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When Thomas Kramer recalls his decision to leave his job with a prestigious consulting firm to start up a tech firm in the final hours of the dotcom boom, he doesn\\u2019t hesitate to underscore his decision\\u2019s questionable timing.

\\u201cThis was when I realized that I would be getting out of consulting at what potentially would have been the worst possible point in time. Everyone could see that the Internet boom was closing, and smart people do what smart people do: They run in the other direction,\\u201d recalls Kramer, now some 20 years later.

Whether it\\u2019s quantum bits, IPOs, or even SPACs, the exciting developments surrounding IonQ are no match for CFO Kramer\\u2019s insightful personal advice and often biting self-reflection.\\xa0

\\u201cTravel is something that you do when you can,\\u201d explains Kramer, who tells us that during those times when his career has dispatched him to different parts of the world, he has frequently combined work and leisure trips.

At one point back in the early 2000s, when he discovered that he was not required to be in Delhi, India, for another 48 hours, the avid traveler made a pit stop in the United Arab Emirates.\\xa0

\\u201cI stopped off in Dubai and then I drove to Oman,\\u201d he reports, \\u201cbecause, hey, when else are you going to get to go to Oman?\\u201d \\xad\\u2013Jack Sweeney

CFOTL:\\xa0Tell us about IonQ \\u2026 what type of company is this?

Kramer:\\xa0This is one that I love to get at cocktail parties because we actually shoot lasers at individual atoms and use these as building blocks to create the computer of the future. And I\\u2019m not kidding about the lasers or the atoms\\u2014this is what we do. We literally manipulate the smallest entities in the universe to create the largest-capacity supercomputers in the world.

Why is this important, because who cares about computers? You can go to Best Buy and buy another one every day. But the problem with computing is that \\u201cmore slow\\u201d hasn\\u2019t been working for a while now. There are just physical limits to how many transistors you can put into a chip, and transistors are the basic building blocks of traditional computers. Transistors or bits are pretty limited in their function, though. They\\u2019ll assume the value of only zero or one, and to paraphrase Katy Perry, they\\u2019re off or they\\u2019re on.

Famously, quantum bits can be both zero and one at the same time\\u2014and also any value in between. This means that they can hold much richer information and therefore be used to compute much, much more complicated problem sets.

I\\u2019ll give you an example. Most UPS drivers can make about 120 deliveries per day. The potential combination of stops is expressed as a mathematical function by multiplying 120 by 119 by 118, and so on. The result far exceeds the age of Earth in nanoseconds. The practical implication of this is that if UPS or FedEx tried to calculate the optimal world for each of their more than 100,000 drivers every morning, all packages would\\u2019ve been delivered weeks ago, before the fastest supercomputer could ever give you the answer.

This is where quantum computers come in. They can handle a much larger data set simultaneously than your traditional computer can. When you go public, it\\u2019s a moment of profound commitment because now you\\u2019re really stuck, now you have to make it work. And that\\u2019s what I want to see happen here. We can go public. We will be trading. But what\\u2019s important is that we can bring out the best computers in the market for decades to come. And we as a finance function can help to make this happen.