I’m going to say something that might ruffle some feathers... but after ten years of hiring engineers in deep tech, someone has to say it.
Too many quantum startups are falling into the "PhD Trap."
They raise a seed round, hire five brilliant academic physicists from top universities, and then wonder why it takes them twelve months to ship a simple interface or run a basic compiler pipeline.
Don't get me wrong... the physics is critical. If you are building quantum hardware or designing new error correction codes, you need deep, specialized academic expertise.
But here is where the wheels fall off... a PhD in quantum physics does not guarantee that someone can write clean, scalable, production-ready code.
