily accessible. These are also things I saw when I visited labs during my PhD. I think it's the Niels Bohr Institute where there's always a pen or paper within arm's reach; there are whiteboards by the coffee machines. And there were never crumbs on the lunch table, because you wanted to be able to sit down and write. It all accumulates in the long term.

Shamil Malachiyev: And is that something that you put in the rule book? Is it something you ask of people in the interviews? Or when you notice something, do you tell people that that's not how it's supposed to be done?

Brandon Severin: All of the above. You can quickly see it in interviews, actually. Some people are very, let's say, pedantic about the code they write, but less so about the maths they write, because maybe that's just what they care about, or maybe they just don't have the skill. And you just say: look, try to approach it with the same care, because you're not just writing that for you, you're writing it for everyone. And then in real life: I'll tell them. My co-founder knows.

Shamil Malachiyev: When I'm listening to founder stories, and when I'm trying to evaluate myself as a founder compared to those stories, I sometimes think: okay, I can be one of the two. I can be either the Steve Jobs, Elon Musk type of founder, who's really strict: this is how it's supposed to be done, and if I see somebody who's doing it a different way, I will either tell them or fire them. And that allows for quick progress. And there's the other type of founder, which is: it's okay, we'll teach them, we'll guide them, we'll be gentle, we'll be nice. What do you think about yourself? Which type of founder are you going to be, when asking other people about you in 10, 15 years?

Brandon Severin: I worry it's going to be a bit of both, depending on the circumstance. And the reason being: I've already seen it now. Sometimes you really don't have the time, especially with something deep tech, where there's low revenue or zero revenue relative to your B2B SaaS counterparts, and the money you have in the bank is just a ticking time bomb to get to your milestones.

Now, at the same time, if you look at people like, let's say, Steve: I think as he got later in his career, he started to say, you know, we're building a team, and it's actually helpful to educate people and not just fire them straight away. But then you have Jensen, who's kind of a mixture, where I think he says: torture them into greatness. And other times, there's a moment where you have to really pick what matters, what's the priority at that time. Sometimes you just can't sweat the small things, because you have this one thing: okay, push for that. It's okay if the bins aren't tidied up right now; you'll get someone to take them out. That's not a priority. But when this is done, we're fixing this. So I hope it's a mixture of both, because I really believe those two skills are applied in different contexts to reach the maximum reward. And I also feel like I can wish and say this is what I think I'll be, but other people will judge me and tell you, right?

Shamil Malachiyev: As a founder, what do you think are your strongest suits?

Brandon Severin: Not giving up.

Shamil Malachiyev: Killer persistence. Persevering through everything.

Brandon Severin: Yeah.

Shamil Malachiyev: And what about your weakest skills, the weakest points that you've identified that you still have to work on? It doesn't mean you avoid them, but you just know that those things are tough.

Brandon Severin: I think it's this balance between perfection and moving quickly. Very similar to what we just discussed. Because the playing field is different, or at least we might think it is. It's science; you need to be precise. But at the same time, you want to get feedback, so you want to ship whatever you have out there as quickly as possible, and you almost iterate your way to perfection. And that's something that I feel I'm working on. I think I'm getting much better at it. You learn it quite quickly; it's just this muscle you have to exercise. But I'd like it to be better. And obviously the dream is you can do both at the same time. And some people might say it's not possible. I hate it when people say it's not possible. So I'm going to try and prove them wrong.

Shamil Malachiyev: For now, it's impossible.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, exactly. Maybe for you.

Shamil Malachiyev: And what part of your work do you enjoy the most?

Brandon Severin: Can I pick one? It's really hard. And that's the part of it I enjoy: it's really hard to do. And so growth is inevitable, whether it's just personal, or as a team, or a state of mind, or scientific, or product-wise. It's hard. It's why I did quantum in the first place. I was like: that seems really hard. I was busy learning about engineering alloys, but quantum was the hardest subject. So: yeah, let's do that. And that's always led to very fun times for me. I call it type two fun. I guess that's what they call it, right? Where in a year or two years' time, you'll be sitting in a bar saying: I remember when we did this, and we thought the world was going to end.

Shamil Malachiyev: It gets me thinking about an interesting thing. When I started going to therapy and talking about my founder experiences, one of the things I uncovered: I used to always try to get into the hardest thing possible. But part of it was because if you fail at something that's insanely hard, it's okay. Obviously, there was a 99.999% chance of failing, because it's almost impossible. That makes it easier to deal with yourself, your internal voices, when you fail. But when you do something easy, you still have a chance of failing, and if you fail at something easy, that almost says a lot about me. Was there ever a part of you that was thinking: I'll do the hardest thing possible, because even if I fail, it's nothing big?

Brandon Severin: No, there wasn't. I didn't really think about failing, actually. I thought more about the growth, the journey along the way. And now I realize where that actually came from. It was during childhood, where in secondary school we did this run every year for charity, where you basically run 10 miles from the school into central London, or actually from central London out to the school. And if you want, in the last two years of high school... sorry, the Americanisms are really getting to me: secondary school. You can run 20 miles, where you start at the school in Harrow, and then you run into London and you run back up.

And I remember doing 10 miles the first year, and I was like: that was tough, but I did it. But there's no way I'm doing double that. And then we got to the last two years, and all of my friends were doing 20 miles. They signed me up for it. I was like: what? And I really didn't want to do 20 miles, because you had to train. You couldn't just bash out 10 miles and kind of walk the last two. Twenty is a little different. And so I had to wake up every Sunday morning at seven with the rest of them, and start with three miles, then six miles, then nine, then 13, then 15, then 17, then 19, and 20 was race day. And when it got to race day, I was like: come on, you just ran 19 miles last week. You're winning, buddy. You never thought you could do that.

