MasterStroke with Monica Enand & Sejal Pietrzak

Quantum Computing - Reshaping the Tech Landscape - Insights from Thomas Kramer

• Guest: Thomas Kramer; Guest Host: Ned Renzi • Season 1 • Episode 27

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Join host Monica Enand and  guest host Ned Renzi for an enlightening conversation with Thomas Kramer, a distinguished CFO known for steering companies like Cvent, Opower, and IonQ through the complex waters of public offerings and technological advancements. 

"If we do not figure out how quantum computing will works our world will eventually be covered with data centers and power plants..." 

Thomas break down  the evolving landscape of quantum computing and its revolutionary potential to reshape our world by leveraging qubits for remarkable power and energy efficiency. Through Thomas’s extensive experience, we gain insights into the profound implications of quantum technology in transforming data centers and energy consumption, a crucial step in addressing future sustainability challenges.

The conversation moves into the intricacies of public markets and career navigation with Thomas, sharing personal anecdotes that underscore the value of humility and mentorship during pivotal career transitions. Reflect on the current challenges within IPOs and liquidity markets, the impact of the SPAC era on public trust, and the emotional nuances behind organizational budgeting decisions. By examining the role of luck, reputation, and networking, we offer valuable perspectives on achieving career success while balancing strategic financial management with personal growth. 

This episode is a wealth of insight  on understanding the intersection of technology, finance, and personal development.



Georgianna Moreland - Creator, Executive Producer & Managing Editor;
Matt Stoker - Editor


Thomas Kramer :

Things move very, very quickly. If we do not figure out how quantum computing will work, the Earth will eventually be covered by data centers and power plants, and we are already today seeing many examples of where quantum computers can outperform classical ones, and what we need now is scale. It's not that we need to prove that quantum computers work.

Georgianna Moreland:

This is Masterstroke with Monica Enid and Sejal Petruzak, and welcome to our special guest host, Ned Renzi. Conversations with founders, CEOs and visionary leaders in technology and beyond. This episode is sponsored by Enjoy the Work. For over a decade, they've helped more than 300 startup founders build successful companies. Many have reached unicorn status, while others have secured meaningful exits. Founder growth is key to company growth, and Enjoy the Work focuses on developing both your leadership and operational skills. From go-to-market strategies to raising capital and scaling teams, they partner with founders ready to take their companies to the next level. Learn more and schedule an intake session at enjoytheworkcom.

Monica Enand:

Welcome to Masterstroke. We have a very exciting pod today. Thank you so much to Ned Renzi, who is co-hosting with me today. Ned, thank you so much for being here.

Ned Renzi:

It's my pleasure, Monica.

Monica Enand:

All right, ned. We have a really exciting guest who's going to take us into a very serious dimension, so we're going to learn a lot of things today, I think. So I'm going to let you introduce the guest, because you have been a longtime friend of Thomas Kramer. Tell us who Thomas Kramer is.

Ned Renzi:

That's right. I think I've known Thomas maybe about 25 years or so. We met when he was a CFO and co-founder at Cvent, which was a leading SaaS company in the event management space. That company ultimately went public and exited for well over a billion dollars and then got taken private by Vista, which. So he has that in common with you, monica. Yes, after Cvent he became the CFO at Opower, took them public again greater than a billion market cap and then he stayed through the sale and integration with Oracle, which I suspect was a lot of fun, and then currently he's the CFO to quantum computing company IonQ, which I know Monique has a lot of questions on quantum computing, and he took IonQ public at $2 billion valuation. So Thomas is three for three in successful exits.

Ned Renzi:

Prior to all that, he served time at Accenture, bcg and the military, and I used served time with Accenture and BCG because it's probably just the same as serving time in the military. So Thomas jokes he's survived three recessions and he's currently looking for the fourth. So I'd like to get some predictions from you on that. In terms of background, he has a Master in Science and Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics and Stockholm School of Economics, an MBA from Harvard, and has been named CFO of the Year in Washington DC several times. I'd also say personally, as I've gotten to know Thomas, he has excellent taste in wine and I think it's okay to say I could give you a budget and you buy cases and just have them shipped to me, which are still some of the best wines I've ever had, and actually at reasonable prices. So I'm just dropping some of those nuggets in in case Monica wants to take the conversation in that direction.

