Announcing BQP Partners: my and my brother’s new angel-investing venture
As I’ve written before, these past couple years I’ve often felt like the last remaining person in either quantum computing or AI who lacked a stake in some startup company whose valuation is right now shooting into interstellar space. My academic colleagues, including the ones who seemed the most singleminded about quantum oracle separations and other gloriously useless pursuits? One by one, like in a zombie movie, I learn that they too have now launched startups, and invariably raised tens of millions of dollars, for the sorts of ideas we might’ve idly traded at coffee breaks back in the day, before getting back to our real work.
So why didn’t I join this rollicking party? Partly because of a lifelong fear that, the instant my self-worth became tied to how much money I made, I’d need to humble myself before people who bluster and bully and lie and hype and conceal … yet who nevertheless succeed at becoming orders of magnitude richer than me. I’ve been terrified of even starting down that road, of whether I’d still be myself at the end of it.
It’s also partly that I can’t stand failure, or regret, or being wrong. Of course, as an academic researcher I also fail, and regret things, and am wrong constantly—but there it feels tolerable, because normally I can tell myself that it’s all just down to my inborn limitations. After all, if I could’ve solved the major open problem that someone else solved, or written the brilliant book that someone else wrote, then presumably I would’ve done it!
Clearly, though, I could’ve mined bitcoin in 2010. I could’ve gotten an early stake in Amazon or Google. It’s not even like those ideas never crossed my mind. I just … didn’t act on them, for some reason. (But even if I had, I’d probably just be full of regret that I hadn’t done even more.) Thus, my only way to avoid paralyzing regrets, has been to tell myself constantly that I’m not in the forecasting or money-making businesseses in the first place.
It helped that, insofar as I’m shallow or covetous, insofar as I’ve desired things of this world rather than insight or eternal truth, it’s never really been money that I cared about, but just being respected and liked. Elon Musk is the richest man on earth, but also one of the most despised—which isn’t a bargain that I could imagine ever appealing to me.
Plus, when I actually meet billionaires, I don’t find myself envious of their mansions or cars or anything else that they have; I don’t feel like such things would make my life any happier. Maybe I slightly envy their ability to fund the causes they care about, or their professional staffs who relieve them of drudgery, but mostly I envy the way their wealth announces, to whatever extent it does: “I was right when others weren’t.” Again, though, I’ve never trusted the world to cause me to be right about the future valuations of companies or anything similar, so I’ve settled for having been right about PostBQP and algebrization and BosonSampling.
The bottom line is that I made a choice decades ago to forgo trying to get rich, no matter how many of my friends did the same, and to strive instead to discover and tell the truth—to be a professor, a blogger, a jokester, and an “objective” arbiter and commentator. “Then, surely, everyone will like me!” my internal monologue went. “Then, surely, they’ll be grateful for all the free service I’ve rendered them—for decades of blogging, without once so much as asking for a donation or running an ad!”
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
As any regular reader will know, my attempts to be loved as a blogger backfired pretty spectacularly. Or rather: they did lead to thousands of strangers liking me (and I’m grateful for every last one of you), but they also led to probably an order of magnitude more strangers hating me, and congregating on Reddit and Twitter and elsewhere to discuss how badly I suck. And of course, trying to shift that balance by writing what people want to hear, rather than what I actually believe, was never within my realistic option set.
In the startup context, it didn’t matter how carefully I avoided taking a direct stake for or against any of the companies I blogged about. People on Twitter simply assumed that I had a stake—for example, that I must’ve shorted D-Wave or IonQ, or invested in their competitors, or had equity in AI companies. For why else would anyone write what I wrote?
Amusingly, my attackers here typically did have precisely the conflicts-of-interest that they falsely accused me of having, but that was never at issue; only my imaginary conflicts-of-interest were. Even as the Scott-haters greedily filled their pockets (or tried to), I alone needed to keep turning my pockets out to prove that they were still empty.
So then, screw it! In partnership with my brother David Aaronson, who’s long done investing professionally, and on David’s guidance and encouragement, I’m hereby embarking on a new policy.
