An Intro By Zachary Ronski

It's spring in Toronto, and the city is coming alive. The patios are packed, people are back on the streets, and there's that unmistakable energy that only shows up when the cold finally breaks and everyone remembers why they love this place. The startups are scaling, the capital is moving, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, a Toronto company just rang the bell.

I've spent my career working alongside founders. The ones who bet everything on an idea, who build through the uncertainty, who stay the course when nobody else believes yet. That's the story I'm always chasing. And when a founder takes their company public — when the market finally catches up to the vision they've been carrying for years — there is no better validation of that risk. Xanadu's IPO is exactly that kind of moment. The kind that reminds you why the risk was always worth it. The kind of win that gives every founder still in the dark something to run toward.

But what I've always been more fascinated by than the outcome is the person behind it. What does it actually take to run a company like this? One where the stakes are this high, the timeline this long, and the science this hard?

That's what this conversation is about.

How Christian Weedbrook builds his team. How he thinks through impossible problems. What Toronto means to him. And what it looks like to bet everything on light.

To learn more about Xanadu.

The Interview With Christian Weedbrook.

The Unconventional Path

Q: Your path to founding Xanadu went through some unexpected detours — film school, stocking shelves at 4am, making heat packs. Looking back, what did those years teach you that a conventional academic path never could have?

Christian: That path really taught me grit and resilience. At the time, I didn't have a clear direction, but I kept coming back to this idea of "why not me?" which, in hindsight, is a big part of entrepreneurship. It gave me a sense of audacity and belief that you can build something meaningful even if your path isn't linear. Those years helped me get comfortable with uncertainty, which is something you deal with every day as a founder.

Why Toronto

Q: Toronto has its own energy when it comes to building — it's not Silicon Valley, it's not New York, it's something different. What has this city given Xanadu that you don't think you could have found anywhere else?

Christian: There's always been a sense that we have something to prove compared to places like San Francisco, and that drives people to build differently. At the same time, the city attracts world-class researchers from around the world, which is critical in a field like quantum computing. That mix of ambition and talent is something that's hard to replicate elsewhere.

The Problem Worth Solving

Q: Quantum computing promises to change everything from drug discovery to climate modelling to AI. In your mind, what is the single most important problem this technology will solve — and what is the milestone that will make you look back and feel like it was all worth it?

Christian: For me, the biggest milestone is when quantum computing becomes scalable — when we're stacking quantum systems in server racks and running them like a data centre. Solving that unlocks everything else, from drug discovery to climate modelling to potentially more efficient AI. It's really about moving from theory to something that can operate at an industrial scale. That moment represents a new phase of human technology, similar to the early days of the internet, where the real impact comes from what people build on top of it.

The Open-Source Bet

Q: You made PennyLane fully open-source and hardware-agnostic — meaning it works across the entire industry, including on other systems. What was the thinking behind that decision, and what did you want it to do for the ecosystem?

Christian: Open-source is often where the best ideas come from, because you're not limiting who can contribute. When you open things up, you invite a global community to push the technology forward faster than any one company could on its own. In quantum computing, collaboration is especially important because the problems are so complex. We wanted PennyLane to become a foundation for the ecosystem — something that helps researchers and developers build, experiment, and innovate across different hardware platforms, not just ours.

Going Heads Down

Q: After Borealis and the cloud launch, you made the decision to go heads down and pull back from public access entirely. At a moment when competitors were racing for users, what gave you the conviction that was the right call?

Christian: We made a deliberate decision to focus on building the right product for the long term rather than optimizing for short-term access. In a field like quantum computing, it's easy to get caught up in momentum, but what really matters is making sure the technology is ready to deliver real value. Right now, we're focused on our next generation of fault tolerant systems, and that's where we believe the biggest breakthroughs will come from.

Life After the IPO

Q: Taking Xanadu public is a significant milestone — but it also means a new kind of accountability and a much broader audience watching every move. How has that changed the way you lead, and what do you want that new audience to understand about where you are in the journey?

Christian: Going public hasn't really changed how we lead. The way we've approached building the company is what's gotten us here, and that doesn't change overnight. We have ambitious goals, but I've always believed it's important to enjoy the process and build something meaningful with people who are genuinely passionate about the work. We've grown to a team of nearly 300 incredibly talented people who care deeply about pushing this technology forward. Public funding is really just a means to an end — helping us get to scalable quantum computing faster.

Where It Gets Hard

Q: Most people assume the biggest barrier to quantum computing is the science. But you're building something that has never existed before — new hardware, new software, new manufacturing, new markets, all at once. Where is the problem actually hardest, and what does solving it require that the world doesn't fully appreciate yet?

Christian: The hardest part is definitely the hardware, especially when it comes to fault tolerance. Quantum systems are incredibly sensitive to noise and errors, and getting reliable, repeatable results is one of the biggest challenges in the field. What people often underestimate is how much engineering and systems integration are required to make all of this work at scale. We're building an entirely new computing stack from the ground up.

Who Makes the Team

Q: When you're building a company at this level, every hire matters. What are the specific values and qualities you look for in the people you bring in — and what's the one thing that will make you pass on someone no matter how impressive they look on paper?

Christian: For us, it comes down to passion and a long-term mindset. Because you won't see results in weeks or sometimes even years, people need to be motivated by the mission and comfortable working on problems that take years to solve. We look for people who are curious, collaborative and willing to keep learning as the field evolves. No matter how impressive someone looks on paper, if they're not aligned with that mindset or don't genuinely care about what we're building, it's not the right fit.

Fello's Thoughts

Moments like this matter beyond the headline. When a Toronto company goes public on the back of a decade of hard, unglamorous work — the late nights, the near misses, the years of building something most people couldn't even explain — it sends a signal to every founder in this city who is still in the dark. That it's possible. That staying here was the right call. That the world doesn't only crown winners from one zip code.

We need more of this. Not just the IPOs, but the conviction that precedes them. The founders who pick the hardest problems on purpose and refuse to leave.

As a bonus — we've had the pleasure of working with Xanadu, and if you'd like a sneak peek inside the lab and the operation, we've got you covered. Watch below.

The Architecture of Light

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2026