Monica Enand:

Oh well, we could talk for a very long time about all kinds of fun things, I'm sure, but what I really? Thomas, thank you so much, first of all, for being here on Masterstroke. Welcome to the show. We're really happy to have you here.

Thomas Kramer :

Well, thanks for having me. Monica and Ned, thank you so much for giving us your money. Almost nobody else wanted to give us money at Cvent and we almost went under, but you saved us. So thank you very much.

Ned Renzi:

Yeah, I joked in the early days before success was obvious. I'm going to look really smart or really stupid in a decade and, thanks to you and the rest of the team, it turned out on the smart side.

Monica Enand:

Oh, I think you've done a lot of smart things, ned, and definitely backing Reggie and the team at C-Bent and Thomas was incredible. Watching that. Your success, thomas, is just incredible. But you know it's one thing to have one successful exit, one successful, you know, go public billion dollar valuation, but your track record is amazing. You know I feel like next time I start a company, can you come join and help me take it public Not that I'm going to start a company, I'm not going to do that, not again. I'm very interested. You're working on IonQ, which is quantum computing. Can you explain, kind of the layperson, four dummies what is quantum computing?

Thomas Kramer :

What is quantum computing is that it represents a new type of supercomputers that is just vastly more powerful and also more energy efficient than what classical computers represent. Instead of using transistors, you use qubits, so a quantum bit, and instead of the transistors that we know, which are like light bulbs they're 0 or 1, a qubit, a quantum bit, can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. They can also be any number between 0 and 1,. They can also be any number between zero and one, including negative one. In fact, it's a sphere of numbers. But the truth is that if we do not figure out how quantum computing will work, the Earth will eventually be covered by data centers and power plants, and that's really not a great feature feature. So that's sort of a cop-out, because quantum computing is something that goes back to 1900. It stems from a field of physics called quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics is a different way of looking at things. Many people think that one plus one should always equal two, and we have a perfect way of doing it because it is that way. It isn't that way. If you look outside, there are no numbers of nature. We made them up and quantum mechanics is a different system that explains the universe, and in many ways it explains it better than our classical ways and digital ways, and in many ways it's more efficient at getting to certain solutions. And so it's been around for, you know, over 100 years. Albert Einstein first tried to prove that it didn't exist, and he then got around to saying well, it does. I can't tell you why, but we can observe that it does, and this is what he famously called spooky action at a distance, because he could observe that two elements knew about each other, and even when he changed one, even if they're kilometers apart, at a speed that's faster than light, the other element would know what the first one was doing, and they were not connected by any wires. And so that was his um. He admitted defeat and will go on to do many other great things. It wasn't until 1981 when some other famous physics geek called Feynman issued the statement that nature isn't classical Damn it, it's quantum classical. Well, damn it, it's quantum.

Thomas Kramer :

What can you do with a quantum computer? The best example is probably something called the traveling seismon, which has to do with how can you get to the most stops. If you're going somewhere, and if you think about a FedEx driver, he or she has to make 120 stops a day. That is only because of our eight-hour workday, but you think, when you have this limitation, that the great minds at FedEx stack your car for you and give you a list of how you can make the most efficient route between your various stops. It turns out they can stack your car but they can't figure out the most efficient route.

Thomas Kramer :

The reason for this is that if you want, with a classical computer, to figure out what is the best route, you have to figure out all the possible routes and how long that would take, and then you pick the fastest one. Well, how many possible routes are there between 120 stops? This is what we know from high school math. It's a factorial, and so, in order to figure out how many there are, it's 120 minus one, so it's 119 times 118, times 117, and so forth, all the way down to one.

Monica Enand:

The number gets pretty large, pretty quickly.