Namely: when I hear about a brand-new startup that sounds relevant to my interests—in quantum, AI, or anything else—and I like and trust the founders (ideally, because of their previous academic research work), David and I will often make a small seed investment if the founders are open to it. Or, of course, we might become advisors or get involved in some other way.
In fact, David and I are launching BQP Partners—the link goes to our AngelList, where you can read about how to invest with us if you’re interested. (See also whether you can spot any differences between David’s writing style and preoccupations and mine!)
So far, David and I are investing in:
- Oratomic (the new neutral-atom quantum computing startup out of Pasadena started by Dolev Bluvstein, John Preskill, and Hsin-Yuan Huang among others, which I previously blogged about here). See here for their Series A announcement this week.
- A non-quantum startup being cofounded by someone whose scientific work I’ve admired. I’ll write more about this one as soon as I’m able to!
I have little doubt that more potential investments will come our way very soon (some, probably, as a direct result of this post).
Crucially, I can handle my burden of regret—the “why didn’t I do this much earlier, if I was going to do it at all?” question—by telling myself that friends of mine were not founding companies left and right until very recently. I can also tell myself that I’m doing this less as a bet about the future (in which case … what if I’m wrong?), than simply as a way to support brilliant colleagues doing things that I genuinely admire.
When I blog about a company, I’ll always disclose if I have a financial position that presents a clear conflict of interest, so you can judge for yourself whether to listen to me. (Although, if that’s the sort of thing you’d demand, then you probably weren’t listening to me in the first place, were you?)
Having reflected on it a lot these past few months, I’m happy with my new policy and with my and David’s new venture, and I’m curious to see where it goes. I’m at peace with the possibility that we’ll lose our shirts, but I’m even at peace with a more disturbing possibility—that we’ll make millions and then people will scream at me online for being a sellout, a hack, and a shill. Those people, as I’ve learned, were going to scream at me anyway.
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Comment #1 July 10th, 2026 at 11:42 am
When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me: “In life, you have to choose between money and God.”
I didn’t become a priest, but I didn’t choose money either. I became a scientist. I think this applies to you and many of the good folks reading this blog.
Comment #2 July 10th, 2026 at 12:15 pm
I am unfortunately getting Newton and the South Sea Company vibes from this.
Comment #3 July 10th, 2026 at 12:16 pm
Nole #1: As I said, I feel like I did choose “God” over money as a teenager, and like I stuck with that choice for decades — even as more and more people who I knew became fabulously wealthy, and even to the point of (effectively) walking past million-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk.
The whole point of this post was to explain how I finally reached a breaking point — namely when, having lived my life this way, I then had to deal with quantum computing speculators on Twitter — people who were clearly just pure grifters and opportunists — assuring the world that my views on quantum computing could be completely discounted, because I must be on the take somehow. The idea that these frauds would make out like bandits from a field that I’d spent decades studying and that they understood nothing about — while I had to hope beyond hope that, if I just took enough additional vows of poverty, the smirking Twitter frauds would stop condemning me so much — well, it was too much for me.
Even now, I’ll still spend my time as a professor, blogger, and researcher, devoting his life to “God”! Just no longer to the extreme of walking past million-dollar bills on the sidewalk. 🙂
Comment #4 July 10th, 2026 at 12:35 pm
Is there a way to invest in BQP Partners to short Oratomic?
Comment #5 July 10th, 2026 at 12:35 pm
will #2: It would certainly make narrative sense if, after watching countless know-nothings profit hansomely from quantum computing hype, the people who actually understand quantum computing finally, reluctantly, dipped their toe into the water themselves … and then they, and only they, got wiped out. That might indeed be what happens in this case. If it does, I guess I’ll at least have the consolation that I spent the first decades of my life correctly.
Comment #6 July 10th, 2026 at 12:38 pm
I am willing to be a beta tester for a quantum computer prior to product release. There is interesting encryption I could target..I mean experiment with.