But it took me a while to get that mindset, because I'd still be fixated on the goal, and if I didn't hit that goal, it's like the world is ending. But you tick the box, move on to the next one. That was one key moment: you never thought you could do 19, and you just did it. Okay, 20 is going to be a piece of cake. So for me it was less "if I fail, it's not a big deal." It's more: you shoot for the stars, you might end up on the moon. But I still kind of want to go to the stars. I mean, the moon's kind of lonely. The stars are even more lonely, but at least it's the stars.

Shamil Malachiyev: Much, much hotter.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, exactly. And I like the heat.

Shamil Malachiyev: So it's about the person you become on the way. The higher the goal you set, regardless of whether you achieve it or not, you still become somebody worthy of that level.

Brandon Severin: I don't know about worthy. It's more like a state of mind you unlock, where you realize what you can do. You start with the smallest thing that can get you towards the top of the mountain, then you move to the next thing, and then the next thing. And once in a while you might look back and be like: geez, I'm halfway up. I didn't even think I'd make it past the first step. And you're like: only halfway to go? I just did that; I could probably do some more. It was a similar thing with running those 20 miles, because I really didn't like running. I think that's why they signed me up for it, as a kind of torture. Bastards. But it's very much a state of mind. And when I go on runs now, by myself or with friends, and someone says "I can't go any further," I'm like: you probably can. You're just not aware you can, and the only way you know is if you try. And I guess that's why I like the startup grind as well: the world feels like it's ending every day, or it's complete euphoria and it's going great, and then you just have to do it all over again.

Shamil Malachiyev: For me, if the world is a simulation, and let's say for each of us there was a kind of boundary around what we're supposed to be doing, I think doing the hard thing is basically expanding your zone of comfort. It's allowing yourself to be okay with moving to things that were not predestined for you, which are comfortable and easy. I saw this video where they put a spider down, took a marker and drew a circle around it. And for a good while, the spider would not cross the border. Then they drew closer and closer to the spider, until the point where it was so close that it had to put one of its legs out. And after it did that, regardless of how many times they tried to draw another circle, it would just not even notice the circle, because that's not a boundary it can see anymore. I think that kind of applies to the way you do it. You just go for hard things, to maybe tell yourself that there are no boundaries really. Whatever you want, you can do it. It's just about the decision.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, it's a nice reminder. It's like a little revision session.

Shamil Malachiyev: And what do you think about when you go running?

Brandon Severin: That's a journey too. It normally starts out with: oh, I'm a bit stiff today. Legs like logs. And then: oh, isn't that nice, the sun's rising. Okay, it's a strong headwind, got to make it through this part. Ooh, what's that smell? The fishermen are out. The birds, wow. Very in the moment, very in the moment. And eventually, if I go a longer distance, like more than six miles, I start to switch off. I enter a flow state, just step after step, and I'm like: I didn't realize I was here. Now it's more of a thing to clear my mind, and it's the cheapest form of exercise in San Francisco, because this place is expensive as hell. I was thinking: I could run to the office.

Shamil Malachiyev: Skip the commute. Just run. Do you do a lot of sports outside of running?

Brandon Severin: No. And the reason being: it's hard to organize people, you've got to depend on them, everybody's got their own thing. Running, I can just get up, put the trainers on, and go. I'd like to do more sports. I did a lot of sports during childhood and at uni. I really enjoyed the team aspect of sports. But right now, no. I might pick up football, or soccer, sorry. Just a little kickabout, to calm the mind. Or office cricket. Nah, too busy coding.

Shamil Malachiyev: Bringing the British culture into the office.

Brandon Severin: And I think, I don't know, maybe I'm just trying to build a cult, right? I think that's the deep-down subconscious thing that's happening, where even if I don't realize I'm doing it, I am definitely doing it. We went out for lunch yesterday as a team, and everybody was like... we got burritos.

Shamil Malachiyev: Fish and chips, of course.

Brandon Severin: I had a sandwich, very British. Like a meal deal.

Shamil Malachiyev: A piece of bread with baked beans on top, right?

Brandon Severin: Baked beans on toast, exactly. No, no, no.

Shamil Malachiyev: Do you also put crisps in yours? No? Okay. Not that British.

Brandon Severin: But yeah, everybody's wearing merch. It's rare I see other companies where everybody's wearing the company merch. Maybe Astranis, because they're around the corner from us. And I like that about Astranis.

Shamil Malachiyev: Wait, who? Astranis. Okay, because I thought you said "astronomer" and I was like, okay, that's the guy. The famous guy now.

Shamil Malachiyev: When looking for people to bring to your team: there is a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, because you're doing something insanely complex, and now you have a lot of responsibility in front of investors and everything. What do you look for in people that you are actually bringing to the team on this hard journey? What are your green flags and red flags?

Brandon Severin: Resilience. Communication skills. The reason being those two, just to start with: expertise is great, whether you have a PhD in quantum engineering or whatever. But this is a long slog as well, like a PhD, let's say, but the leverage and the trade-offs and the timescales are very different, and the cost of failure is very different too. And then communication skills, because if you have clarity of written word or spoken word, it correlates to how you think. And what we're building is so multidisciplinary. You really need to be able to talk quantum, or learn quantum, because if you can speak it really well and explain it from the fundamentals, it probably means you understand it pretty well, to the machine learners; and the machine learners need to fundamentally understand the machine learning to teach the quantum engineers. And that's just internally. I feel we actually have a duty, as people building on the frontier of what's possible, to educate people outside of our social sphere. Because, you know: quantum computing, AI. It's like, okay, but what's it going to do for me?