Thomas Kramer :

It is larger than the age of the Earth in nanoseconds, and so a classical computer will not be able to calculate this before all the packages have been delivered, a long time ago. What a quantum computer does? Instead of doing the sequence, it calculates how long it takes for every route at the same time, so it pushes it through simultaneously, and what comes out on the other end is a probability distribution of what is most likely to be the right route.

Monica Enand:

You paint an amazing future and I definitely like your future where everything's perfectly optimized and I get my items exactly when I want them and quickly and efficiently, and we do not cover the world with data centers. What I want to know is is this like science fiction that is going to happen, like in my children or my grandchildren's timeline, or you know? Is this something that you think quantum computing would be broadly commercialized in my lifetime?

Thomas Kramer :

Oh, 100 percent. Things move very, very quickly. They do Absolutely lifetime. Oh, 100, things move very, very quickly, they do absolutely. But we were invited to the white house recently for a quantum summit, and so were all the other quantum manufacturers, and asked just that question so when it is quantum gonna hit, like just main mass adoption? And depending on who you are, so Microsoft would say well, around 30 years from now, and IBM would say around 20 years from now, and Google would say the same and we're saying in a couple of years.

Thomas Kramer :

So when you ask the question of when is quantum going to reach commercialization, you need to insert a quantifier on your type of hardware, because if your hardware isn't up to it, it's going to take much longer. And Microsoft is famously still looking for their qubit, which is the basic building block of a quantum computer. So obviously they can't, which is the basic building block of a quantum computer, so obviously they can't build quantum computers. But we are already today seeing many examples of where quantum computers can outperform classical ones, and what we need now is scale. It's not that we need to prove that quantum computers work.

Monica Enand:

That is fascinating and I am so excited about that future. If you think about in our lifetimes what Moore's Law has done for us and the technology and where we are in the world and all the benefits that we've had from. If you think about the beginning of the transistor probably in 1970 or maybe around then to now, with it shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and all of the amazing technological advancements, this kind of takes it a whole different step and then you know you can see another ushering in a new era.

Ned Renzi:

Thomas, I'm going to take the conversation in a slightly different direction. Over the years, you've been gracious to me in sort of serving as a mentor advisor to some of the executives I've been working with, and something I admired about you is how you just I don't know if level up is the right word, but you started at startups and you've gone through the hyper growth phase. You've gone through the IPO, the acquisitions, multiple times and in your current role, right so like how, how did you manage your personal development to sort of level up, you know, for every next phase of growth of the companies you've worked with?

Thomas Kramer :

That is an excellent question, the um. The truth is that, uh, companies are organisms just like people, but they grow a lot faster. The average company hits prime. Well, most companies never get out of the start and so they're dead by year three. But the average company probably hits prime somewhere between 10 and 20 years and by 30 they're over. The secret to actually surviving is just to be humble and ask.

Thomas Kramer :

And when I was going public with Opar in the field that I knew very little about, and so I just picked up the phone and called other cfos who had gone public in that field and I said, hey, what do you think I should do? And I remember one of them, um, who? I called her? And I said I was on my way to San Francisco and she said well, why don't I just pick you up at SFO and I can drive you to your hotel and we can talk in the car. And then on the way she stopped over somewhere and we had lunch and there's this brother-sisterhood of CFOs of like. We all know who scary is and so we help, yep.

Ned Renzi:

That is really important, that's a great example of just sort of asking for help. It's one of the things I found when I moved to the Bay Area is there was just a culture of pay it forward, that somebody had helped that person, so they're willing to pay it forward and just continue. Well, I think it's important to have that beginner's mind like that you, they're willing to pay it forward and just continue.

Monica Enand:

Well, I think it's important to have that beginner's mind, like that you're not afraid to say, hey, I know how to take an event management company public, but I don't know how to do this, and I, you know, I'm not afraid to just ask. So I think that's really.

Thomas Kramer :

Well, I know little. I grew up on a wet piece of rock in Northern Europe, and so my entire country has 5 million people, and we know, all of us, that if you don't adapt to the rest of the world, well, you're not going to go far.