Comment #7 July 10th, 2026 at 12:40 pm
I don’t begrudge you making some more money (if that’s how this pans out) given all you’ve put into the subject, both research and public outreach. Still I can’t help but feel rather sad you’ve been driven to feel this way.
FWIW I doubt the detractors really are an order of magnitude more numerous (probably more likely the other way around) than the appreciative, though the former may be an order of magnitude louder. Maybe that’s the fault of those of us who do appreciate what you do for not speaking up more. OTOH I’ve never been good at “whoever shouts loudest wins” contests, and I suspect that’s true for many of us…
Comment #8 July 10th, 2026 at 12:40 pm
BasicQuestion #4: No. People accused me for years of shorting D-Wave and IonQ, but I wouldn’t know how to do that and would’ve felt little interest if I did. I’m more comfortable being long anyone who’s trying to solve the actual problems of scalable fault-tolerance and talking about it mostly truthfully, regardless of their (unknowable) chances of success.
Comment #9 July 10th, 2026 at 1:00 pm
flergalwit #7: I, too, constantly feel sad about the state of the world and my powerlessness to change it. There’s no question that being an Internet (semi) public figure for as long as I have has given me a darker view of human nature—and my view of human nature was already quite dark from childhood.
On the other hand, one thing that’s felt 100% right to me every time I’ve found enough strength to do it, is ceasing to beg for approval from people who will hate me regardless.
In the event that David and I do make any significant money from this venture, I hereby commit to donating a large fraction of it to try to fix this broken world.
Comment #10 July 10th, 2026 at 2:45 pm
I have to admit, while reading this I expect it to be a parody, and you’ll be shilling for deliberately absurd made-up startups that accentuate all the silly things real start-ups do. After all, it seemed so uncharacteristic of you to start an angel-investing venture. I was surprised when I got to the end of the post to find nothing absurd at all and all indications that you are serious. Congratulations and good luck on your new venture!
Speaking of which, would you consider investing in my startup? As we all know from Roger Penrose, consciousness arises from uncomputable quantum gravity effects in the brain. In our quantum AI company, we seek to build our own devices which exploit these quantum gravity effects to make a conscious AI. This AI will be capable of ascertaining the truth of Goedel sentences, making it in principle more powerful than any possible LLM. Our main monetization strategy is to use strenuous experiences of these AIs to support a blockchain for our new cryptocurrencies. This combines proof-of-work, with mining only possible for buyers of our conscious quantum gravity computer, and proof-of-stake, as a stake in coherence of the blockchain is guaranteed by the negative qualitative character of the mining computation. We believe the unique epiphenomenal security properties of our scheme will guarantee its success.
Comment #11 July 10th, 2026 at 3:01 pm
I can understand you, in bocca al lupo as we say in Italy! You are surely too negative about the success of your blog—your Trevisan Prize proves that! As an avid reader and big fan of your blog, I am worried: can you blog like you used to, now that you have invested in Oratomic and work for StarkWare? Do they even allow you to write anything that isn’t absolutely positive about the Oratomic quantum processor and the prospects for quantum cryptanalysis in general?
To be totally open: when I read your blog entry “Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools” (before I knew about your new business activities), I was quite surprised that you did not at least mention that the Oratomic approach requires a very large number of spatial position swaps of the qubits to enable the reduction in the number of required qubits. Interesting and promising as their approach is, it really exchanges one formidable problem (the required large number of qubits) with another formidable problem (the required large number of position swaps). This could be an excellent idea, of course.
Comment #12 July 10th, 2026 at 3:09 pm
Itai #10: See that’s precisely it, for 30 years I’ve treated any commercial or investment opportunity as purely a thing to make wisecracks about, before returning to serious work like quantum oracle separations. But then if all my friends are non-parodically, non-ironically making bank, which of us has the last laugh?
As for your quantum microtubule startup, yes, I hereby invest 20 bajillion Uncomputable Bux, transferred to you via wormhole. Let me know if you need more.