And the resilience thing cascades all the way down to how you approach your work. It's not working: okay, I'll do it tomorrow. Or will you try and fix it now? Or: it's not working, I'll give up. Or: I don't really understand this, so I'm just going to avoid it. That's something many scientists are guilty of, because there's a certain ego to being very smart. You want to be smart in the field you know, and you want to be the best in that field. But then if someone presents you with a problem of, say, simulating antigens or antibodies, and you're a physicist, you might say: that's beneath me. Well, it's probably not. It's just that you don't have a clue what you're doing, and you can't bear the pain of not dealing with that.

And I think that's the thing. Obviously it's nice to have the labels and the brand names: this person did a PhD, this person's an expert. But at the end of the day, the work just needs to get done, and the work gets done by people, at least from what I've seen so far, with an attitude to get it done, who are just going to plow through walls and learn as much as possible and not scoff at things, and put in their best work. Rather than: I went to this lab, I worked at this company, we did X, Y, Z, and that's why you should take me. Because it's just a different ball game. You really have to have a tenacity for research. Some of that I've figured out from working with other PhDs and postdocs, but also from people building startups very quickly: they also have a research tenacity, just running experiments and iterating. But the approach is very different. It's more: quick, I need feedback as much as possible, I'll deal with it. Sure, it's humbling, but I don't care; I'm aiming for this bigger goal. Whereas maybe the typical postdoc or PhD might be: oh no, I won't get my Nature paper. It's like: great, but we still have a problem to solve here. Let's get it done. If I wanted to be concise: those two things. Obviously I was a bit less concise as to why, but those are the main two.

Shamil Malachiyev: How many interviews have you had to go through when picking people for your team?

Brandon Severin: Personally? Not that many, actually. I went through the numbers with Joel the other day. But our strike rate was quite good. I think it was like: after five in-person interviews, we found the one. And now we're a team of three. But that first hire is very important. Very, very important.

Shamil Malachiyev: You have to be culturally aligned 100%.

Brandon Severin: Exactly. They're basically a pseudo-founder, in a sense. But that's in-person interviews. There's the whole filtering of coding and personal projects and chatting over the phone; it just depends on what method you use to source. But even then, I don't think we spoke to that many people. Like a couple hundred or so. And there's tons of inbound. I think that's one thing about doing a deep-tech startup: it makes it a lot easier to hire, in theory, because the people willing to jump on the ship are way more than "I'm building AI for X." Which, arguably, we kind of are: building AI for quantum.

Shamil Malachiyev: Well, you're kind of playing the game on both sides, right?

Brandon Severin: Exactly.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you tell me a bit more about your experience? Because you went through Y Combinator, something that has this magic around it, because everybody's trying to get in. I know there are like 30,000 applications each year that get sifted through. When you were considering your options, you were still at Oxford doing your PhD, creating the concept in parallel. What were your thoughts at that time? How did you make the decision to apply to YC specifically?

Brandon Severin: That's a long story. It boils down to, I think, a lot of cumulative information over many years. It's not like I looked at the website and was like: okay, yeah, we should apply. I'd heard of Michael Seibel. I'd heard of Tom Blomfield; I used Monzo Bank, and Tom's a group partner at YC. I use Gmail: Paul Buchheit. So you kind of have that subconsciously. But also, there were other startups that we looked up to greatly that went through YC. One of the first quantum computing startups ever was Rigetti Computing, led by Chad Rigetti. And he went through YC in 2014, alongside, I think, Helion Energy and so on. Worked out for him. People always say: oh, they don't do deep tech. Actually, if you look a little closer, they do a lot of deep tech.

And then two: I could just stay here in the UK, stay in Oxford, and do it that way. But Joel and I, my co-founder, we'd been around many university spin-outs. During my master's year, I worked in a lab where I was sensing nanoparticles using optical microcavities; it was competitive to, kind of, Theranos. And the tech was really good, by the way. It worked.

Shamil Malachiyev: Not like Theranos.

Brandon Severin: Great team, great postdoc. He had a huge impact on my approach to research and science and entrepreneurship. That's a long story. And they did a university spin-out. I saw Chris Ballance spin out Oxford Ionics across the road. I saw Simon Benjamin and John Morton spin out Quantum Motion; Peter Leek, Oxford Quantum Circuits. It was spin-outs galore. And I just wanted to do it differently. It felt like something was missing, and I don't know how I got that vibe, just from looking at how other startups performed and approached their work compared to the traditional deep-tech Oxford University spin-outs. And there's an argument for both cases: one's a deep-tech thing and the other one's typically B2B SaaS. But at the same time, I think you can take a lot of that launch, get-things-done-quickly, write-code, talk-to-users, build-product attitude, versus: we've won this excellent grant from the government, and we're going to do this and get a bunch of people on board. I just wanted that fast-paced mindset to proliferate, and to be on the ground building.

Shamil Malachiyev: Is there really such a big difference? Because for me, for example, Chris Ballance's story: even though he decided to stay with Oxford Ionics, they got acquired a couple of months ago by a US company, I think. You can see this kind of progress, but the story is not something you could imagine seeing a film about in five years. And then when you look at companies that go to YC, it's almost like living through a startup TV show. It's almost like you can be a part of the story that maybe you'll get a TV show or a film written about one day. A little brighter, a lot more music, a lot more people around. But maybe it's just my perception. You've seen both very closely. What can you say?

Brandon Severin: To be fair to Chris, I think Chris is actually an exception. I think what he's done is actually fantastic. I've seen Chris in certain scenarios, and just the tenacity he has, I was like: yeah, this guy gets it. He gets it.