Ned Renzi:

So, thomas, while you've leveled up your career I know there's times in between some of these where you took time off you mountain bike, you skied, you ate and drank your way around the world but then you kind of decided to jump back in the game and sort of maybe talk to us a little bit about how you thought about those transitions at those points in life and how do you think about your next act, when to decide how to decide to get back in the game or not first I will say that I skied 30 days last season um so it's possible to have a work life balance.

Thomas Kramer :

Um, but that said, after old power I took roughly five years off. I served on boards and, you know, traveled around and did this and that I was pretty happy. I was the only board. I will admit that. And then NEA, who's backed all of my three companies, called and said that IMQ was going to go public and if I wanted to maybe consider taking them public. And I asked them how much revenue do you have? And when the answer was zero, I said this has been a great call, but I've got to go.

Monica Enand:

I was wondering about that.

Thomas Kramer :

And then I felt bad. The next day I called my friend back and said hey, you know, I'll speak to your CEO. And then I spoke to the CEO and I still said no. But then the rumors come out that they're still going public, they're using an interim CFO, which, monica, you know what it takes to go public. And so that felt a little sketchy and I said I'd be happy to mentor this guy and just help along, be consultant, whatever.

Thomas Kramer :

And then you know, and I left this as a voicemail and then 40 seconds later the guy called back and go, you invented this guy. Who do you want to be this guy? And so I was suckered in, partially also because the person who first funded this company was Harry Waller and he was my best man at my wedding and, uh, I was in his, and so, uh, the last, the last company he actually invested in, was I am here and he was a um. It was a physic physics major in college and on the weekends he read physics papers and he saw this great paper by two professors, johnson Kim and Chris Monroe, and he just drove down to Duke from their office and said you have to do this. This reads like a business plan. I'm going to fund you and that's how imq started.

Monica Enand:

And so when age what, I realized that I'm like, okay, I should probably take them public, because it was a great connection to this company yeah, I know being with the people that you admire and respect is huge and and you know it's such a rare story to hear about academics writing a paper and somebody saying that reads like a business plan, like that's a pretty unusual story. And you know you talked about going public. We've been talking about going public and over our careers the three of us we've seen exit windows come and go, but it kind of feels different now. I mean there are a lot fewer public companies than there used to be. It's unclear that there's even like an attitude in DC towards tech M&A that is friendly. It seems maybe possibly hostile and the IPO bar seems really high. And the IPO bar seems really high. How do you see liquidity markets kind of evolving, especially with private equity and growth equity firms providing liquidity?

Thomas Kramer :

How do you see that over the next few years? You know there's an old truism that good companies can always go public, and what's happening is that it's becoming harder for more peripheral companies who have a harder story to tell. But we should also be aware that we did this to ourselves. What happened in the SPAC era was a travesty of so many companies that had no business being public and they went out and they abused the trust that the public has in the system and in going public. I hope that this will change and I think it will change. We've also gone through COVID and we've gone through we're still going through two international and military conflicts. That interrupts a lot of things around the world, including the Odessa exchange Talk to me about ordering lasers, for instance, from the other side of the world and so these things tend to come and go. I both hope and I believe that it will come back.

Ned Renzi:

Look, I think it's fair to say that throughout history, these macro situations come and go, whether they be wars or recessions or whatever. However, you know the metrics do seem to have moved right. Like you know, monica's brother it was a founder who I invested in and we took his company public in 99 at 29 or $30 million in revenue, right, and you had small boutique banks that would track them and make a market and trade and provide analyst support and all that kind of stuff, right. And it just feels like you know, you know, I don't know, notwithstanding, with zero revenue. It just feels like if you're a revenue generating company, it feels like you know you have to be in the hundreds of millions of revenue to be considered for an IPO and a roadshow to get the banks to sign up these days. I mean, how do you view that?

Thomas Kramer :

Well, ned, we're both old. What is the current value of $20 million in 1999? And we're also remembering the outliers. The norm used to be back when cement was going public and opar, like you need to get to $100 million the year of when you go public. That was just a metric, and then nowadays it feels like it's $200. So, yeah, it is becoming harder, but that doesn't mean well, actually, that might be a good thing. Harder, but that doesn't mean well, actually, that might be a good thing, because if you don't have to deal with the SEC and quarterly reporting, you have the beauty of just thinking more long term.