Comment #13 July 10th, 2026 at 3:13 pm
InquireR #11: With the exception of the OpenAI thing (which ended two years ago), I continue to turn down any industry opportunities that would put any real restrictions on what I can say on this blog, and more generally, I continue to write what I think about basically everything, so help me God, even when my family and friends fervently wish that I didn’t. Sorry, I thought that went without saying.
Comment #14 July 10th, 2026 at 3:27 pm
Giving money to people who can reasonably be expected to do cool things with the money is good. Good for science, good for scientists, good for the world. This remains true even if the things they’re doing are *so* cool that there’s a chance other people will even pay for the outputs and thus ultimately return the money to you. As for the commenters who are being weird about this, I think that sort of attitude is a drag on science and on society.
Comment #15 July 10th, 2026 at 3:47 pm
Scott #13: It might be hard to predict in advance what could cause you restrictions?
For example if you invest in company A and they put out some dubious work or claims, I can very well believe you’ll call it like you see it, even if it’s bad for your investment.
But now suppose company B, a direct rival to A, puts out something dubious. Mightn’t you now feel a conflict of interest in calling out B the same way you would if you didn’t have a vested interest in A? Do you have a plan for dealing with this kind of situation?
Not trying to be negative, just a little concerned, much like InquireR #11. Ultimately you don’t owe anyone the continuation of the same kind of service you’ve been offering the world for decades, but if I understand correctly it isn’t your intention to change course in this respect.
Comment #16 July 10th, 2026 at 4:08 pm
flergalwit #15: Like I said—I expect that I’ll continue to call things as I see them because I’m constitutionally unable to do otherwise. And I feel like I can’t do so in some particular case, I’ll say that (just like people regularly decline to review papers because a former student is their coauthor, etc).
Comment #17 July 10th, 2026 at 5:39 pm
Thanks Scott, I am relieved that there are no restrictions on your reporting due to your business activities. Given that you surely did a deep-dive diligence into Oratomic’s technology, I am genuinely interested in your evaluation of the staggering number of qubit spatial position swaps (billions of times for each qubit in a full-scale cryptanalytical computation) that their architecture requires. To me, the construction of such a ‘liquid CPU’ seems to be a fundamental hurdle. What is your take on that?
Comment #18 July 10th, 2026 at 6:10 pm
InquireR #17: I mean, doesn’t every scalable neutral-atom architecture involve moving the qubits around a staggering amount — substantially ameliorated by the ability to move them all or most of them simultaneously? How much worse is Oratomic’s architecture than QuEra’s in this regard? Can you point me to anything written on this?
Comment #19 July 10th, 2026 at 8:53 pm
Really, the most important thing money can buy is not having to work on anything you don’t want to work on! If one is purely an independent researcher with a pile of money, there’s no need to get up in the morning to teach intro classes. 😛 I mean, there are other ways to accomplish that, but it sure is a use for it…
Comment #20 July 10th, 2026 at 9:11 pm
Also yeah I also thought this was parody! Well… best of luck to you!
Comment #21 July 10th, 2026 at 10:32 pm
Dear Scott,
Does it mean that you will now be wearing suits? at least some times? [I mean real suits, not tweeds.]
–Ajit
Comment #22 July 10th, 2026 at 10:37 pm
I do have a question though. Suppose that AI goes like, 99th percentile well in the range of predictions of serious optimists. As a consequence there is unprecedented and unimaginable economic, scientific, and technological progress in the next couple of decades. Massive breakthroughs in every field every year. Flying cars, lab-grown organs, fusion, whatever. In that world, what is the role of the quantum computing industry? How much are quantum computers used, and for what? What, in the limit, are you hoping these companies will accomplish?
Comment #23 July 10th, 2026 at 11:47 pm
Hi Scott, congratulations on the new venture!
You have nothing to apologize about.
In fact, given the kind of companies you’re looking into, I imagine that you might actually get intellectual benefits as well. I would not be surprised if you end up learning about a cool problem and writing a paper. And of course the companies will benefit from your advice as well.