But I think the other thing is: many of the products I just use every day are Y Combinator startups. And two, it boils down to the saying that I think every founder and VC kind of deals with, which is: let's say you want to win a gold medal at the Olympics, and you get to pick your coach. Who do you choose? Someone who's won gold medals at the Olympics? Someone who's been an Olympic athlete and tried to win? Or someone who's written about the Olympics, and they're a great journalist, and they've seen a lot of Olympians? And the startup is the Olympics, right? And I think it kind of boiled down to that. Given the opportunity, I want to be trained by Olympians, and I want to be surrounded by Olympians. People who are all in. Not: half my role is at the company and half my role is as a professor. That has its benefits, because you get access to university facilities and the talent pool; there are so many benefits to doing that. And to be honest, I think the spin-out system that Oxford has built is clearly working for them, because they are churning them out. I mean, look, Oxford Ionics just got acquired, right? But for the founder who is young and maybe not a professor, aka me: I grew up in a different age, where you can build software and impact the world from your bedroom. I guess I'm just culturally more aligned with that side of the boat than the other side.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you tell me about your experience at YC? Have the three months you spent there changed a lot within you? What did it give you?

Brandon Severin: It was great. I try and keep the mindset that I haven't left YC. So I still have the demo day countdown timer for every demo day. Set three-month goals, set two-week goals, set monthly goals. Still do group office hours with the people in our batch. Still do office hours with our group partner, Tom. And it changed me, in a way, in that I realized it was okay to be crazy, and probably actually beneficial. Rather than being told: probably not possible, maybe you should go here and study this, or wait a bit and then do that. Whereas: I am building a quantum computer on silicon chips and building AI software. Ten-minute call: yeah, you're crazy, come over here, here's half a million. Versus: oh, I don't know if you can do it, maybe you should chat to so-and-so and then figure it out. What's the core IP? I think the Y Combinator model has fundamentally proven that smart technical founders will build their way, or try to build their way, to success. And also sell their way to success, because you want to make something people want.

Shamil Malachiyev: So you have a good combination, right? You're a highly technical person, but then if you look at your upbringing, those core pieces of skills that were instilled in you are a lot entrepreneurial: a lot about selling, a lot about dealing with customers as well. So you have a nice mix of both.

Brandon Severin: Yeah. And I think the thing that might surprise people, and I've seen it in YC: you can quickly learn the sales. Kids dropping out of college, earning a good few K of MRR and ARR very quickly. It's harder to do the technical stuff, and also do it with taste, especially with AI tools to help you build things very quickly. You always want to have a bit of taste in there, and the user experience. I think that will get better and better. But you can learn sales. YC helps with that, because you're constantly pitching and explaining what you do to people. Constantly asking: oh, how did you close that contract? What were the tricks you used? How do you do the cold calls? I was talking to a guy last night: so what do you do before they hang up the phone? It's like: well, I have this one killer line.

Shamil Malachiyev: Are you going to share the killer line?

Brandon Severin: I probably won't say it as well as he does. Maybe I can recommend him for an interview, but it's his line.

Shamil Malachiyev: And if you look at yourself, we're getting to the really good questions: what would you say is the difference between the Brandon prior to Oxford, the Brandon prior to YC, and the Brandon we see today?

Brandon Severin: Prior to Oxford is hard, because I worry that whatever I say, I'll be looking back with rose-tinted glasses. I think it's aggression. I think Brandon's just got more and more aggressive at each one of those stages. Sure, okay, I've got more technical and whatever, but who I am as a person: I think I've gone more aggressive.

Shamil Malachiyev: I can hear it in your voice. How does that show?

Brandon Severin: You do what you need to do to get things done. Someone says: we've never done this before, so we can't. Why not? Just move the walls, okay, or chisel away at them. Rather than: okay, I guess I'll try somewhere else. Or: this is impossible. Okay. They said they're closed. Okay. Because you really have to will your product and startup into existence. I think it helps getting lucky, but you've got to be in the right scenario to get lucky, and also the right mindset to get lucky. You might get lucky and you might not even see it: you walk away from the poker table while the flop's coming in. So yeah, I think honestly it's aggression. It helps. But I'm not out there beating people up. It's just being willing to move things along, even if it makes human beings uncomfortable, because the mission is greater than that moment in time. And it's working.

Shamil Malachiyev: Has this made you less tolerant of mediocrity?

Brandon Severin: I've always been that way. And I think the reason why I've been that way is because there have always been very high standards placed on me, from childhood, but also in school. Some people are prejudiced and whatever, and you kind of have to prove them wrong. Well, you don't necessarily have to, but to be taken seriously, sometimes you do. And so it's like: okay, cool. I'll just be the best. And then it's like: well, if I can do it, come on, let's go. Tidy your room, let's move. But at the same time, it's realizing then what's possible. Because you go from being told you're going to fail your maths GCSE, to doing it a year early, to doing maths A level early, to doing further maths. So then when someone says: oh, I'm not really too good at maths, I'm like: you can probably do it. Trust me. I believe in you. I was told I would fail. Literally, I was told, like, day one.

Shamil Malachiyev: I flopped my further maths A levels. I got a C.

Brandon Severin: I believe in you, buddy. You want to retake it? You could probably do it. Because this is the thing. You're a human being, right? You're one of the best AI agents that evolution has ever manifested. You're multimodal. As multimodal as it gets. So give it enough time. You can do it.

Shamil Malachiyev: Are there specific moments, lessons, that you remember, which maybe you've looked back on with regret, like: I could have been more aggressive, I could have had a different outcome? Or maybe somebody told you something that made you reconsider your aggression as something good and positive, rather than something that makes you a bad person?