Thomas Kramer :

And because somewhere along here and I don't know exactly when this happened, but an IPO used to be a fundraising event. You addressed a public market so you could get money. That's almost never the case now. When you go public, your job is actually to transition your shareholder base from people who like to invest in private companies to people who like to invest in public, and it has very little to do with fundraising, except for the SPAC era, where what they promised was a way to get funding, and some say quickly, some say cheap. To me, this backup process felt exactly like the IPO process, but it's not clear how we think about it. And if you can go private longer and you're able to fundraise, I mean, I would actually prefer that, except that from a societal perspective, I think there's a lot of good sunshine in being public, so that you're forced to follow similar rules, so you can compare one company to another. But I think that the rising bar for going public part of that is just also a reflection on the economy being there.

Ned Renzi:

Yeah, look, I think on one hand you make some valid points on like because we play in the private markets game, so we are beneficiaries of that. When I think about the general public, like my dad, my brother, who you know are public servants they have public pension funds who can't really, you know they're accessing these private companies through very high cost vehicles, right, and paying much higher fees and things like that than they would if it was public. You know you're a part of an ETF where the light's shining in as you speak, and so my sense is there's probably fewer people who are benefiting by some of these trends. Do you see it that way? I would know.

Thomas Kramer :

I would have to go out and look. The truth is, if you look at the IPO as an exit, it's better to exit through a sale than through an IPO, and whether people need to invest in these smaller companies, I don't know. Actually, I know that that's probably not a good idea for most people because they don't have the ability to actually figure out what's going on, and in that respect, it's better that they're public, because there is some screening functions that happen when you force people to follow the same rulebook.

Ned Renzi:

We joked earlier that kind of referenced. You know you're looking for your fourth recession. I know you and I were involved during what I'll call like the first recession in my career and we kind of had to make some drastic moves to what I call default survival mode above any other goals for the company. Like if you were a CEO or CFO right now in some of these tech companies, what would you do to prepare your company in case a recession hits? Well, the best?

Thomas Kramer :

preparation is to load up on money. So the golden rule is that, for me at least, if somebody shows up on your doorstep with two suitcases full of money, take them, because you never know when that situation comes back again. However, from an operator's point of view, I think the best preparation for a recession is to run a good company and to be I was going to say cheap, but you can't always be cheap. You know it's not necessarily cheap or frugal. It is investing in what matters.

Ned Renzi:

And so running a tight shop. Are you an advocate of almost like annually doing a zero-based budget approach and just start from the ground up, line item by line item, every year, every couple of years? Like, how do you think about that?

Thomas Kramer :

So somewhere between a zero-based budget and KTLO, keeping the lights on Because there are. There's a difference between marketing and be legal and, like G&A, overall, I have to pay rent. I don't have to really think about it that much. However, it pays to pay attention to the rent and things like insurance. It's easy to forget about it. So if you don't have a list and go through that, you've done it all. Some version of Cerebes should be done. I remember when I started at Opar, the budgets were created by taking one month in Excel and then the next cell was previous cell times 1.04. And then you just dragged it across and now you had a whole budget. That meant absolutely nothing.

Monica Enand:

Yeah, everything was just going to grow by 4% every year, right?

Thomas Kramer :

So you do have to think, and we're actually right now going into our budgeting session at IONQ and it's a massive undertaking and you have to justify what you need. And we got together and then we have to decide whether we need all of that. And it's funny when you do budget cuts before the budget's even approved, because they start at a high number, it's too high, and so we cut it down and people feel this intensely oh, I lost something or somebody got fired, but these are just numbers on a page and nobody's gotten fired yet and if you do this right, you won't have to fire anybody. The most harrowing experience professionally for me was when we had to fire 78% of the workforce at C-Bell.