I’ve probably been giving you this advice for 20 years, but you can ignore the haters.
Your blog is so popular because the vast majority of people want to hear what you say. And if you wanted to give yourself a gift and turn comments off, then you have my encouragement.
It is true that people often take for granted content they get for free. That’s a problem that open source maintainers also have. But this also means you don’t owe the commenters and sneerers anything. Good luck!!
Comment #24 July 11th, 2026 at 3:58 am
Scott #18: Fair point, the problem is not worse for Oratomic than it is for QuEra. To profit from the low qubit numbers enabled by the use of LDPC codes, the architecture requires an astronomical number of spatial position changes. The neutral-atom researchers have demonstrated solid and efficient methods for moving atom qubits within the circuit, but scaling that up to billions of moves without ruining the QEC seems like an engineering Mount Everest to climb to me. I guess I long for one of your insightful explanations why the prospects of neutral-atom computing seem bright to you.
Comment #25 July 11th, 2026 at 5:09 am
Congratulations on launching BQP Partners! I really appreciated the honesty and self-reflection throughout this post. It’s refreshing to see someone approach angel investing not just as a financial opportunity, but as a way to support talented researchers and innovative ideas while maintaining transparency. Wishing you and David great success as you help bring the next generation of quantum and AI startups to life.
Comment #26 July 11th, 2026 at 6:35 am
It’s quite a privilege to wonder why you didn’t decide to become a billionaire. In your situation i wouldn’t really bother what people online are saying to you. You have a nice family, you are wealthy enough, you are friends with some the smartest people on earth, why care. I don’t really understand the struggle.
Comment #27 July 11th, 2026 at 8:36 am
I’m also a quantum computing guy who wants to get rich. It does seem generally good for one’s well-being. The problem is that QC isn’t very useful yet, so the QC business tends to reward appearance over substance. So maybe my plan should be to work on my quantum showmanship, and put whatever comes out of it into AI or robotics or genetics or something that actually does something.
For me personally the most important investment decision is probably the choice of employer. With the US about to hand $10B to QC companies, there’s a real opportunity out there. Any of the recipient companies would be an improvement over my current one.
Comment #28 July 11th, 2026 at 9:21 am
I am sending good investment karma your way. It’s really not worth anything because there is zero chance I could identify good opportunities in this area. Even if it doesn’t work out I am sure you will learn things that will be of future benefit. Here’s to you rollin in the dough if that is what you want. I can’t wait to see photos of your ranch with jet airstrip in Jackson Hole.
Comment #29 July 11th, 2026 at 9:47 am
R #27: Right, the heart of the problem is that the honest people in quantum computing, seeing all the technical problems that still need to get solved before QC becomes genuinely commercially useful to anyone, find it unseemly to get rich from QC before those problems actually are solved.
But then lots of money flows anyway, and the dishonest, “QCs solve optimization problems by trying every answer in parallel” people gleefully collect as much as they can, leaving only scraps for the honest people.
So, how are the honest people to respond in this situation?
It seems to me like the only sustainable answers look like: find ways to compete with the dishonest people at funding without abandoning their honesty.
There are, of course, countless parallel dilemmas throughout life. Eg, nice guys in their teens and twenties perceive that, before they could possibly be “genuinely worthy” of female affection, at a minimum they’d need to improve themselves in all sorts of ways. That then leaves the assholes, who feel no need to improve themselves and indeed no moral obligations of any kind, to monopolize female affection while laughing about it.
It seems obvious in such a case that the correct countermove for the nice guys can’t be remaining as they are, but it also can’t be turning into assholes themselves. It needs to be some third path, of competing to some extent for women while preserving their fundamental niceness. The only reasonable disputes concern exactly what that third path looks like.