Brandon Severin: I used to have a lot of "if only I'd done that a little differently." Now you ain't got time for that. You learn the lesson, you move on, you're playing the next point. You focus on the next point. You lose that point: okay, next point. You win that point: who cares, next point. You play the game.

But what I have learned, especially when I see other people operate, is that the best people just know exactly when to apply it, because sometimes it just doesn't work. You go to the front desk of, I don't know, anywhere, and you're trying to get past the front desk: do you have ID, do you have a reservation? What do you do, shout at the person at the front desk? That's not going to work. "Do you know who I am?" No. They're probably better at their job than you are; that's why they're there and you're on the other side. So what do you do? Maybe you chat to them, explain the situation. So it's almost like a different form of aggression. You're still not taking no for an answer. And you probably vibe your way through, if you want to use that zeitgeist of a word. It's not as simple as just being shouty and angry. It boils down to just not taking no.

Shamil Malachiyev: Knowing when to be soft, knowing when to be...

Brandon Severin: Yeah, exactly. But still having that resilience to keep pushing.

Shamil Malachiyev: It's better to be a samurai in a garden than a gardener at war, is the phrase that I've heard.

Brandon Severin: Interesting. Yeah, maybe. I'll have to think about that one.

Shamil Malachiyev: It's something that's quite popular. The psychologist, I think, Jordan Peterson, maybe you've heard of him: he likes to say that as men, we need to understand our internal monster and take hold of it, to make sure that we can become aggressive when we need to. It's about being assertive when you know something is just and something needs to be done. And that ties to: it's better to be prepared and have that capability within you when you don't need it, than to not have it when it's extremely important.

Brandon Severin: I like that.

Shamil Malachiyev: It's something I struggled with for a bit. My father was very strict and aggressive, and when we were working together in a family company, a flour mill, I would work with him, and he would be really strict with everyone. And I would hate that, because I would see myself in all of the people he was being strict with. So I was trying to be soft, trying to be kind, trying to be liked. And then when I started my own companies, I realized that, for example, in my IT company, within the first three, four years, I was too soft, and that was the reason why the people who were in top positions were not that qualified. They weren't the best people. And I knew I had to find better people, find better systems, and learn more from them. But it was hard for me to be assertive and aggressive with them. It's only later that I realized it's essential, because you're building something that will stand for ages and that will help change the world in a great way. And in order to do something big, you need to be able to sacrifice that worry about being perceived as bad. Everybody's trying to be liked.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, yeah.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can we talk a little bit about the world of quantum? I read an article two days ago that in the world of crypto, we have Satoshi Nakamoto, and he has his hard wallet with, I think, a million bitcoins, something like $127 billion on it. And I went to ChatGPT and asked: current compute cannot break that code, so what about quantum computing? And ChatGPT said: within the next five to seven years, it's quite possible that those computers will be able to break it within like five minutes. And then I think: okay, so that's almost inevitable. How is quantum computing going to affect the world of humanity moving towards these crypto financial systems? Is anyone safe?

Brandon Severin: Yes. Quantum will make crypto stronger. Crypto is one of those things where it's just extremely resilient. And we see it time and time again. Everybody thought it wouldn't exist. Funny enough, now you can buy futures and options on the thing. Everybody thought it was a bunch of nerd money; it's still here. You've got the president launching tokens. Could you believe it? In this world? And you really think about that: six years ago, people were saying it's over. Here we are. So quantum makes crypto stronger in that we're going to see cryptocurrencies upgrade to more quantum-secure algorithms for signing and sending transactions, as well as generating private and public keys, basically wallets.

Now, why do I say people are safe? The answer is: yes, actually, some of them are. The vast majority are. Because it's an interesting case with Satoshi's coins. This is what I mean by crypto being very resilient: the crypto community realized this was a problem in the early days, particularly the Bitcoin community: that quantum will break public-key cryptography. So what do we do? Well, quantum's not good at breaking hashing algorithms. It will reverse the public-private key pair, but if you hash something, SHA-256 or whatever, you're okay. I think with Grover search you get maybe a square-root speed-up, so it's actually not that much faster than a classical computer. So what they started doing was hashing public keys. You have your public key, you hash it, and all the blockchain sees is the hash of the public key. That's the only thing that's publicly available. And so the quantum computer can't reverse the public key, because it only sees a hash of the public key. It would first have to break the hash and then break the public key. And that's the case for the vast majority of tokens on Bitcoin.

But there are some older wallets, Satoshi, whatever, that didn't upgrade to that form of wallet. What happens in the new form is: okay, if I want to send you some Bitcoin, let's say I have 10 Bitcoin in my wallet and I want to send you one. What happens is I send 10 Bitcoin out to the network. One goes to you, and the other nine go to a change address that belongs to me, like the nine remaining in change. And that change address is a hashed public key. But the original wallet that I sent my 10 from: because I have to spend those coins, that public key is now exposed. So if I were to reuse that wallet, because now it has zero, since I sent you one and nine to the change address, with an exposed public key: yeah, that's in trouble with quantum computing. But my new wallet with the nine, that's fine, because the public key's hashed. You only expose the raw public key when you spend coins. So the easiest way to keep your money safe is basically: don't reuse a wallet address.

Okay, here's the thing: Satoshi and the rest of them, whoever it is, I don't know, were on the old-school wallets where you just reuse the same address. They didn't have this change-address protocol implemented by default in the wallets yet, because they didn't think of the quantum-secure aspect yet. So there's a good chunk of change sitting behind these exposed public keys that would be broken by a quantum computer, should it get to reasonable power to break RSA and ECDSA: elliptic curve signatures.