Thomas Kramer :

Oh, my goodness, and we literally had the discussion of hey, should we just let everybody be around for one and a half more months we have a great party, and then we even go home around for one and a half more months, we have a great party, and then we even go home or should we do the responsible thing and cut as hard as we could so that we could have jobs for a few people and that we could honor the commitments we made to our investors and keep trudging on? But that trudging wasn't fun. That was three years misery and we were just too young and naive to know that we could just throw it all in and leave. We had to make it work. And again, thank you to Neff for sticking with us, because I know that probably wasn't fun from the outset either.

Ned Renzi:

Burn the boats kind of strategy.

Monica Enand:

Yeah, it sounds like you've had some crazy experience. I can't imagine what it's like to have to let 78% of your team go just to keep the lights on, as you said, and survive another day, because really what it's about is just can you survive? Can you continue to survive until something can change in the market, the market that your product, your fit, can take hold, that your product, your fit, can take hold? So kind of on a personal level, what I wonder is you've had these great successful exits. I'm sure there were fun days and then some not so fun times, but you always choose to get back into it and I wonder how do you think about a next act, about a next act? Um, and how should somebody think about, like, what are the criteria and how how do they decide what to do for a next act?

Thomas Kramer :

hashtag asking for a friend, thomas, not not at all I'm asking for myself at all well, um, I took two days off between BCG and Cvent, and then I took two days off between Cvent and OBAR. Oh my gosh. Then my friend he was a mentor to me said that's not smart. So I took five years after OBAR.

Thomas Kramer :

Five years, five years. I mean I kept busy and I sat on boards and whatnot. Five years. And I just, I mean I kept busy and I sat on boards and whatnot, uh, but people kept calling and asking hey, do you want to be cfo of this, you want to be cfo of that? And it's, the pitch is always the same. We have this great sass company what good funding, growing fast. We don't go public and none of the recruiters ever say what these companies do is like hey, can you come look at this money for us? Right, that doesn't interest me. So I'm an economist at heart. I like to make things work and I have to be interested in what it is that we're doing Now. Grand at Sealand was perhaps not the most intricate business idea, except that when we started Sealand, only 20% of Americans had email.

Ned Renzi:

Oh, yeah, it was all snail mail. Running events was horrific logistically back then.

Thomas Kramer :

And so if you get to be part of building something new and fun, that's what it's about, and I just really like what I'm doing, and it took a while for me to find something that was worth it, and it was completely random how I found it. There are many others who will correctly tell you that the best way to do this is to get up every morning and look at 10 opportunities and not pick any of them until you get convinced that this is the one. I've been pretty lucky throughout my entire career and just things present themselves and I've said, yes, I'll take that. Thank you.

Monica Enand:

I don't think you're. I understand what you mean by you think you've been pretty lucky. I don't think it's just luck. I think it's, you know, establishing a reputation, a track record. I think it's establishing a reputation, a track record, people who know you, a network of people who want to work with you again, who hear about your work.

Thomas Kramer :

So obviously, yes, there's a little bit of luck involved in all of our lives, but it sounds like you've done a lot right to get there. Well, luck does favor the prepared, but there are so many ways that you can be successful. There isn't one way, so it's hard for me to say you have to do X, y or Z, but what I do know is that you should love what you do, because if you don't, there are so many other things you can do that you should be doing one of those well, thomas, this has been a great conversation.

Monica Enand:

We learned about quantum computing, we learned about public markets and what it's like to be in fast-growing startups and m&a um. So thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate, really appreciate you sharing your wisdom.

Thomas Kramer :

Monica and Ned thanks very much for having me. I give my best to achieve a sense that there might be a connection there.

Monica Enand:

He's my brother, and that has been our episode of Masterstroke. Another episode of Masterstroke. Thank you to Thomas Kramer, thank you so much to Ned Renzi and to Georgiana Moreland, our executive producer.

Georgianna Moreland:

Thank you for listening today. We would love for you to follow and subscribe. Monica and Sejo would love to hear from you. You can text us directly from the link in the show notes of this episode. You can also find us on the LinkedIn page at Masterstroke Podcast with Monica Enid and Sejo Petrzak. Until next time.