Announcing BQP Partners: my and my brother’s new angel-investing venture

Scott Aaronson and his brother announced the launch of BQP Partners, a new angel-investing venture, marking Aaronson's entry into startup investing after years of focusing on academic research in quantum computing and AI. Aaronson explained his previous reluctance to pursue wealth due to fears of compromising his values and self-worth, but he now seeks to balance his academic career with strategic investments.

Announcing BQP Partners: my and my brother’s new angel-investing venture https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9930 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 feeks 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 https://venture.angellist.com/bqp-partners/syndicate —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, BQP Partners is investing in: Oratomic https://www.oratomic.com/ 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 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665 . See here for their Series A announcement this week https://www.oratomic.com/news/SeriesA .- 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 extremely 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.