Pete Shadbolt
Pete Shadbolt is a co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at PsiQuantum. He has worked on quantum computing for the last 15 years. Pete has a PhD in experimental quantum photonics from the University of Bristol and completed a postdoc in the theory group at Imperial College in London. In 2016, Pete and his co-founders moved to Palo Alto, California to start PsiQuantum.PsiQuantum’s only goal is to build and deploy a useful, fault-tolerant quantum computer. The company’s photonic approach allows it to leverage high-volume semiconductor manufacturing and existing cryogenic infrastructure to rapidly scale its systems. In 2024, PsiQuantum announced that it will build its first utility-scale quantum computers in Brisbane, Australia and Chicago, Illinois.
Sunrise Sessions
Before they set out to build the world’s first functional quantum computer, Pete Shadbolt and his co-founders were just teenagers, playing video games, experimenting, and dreaming about what was possible. In this deeply personal talk, Pete takes us back to where it all started: a journey of creativity, curiosity, and a belief that the impossible could be engineered into reality. From the spark of an idea to the bold ambition of PsiQuantum, this is a story of friction, perseverance, and the drive to build a technology that could change the world.