John Martinis

went to Berkeley, went back.

I went there as a postdoc and worked with them.

And they were young and unknown at the time.

And people was like, well, you're going to go to Europe and you're not going to get connected to U.S.

science.

But I knew Michelle and Daniela Stebb and Christian Urbino, the people I was working with, were absolutely brilliant.

Okay.

And they've had a very illustrious career.

So I went over there because I knew that was great.

And we continued to do experiments on this.

Yeah.

And then after that, I came back to the US and I worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

And it turns out just down the hall from Dave Wineland and his group who won a Nobel Prize for Atomic Physics for doing quantum computation.

And I worked on some with doing experiments on counting electrons and working for metrology and then did other experiments.

And then in late 90s, I just, again, went all in on building a quantum computer.

There was funding available at that time.

It had progressed enough theoretically that the U.S.

government started funding this to see if people can do it.

I was at UCSB for 10 years or so, which was wonderful, and built up the lab to go from very basic things to building a five and then nine qubit quantum computer.

And then during that time, Google got interested.