Shamil Malachiyev: That is some $127 billion. More, if you count all of the wallets with abandoned addresses, people who are no longer around or who forgot their passwords.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, exactly. Things like that. But then at the same time, these networks are unbelievably resilient. Because you could even argue there have been more threatening things that have happened to these cryptocurrencies before. There was the hack of a major exchange, Mt. Gox, where like five, ten percent of the current supply at the time just disappeared into hackers' hands. The community could have reversed those transactions; I think they chose to just continue. Ethereum with the DAO hack: the dodgy smart contract that just got drained. Ethereum's still here today. And so if you have something very similar, where you basically have these wallets that just get drained, then the community, whoever, will have to decide: okay, do we stay on this chain, or do we fork the thing and say, we'll pretend that didn't happen and blacklist those addresses? It's happened before. Or do we just upgrade to a quantum-secure protocol in the meantime? So it could be: yes, possible, but it'll probably be alright.

Shamil Malachiyev: Some have already started doing quantum-secure.

Brandon Severin: Oh yeah. There are already secure public-private key protocols that are resilient to quantum. In fact, if you use iMessage or Signal: last I read, they've upgraded to quantum-secure encryption. So they're out there. And the reason why I say that is because: look, you can go onto the NIST website today, you can find quantum-secure algorithms; no one's stopping you from using them. It's just a community-wide effort. And obviously, I say obviously, but it's not obvious: cryptocurrencies have this problem where they're limited by block size and how much data they want to transmit through the network to keep things fast and so on. But if you're communicating with a website with your credit card details, we've got stuff to take care of that.

What people are definitely afraid of is the store-now-decrypt-later. So, okay, I have my hard drive, it's encrypted with AES. The computer doesn't exist today. But when it does exist, all of those old AES-encrypted files and so on: they're gone. Forget about it. The quantum computer's got that. And so I think there's this fear among a lot of the big nation-states and geopolitical players. So it's this double-edged sword, and I want to add the nuance, because a lot of people will say: give me a billion dollars to build a quantum computer, because someone else is going to break AES. It's like: just upgrade your encryption and you'll be okay. But at the same time, if someone is storing it and wants to break it later, then yeah, that's the best way to do it. Conversely, the number of qubits required is still very high. The quality of those qubits, the reliability of them: still very high. And it's five to seven years, of course, all things going well and all things being equal. But there's the other thing of: well, you've still got to build the thing.

Shamil Malachiyev: And what are the crypto blockchain projects that you're most bullish on?

Brandon Severin: Oh, I don't know. Honestly, in that regard, I have no clue. I think for me, it's whoever just upgrades to the quantum-secure stuff first. It's like: right, you thought about it.

Shamil Malachiyev: Because working on a startup that's founded in the quantum sphere, you could just say: hey guys, this is a great opportunity to start building something that's quantum-resilient. And just that one post on LinkedIn could mean somebody sees it and thinks: I can do that, I can tackle that. And then they're the next Satoshi Nakamoto.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, exactly.

Shamil Malachiyev: And maybe one more question. With your current trajectory, how do you think the Brandon in 10 years is going to be different from the Brandon now?

Brandon Severin: Brandon in 10 years will be older. Maybe some more gray hairs. I think Brandon in 10 years will be doing the same thing, or at least I'll feel the same way about whatever I'm doing. I don't think that's going to change. I think Brandon in 10 years will be both proud of what Brandon's achieved, but also just looking forward to the next thing, continuing to build. Because when I think now, that's kind of how I feel now. A lot of people were like: oh, you got into YC, you went to Oxford. I'm like: yeah, that's great, but I kind of just want to build. It's kind of just been a journey to this point, and I want to focus on that. So I don't think I'll change.

Shamil Malachiyev: How big of a motivation for you is money?

Brandon Severin: I was thinking about this the other day, and trying to steelman myself. Because I don't think it's that much. The reason why I make that argument with myself is because I was doing the same thing for below minimum wage as a PhD student. And I'd still do it now. The reason why I wanted to do it this way is because I believe that this is how we do it to the best of our abilities. We're building to win, and by win I mean: get the thing out there and make the best product possible for people to use, not just publish a paper. And so once again, it kind of boils down to the journey. Life in SF is expensive compared to the UK. As founders, Joel and I had this chat where it's like: as long as you have enough money to be comfortable and just focus on building the thing, then we're good. Because otherwise, I mean, it's easier to get rich other ways.

And sometimes we thought about it. This is pre-building Conductor: we worked on something together called Feynman, and it was AI science research. It's basically like a deep-research kind of thing, but for academic papers. And we got a bit of traction with that, and VC funding was getting offered, and people at Oxford were going berserk: it's going to be the next big thing. And I just said: do you really want to do this? When we get out of bed every morning and our feet touch the ground, are we happy with what we're doing? When we have this opportunity to build the best control and characterization software that will be the precursor to building the world's best quantum computing experience? No way, of course I'm going to pick that. Well, I say of course, but for me and Joel: of course we're going to pick that. And then we realized: okay, cool. I think what you value will definitely change over time. Maybe as you get older, you want just a bit more security, so to speak. But right now, we just want to change the world.

Shamil Malachiyev: And let's say you agree to get acquired, and post-acquisition, you and Joel get a hundred mil each. How are we going to notice? Is it going to affect your lifestyle in any major way? Well, except for the camera quality.