(Some people will object: if lots of women freely choose smirking assholes, then who’s a nice guy to judge those assholes “unworthy” of female affection? Likewise, if lots of customers and investors freely choose to give their money to a quantum-speedups-for-everything charlatan, then who’s a skeptic to judge that charlatan “unworthy” of getting rich? The answer, in both cases, comes from the existence of an objective reality that transcends what anyone believes about it. It’s actually true that the asshole laughs about taking advantage of the women behind their backs, in ways that would repulse the women if they found out. Likewise, it’s actually true that the charlatan’s “quantum solution” will fail to outperform simpler and cheaper classical solutions, and the charlatan is counting on customers failing to understand this.)
Comment #30 July 11th, 2026 at 12:11 pm
Scott#5
It’s all about timing. It’s always the masses that get the short end of the stick, simply because they sit out the boom and try to get in at the end. History is littered with ample examples from tulip boom to real estate. The current AI and QC craze is no different, and unfortunately whoever is trying to enter at this late stage will set another example of this lesson not learnt. And the financial shenanigans will laugh their way to the bank, at the expense of the rest. Of course there are possibilities of finding hidden gems once gold rush is over, but they will be few and far in between
Comment #31 July 11th, 2026 at 12:25 pm
Scott #8 “Clearly, though, I could’ve mined bitcoin in 2010. I could’ve gotten an early stake in Amazon or Google. It’s not even like those ideas never crossed my mind. I just … didn’t act on them, for some reason. (But even if I had, I’d probably just be full of regret that I hadn’t done even more.)”
I am asking because all you missed turned out gold and so being a contrarian. So as they say unless you do something essential about the curse it follows you. You missed D-wave and IonQ too.
Comment #32 July 11th, 2026 at 12:28 pm
It’s called monetization. First you present yourself as uncompromising truth-seeker, and swear to never, ever be evil. Then comes the moment that you think that the price is right, and you sell out. You are not first, you are not last. As they say – cut the bullshit.
Comment #33 July 11th, 2026 at 12:36 pm
Prasanna #30: Well yes, that’s the other reason why I resisted getting involved with this for decades—because I’m repulsed and disgusted by the entire concept of needing to get in on a trend before other people do.
Then again, every time I did think about investing in Amazon or bitcoin or anything else, I had exactly the thought expressed in your comment: “no, it’s too late. I’d be an idiot compared to the people who got in earlier than this.” Crucially, I had that thought even when it was still early enough for me to 100x or 10,000x or whatever my investment. From this, we reluctantly conclude that such thoughts must not be treated as dispositive.
In any case, David and I will be limiting ourselves to very early-stage startups for which we have unique opportunities due to my personally knowing the founders or their work or being in the same social and professional circles.
Comment #34 July 11th, 2026 at 12:57 pm
BasicQuestion #31: In some cases (Google, Amazon), I correctly saw very early the enormous value something had, but didn’t invest for the reasons I’ve already set out at length in this post — because it felt gross, because I figured it was already too late anyway, because I’m terrified of being wrong and of the world being adversarial against me.
In other cases (bitcoin, D-Wave, IonQ), I correctly saw the enormous problems with the claims being made for something. I failed to foresee the enormous valuations the things would acquire anyway, due in large part to tulip-bulb effects.
At least in QC and my other areas of actual expertise, I can’t think of a single case where someone I saw as a charlatan turned out not to be a charlatan, or where something I saw as a devastating technical objection turned out not to be one.
Having said that, if someone believes — as you apparently do — that there’s no reality outside of what the gullible are willing to spend money on, maybe they should indeed bet against anything I bet for and vice versa. They might even get rich that way! After all, we live in a freak timeline where arguably the most transparent fraud and conman in human history is now the president of the US.
In some sense, I can only usefully talk to someone if they share my baseline belief in a reality that still has whatever properties it does even if the market and all the popular people believe otherwise. So that’s what I’ve done in this post.
Comment #35 July 11th, 2026 at 1:03 pm
Adoranna #32: Oh, believe me that if I’d wanted to sell out, it would’ve looked dramatically different from this! I would’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars a decade ago or longer, by telling investors whatever they most wanted to hear about quantum computing, and I would not be spending any time in my comment section arguing with anonymous assholes like you.