Brandon Severin: A lot is flowing through my head. Two things. I'd rather be rich and private than famous and rich. And I'd also love to pay it forward. Seeing other entrepreneurs, you might see it that way: an angel check from Brandon or whatever. I love that idea of supporting other founders on their journey and building great things. And even if it's not financial, just having a chat with them and saying: yeah, I've been through that too. But you never know. I mean, look at Jeff Bezos: the guy was riding in a Honda, and now he's renting Venice. He's ballin', he's ballin' out of control. So I had to ask myself what I'd turn into. But no, I don't know.

Shamil Malachiyev: A private plane called Chains, probably.

Brandon Severin: You know, the joke is you can get that now, right? But it's kind of a distraction.

Shamil Malachiyev: Does it get you fulfilled?

Brandon Severin: Oh, definitely not. 100% not. I am one of the worst at that. Joel calls me One-Pair Brandon, because I have one pair of shoes. But who knows, I might buy a shoe shop one day. I don't know.

Shamil Malachiyev: I have two pairs of sneakers. I really like this kind of discussion, about a lot of different things, about life. You find small nuggets in each different conversation, and that gets you to paint a full picture that you can relate to, and look for bits like: I think I want that for myself. When you said the thing about aggression, I think that is going to resonate with a lot of people, because it was a part of my path. People think: aggression, no, it's bad. Being aggressive is bad. But being aggressive, and learning how to use it, is one of the most essential things you can do if you want to achieve any level of success.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, 100%. And then you start to realize how you can bend the world towards your will. It's one of my favorite things in The Matrix: there is no spoon.

Shamil Malachiyev: Bend the spoon. Do you have any of those secret ways that you perceive the world, that you don't tell anyone because you don't want to seem crazy, but then you understand that there is a way to bend the spoon? By doing these small rituals, or thinking in a certain way, you get to that point.

Brandon Severin: Yeah. I think when we describe the world, we basically mean other people, quite frankly. We're not talking about pruning a tree or raking-the-leaves kind of world. You want to get somewhere and there's someone in the way. Or you want to buy something, or you want to achieve something, and someone is saying it's not possible, or you have to wait. And what I think I realized very quickly, and I learned this at Oxford, I also learned it earlier, but I really saw it at Oxford: once there's a human being in the loop, the system is able to be bent, if not completely broken. Because human beings are not lines of code. They have needs, wants, urges, desires. It's what makes humans human. And so often the biggest thing that's limiting them is trust. Which is: if I let you do this, will it hurt me in some way? And so you almost have to build a trust that it's worth it for them. Or: come on, it's me, I'm not going to do anything bad, I want this for the best of everyone. Or: support me, I'm on this journey to change the world. Don't you want to be part of that too? Do you want to be the person who tried to slow this mission down? Or: hey, why don't you come with me? Think about what we can do together. I always say that sounds horrible and very manipulative, but I hate to say it: I think it's true. Because these rules, these things, they're all made up by people.

You can't check in until 3 p.m. Why? Well, we need time for the cleaners to go through. Have the cleaners been in? Yes. So: I need to make a call, I need the wifi, let me get into the room. And just that push. Because they wouldn't have known the cleaners had been in, because they wouldn't have bothered checking; there's just this rule: 3 p.m. And then they check, and the cleaners have been in. Hey, I need to stay another day in this place. Can you help me out? Sure, and we'll give you a reduced rate, because we like you.

And I learned this over time. I remember visiting Budapest as a young chap after secondary school. I went to a music festival out there with a bunch of friends, and I could barely speak any Hungarian. But I quickly realized that even though I was foreign, and I don't look like many Hungarians, so people could tell I was foreign, it went a long way to be grateful. And I think it's the same in any culture: a please and a thank you. So I asked this lady at a cafe: how do I say please and thank you? And at this music festival, in the morning, at sort of breakfast, people are queuing up at this breakfast place, where it's like porridge and flipping acai bowls. In Hungary, amazing, on the Danube. And when I got to the front of the line, I got my porridge and fruit, and I said thank you in Hungarian. And she was blown away. Couldn't believe it. And so the next day, I didn't have to queue in line. I could walk to the front, and she'd have my porridge ready for me, because I was the only one who said please and thank you in the native language. And I was like: okay. Human being. Rules, rules. And everyone was like: what? And before they knew it, they thought I worked there.

Similarly at uni. Oxford is this very elite institution, and, at least when I applied, 60% of the students who went to Oxford went to a private school in the UK, and only 10% of schools in the UK are private. So you just get a bunch of rich people. And then you have the staff, who come from all walks of life. They're local, they're immigrants from the rest of the world. They work in the kitchens, they're cleaners. But they decide who gets a room, who gets to live in the college, what you're going to have for dinner, what you're going to have for breakfast. And before you knew it, they were my best friends. And so sometimes I might forget my lunch card: oh, it's okay, don't worry, we won't charge you. Or: you need an extra night? Sure, it's fine. Or: you're staying here for your PhD; we don't normally give rooms to people who've already been in the college for four years, but we'll give you a year for the start of your PhD. It's a human being in the system. If that was a line of code: if student has stayed four years, then do not give room. But it's the relationship.

And I think that's actually one thing I lost a bit in YC, which was: you want to close deals. You want to close LOIs, close contracts, put the pressure on, get it before demo day. But I think with deep tech it's a little different, because the community is tiny. I know every single founder and CEO in silicon quantum computing personally. And so what am I doing trying to burn bridges to hustle their asses to sign something they may or may not want to sign? It's more of: let's build a relationship, guys. Really think about this from first principles. We're building the future together. It's not just me trying to get VC dollars; it's us actually trying to build a quantum computer and build great control software. And if we do this together, think about what we can achieve. And I think I've gotten that back, actually, since leaving YC. And that's just the nature, I think, of being in a B2B SaaS sort of environment. But at the same time, when you look at some of the best-performing sales companies in YC, there's always that founder that has that inkling of: at this point in the conversation, when they're on the sales call, let me just chill out, relax. Listen to the person you're talking to. What do they care about, for goodness' sake? Keep them chatting. And at the end of the day, they're a human being too. They're going through the struggle. They want to build their thing, they want to keep their job, they want to do great. What can you do to make them happy, and make them realize you're not just out to get them? You actually want to build something of use and benefit. And if they're not interested: okay, cool, move on to the next. That's okay.

Shamil Malachiyev: You could be a great politician. The kind of guy who just goes to any restaurant, and they're like: oh, Mr. Severin. And everybody wonders: how do they know you? It's like that everywhere.

Brandon Severin: This comes from childhood, and I only realized it recently. You can learn something from everyone. Everybody's really smart in their own way. It may not be something you're interested in, but they know something you don't. And why not learn it? For all you know, it could help you down the line, or you could pay it forward. It's a similar argument to being well read, in a sense: you read many different things, you learn about different cultures, different viewpoints. Even if you don't agree with them, you can see things from different perspectives and personas. It's very similar to being well read, but with people. And understanding: hey, Brandon's taken this journey from the UK to San Francisco, I wonder what that was like. And understanding the little things: I know other founders moving here. Where do I live? What area is nice? Where should I get my groceries? And just helping people with that. Because you were there too, you remember. And so that's why I think it's worth taking a step back and understanding: bending the world, it's other human beings. And human beings are beautiful creatures, and we're also ugly creatures too. But at the end of the day, we're all human.

Shamil Malachiyev: Wow, this just took such a different turn. There's just so much to it. This is what I learned early on too, I think mostly about myself. For me, money... we're all going to die one day. What's the money worth? Buying a Rolex, buying a Ferrari: you'll have fun for like two, three months, then what? And then I realized that the whole meaning of life, well, for me anyway, is just playing games that are interesting to you with people that you like. And that's it. All of us are just experiencing this world in different ways. Everybody's playing something that they like. It's about finding your own clique, your own people, and then just doing something that you enjoy with them for 50, 60 years, however long.

Brandon Severin: Exactly. And the other thing is: it may seem like some games are insignificant, but actually I feel almost every game is crucial. You don't need to look at it that way, but in the back of your mind, these small games add up. The games I'm playing now: building a quantum computer and building control software and whatever, with other people. But there was a baby Brandon one day that was playing Monopoly and Pokemon cards, or playing football, or playing rock, paper, scissors. God forbid, playing peek-a-boo as a child, as a baby. And all of those experiences accumulate into the Brandon today. Into Jensen Huang, into Jeff Bezos, into Steve Jobs, into Whitney Wolfe Herd, into Sheryl Sandberg. And that's why you can say it takes a village. You almost don't realize it in the moment.

Shamil Malachiyev: Yeah, looking through the formative years of everything. Because I used to be crazy about Pokemon, and we had these cards. That was a game.

Brandon Severin: Yeah. And it really compounds massively. And not to say you can't learn otherwise. Because: oh, I stole so-and-so's Pokemon card. Well, you keep stealing other people's Pokemon cards. Maybe you get caught, and someone's like: maybe you shouldn't steal Pokemon cards. And then the neural network weights and biases... okay. Sometimes they don't correct. Not the best thing.

Shamil Malachiyev: Talking about this, you've just mentioned something that got me thinking a lot as well, about how neural nets currently are so much like our own biological brains. Can neural nets receive emotions? Most people say: no, no, of course not, they can only simulate something. But then, when you look at what a feeling is: it basically changes your neural connections. Some become stronger, some become weaker. If somebody hits you with an apple, then you're like: okay, apple is probably more towards scary than useful or tasty. You just changed the weights for the word "apple" in your mind, in your vector database. And then when you look at a neural net: if you do something that is harmful, it also adjusts the weights within its neural net, which is pretty much what we call a feeling.

Brandon Severin: Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Before I comment: disclaimer, I'm not a neuroscientist. But I think you're right, there is this kind of learning loop. But at the same time, the initialization of the weights isn't necessarily completely random. Moreover, the learning rate is also adjustable. All these kinds of hyperparameters. And this is very rudimentary, being crude and boiling everything down, but where a machine learner might tune hyperparameters for their network, choosing optimizers and learning rates and things like dropout, for a human being these are all biological things. And biology isn't just code; it's probabilistic code. So there's an element of randomness. Moreover, and I've said that twice now, but it really is moreover: it's real-time feedback. And it's so complex. Fundamentally, it's quantum underlying this thing, so you'd almost need a quantum computer to really get there and simulate that sort of logic. But you can get closer and approximate it.

And you can see it day in and day out, right? Where you feel pain, but then you can train yourself to say: hey, it's only pain. I mean, if we weren't good at that, we wouldn't have amazing special forces and military personnel, or people who get addicted to certain substances or habits. Each time, whatever chemical secretion: oxytocin, dopamine, adenosine; it adjusts, it changes tolerances. Drinking caffeine, these things. And so I think that's part of the score function of, let's say, the reward of your reinforcement learning agent. But you start to realize it's not as simple as: you do this, you get score one. Score one is kind of like 1.2, maybe 0.8; it shoots up this way. And that's just for one narrow problem, but this is happening all the time. And then you realize you can start to control it as well, which is why it's so fascinating and beautiful.

Shamil Malachiyev: Nice conversation. That was the best Saturday conversation I could have.

Brandon Severin: Anytime, anytime. Me too. What a great way to start the day. I'm so happy I woke up for it.