The Courage Behind a Deep Tech Breakthrough

[00:00:03] Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Courageous Choice. It's my pleasure today to introduce Dr. Raj Dutt. Raj is a scientist and technology entrepreneur. He's also the founder and CEO of AFIC Corporation, whose customers have included the U.S. military and the intelligence community. I was really excited about having Dr. Raj join us because he brings a different lens both to leadership, innovation, and what a courageous choice means.

[00:00:30] Dr. Raj was born in Calcutta, India. He grew up with a remarkable mentor, his uncle, whose physicist work with Albert Einstein gave us the Bose-Einstein statistics and the class of particles that we now call Bose. Inspired and tutored by his uncle, Dr. Raj built his life around particle physics, and he's doing incredible things that we get to dive in today. Welcome, and thank you for joining us.

[00:00:54] Welcome to this episode of The Courageous Choice. I'm extremely excited this morning. As you can tell, we have a really special guest, and it's different than our normal kind of HR bend. So I'm excited, and I hope you're as excited as I am. Today's guest is Dr. Raj Dutt. He's a scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur who has spent decades pursuing a problem long before the market fully understood its significance.

[00:01:19] His career has taken him from India to some of the most advanced scientific and defense environments for the United States, from researcher to founder. For more than two decades, he's been working on the frontier of integrated photonics, using light to move information faster and more efficiently as computing demands continue to accelerate.

[00:01:40] Today, as AI, high-performance computing, energy constraints, and national security converge, the problem Raj committed himself to solving has become increasingly urgent. This conversation is about the science, but even more, it's about the long courage behind a breakthrough. What it takes to see possibility early, to stay committed when the world has not yet ready, and lead when the moment finally arrives.

[00:02:09] Welcome, Raj. Thank you so much for being here this morning. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was both an honor and a pleasure to be here with you, Jamie. We ran into each other, and we were seated next to each other, and I said, what an intelligent woman, and I was just impressed the hell out of me. And so, thank you. Thank you. It's an honor. Yeah. There's sometimes when you sit next to someone and you don't know why, and I very much felt that way as well. So, thank you for that.

[00:02:34] We just had a great conversation, and your story struck me in many ways. I talk a lot about courage. I talk a lot about leadership, and I talk about transformation and things changing. And, you know, we're actually going to have a pretty interesting conversation starting from when you were much younger to what's happening today. And it really hits all those points for me. So, I'm excited.

[00:03:00] So, when you think about going back to the beginning for people who don't yet know you, maybe tell us a little bit about your story coming up. It was an amazing childhood. I was born into a very interesting family, very intellectual, but also very conservative. Fortunately for me, my father was a fighter pilot and flew for the Indian Air Force.

[00:03:23] So, my childhood was going from one city to the other, wherever he was posted at that time. His squadron was posted. So, I had an interesting educational experience because in those days, and still today, there were schools. The schooling system was really created and developed by the British system. So, it was the Catholic school or the Protestant schools.

[00:03:50] And so, I went to my first school was St. Jesus and Mary. I graduated from my senior Cambridge from St. John's High School. So, it wasn't a typical Indian upbringing because there was a lot of Western influence to it. So, I found that that has helped me in life. Even the nature of moving around and having to assimilate into new environments as a young person, I can imagine, would develop certain skills.

[00:04:18] Yes. As a matter of fact, it was at times challenging because I went to a new environment. The country of India is like everything is a new environment. We have 22 languages, you know, and hundreds of dialects. The language is different and you had to assimilate to that. But fortunately, the theme was always English.

[00:04:39] And the Irish Brothers school system where I grew up, the authentication and enunciation and the formulation of the words had to be strict and correct. So, you needed to know the English language pretty well, even though my mother tongue is Bengali and I came from there. When did you know you were interested in science and really start out on that path?

[00:05:06] The first few years of my life, I was very sickly. I was constantly getting ill and sick and never could get my education going. And then when I hit the seventh grade, we all came together. It was like, wow, I really have talent. And so, I decided to focus on my studies. And the results start showing. And fortunately, it was at a very young age.

[00:05:36] I graduated from high school when I was 15. And that set me on a great path and great journey. So, we haven't shared anything yet about your uncle. Maybe you can share a little bit about that and what being exposed, just the role that, you know, to him early in life may have had for you. It's a great question. It has its negative and positive.

[00:05:58] So, when you are a halfway decent student and the family figures out that you are, you get pushed more and more into doing better. And I was introduced to my uncle in a profound way because he was then and still a name brand. Right. Satyendra Nath Bose wrote the Bose-Einstein theory.

[00:06:22] And that was unique to have known that Albert Einstein, who had already won the Nobel Prize, and wrote the general theory. And he had this young man in Calcutta, India, some place on the other side of the world, read all his derivations and did some corrections and sent it to the Royal Society.

[00:06:48] The British Commonwealth was the center of power and intellectual capital. And they turned it down. They turned it down. My uncle had the gumption to actually send it to Einstein in, I think, in England and Germany. Einstein was going back and forth with England and Germany. This is pre-World War II. And Einstein read it and he said, you're right.

[00:07:15] And so, they said, let's do the following. Let's translate it into German and publish it in the German Royal Society publication. And they did that. And he had the wherewithal and the sophistication to give him the credit. And it became the Bose Einstein special theory of relativity. And all those fundamental particles are called bosons after him. And the big one was the Higgs boson that won the Nobel Prize within one year after his discovery.

[00:07:45] That's amazing. And half the fundamental particles in the universe that defines us, this universe and all the universes we have are bosons. So, no pressure as a little kid. No, no pressure. So, I had no childhood. So, there was no childhood. It was hit the books and do well. And one of the things he said is, you never make any money earning a living being a physicist. What are the odds?

[00:08:08] So, he said, go and sit for the joint entrance exam to enter IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology. And that's a tough call. That's probably the hardest entrance exam in the world. Admission is less than 1%. And you have a nation which is the largest population and every kid wants to get in. And so, I sat for the exam and fortunately did well enough to do well. You certainly earned it.

[00:08:36] So, you went, you had this incredible and challenging education and then eventually came to the U.S. to continue and build your career. As much as it is eventual, it was there from the time I was a young kid. Like you knew? I knew that this is where I had to be because in the earlier days, going to England was the thing. The British educational system, Oxford and Cambridge.

[00:09:05] I gave my senior Cambridge. I had a good shot at going to Cambridge University. But if you really look at the history and the evolution of a lot of the science at that time, it was all going to America. The best universities were here. And why not? Did it feel natural or did it feel like you were making a, did it take courage or did you just? It took more than courage. Yeah.

[00:09:33] You can get in if you get the right scores. Your grade point average has to be good. And then there are all these special exams you have to give like GRE and all that. And if you do well. But the biggest challenge was money. The government of India allowed us $8. $8. That's it. At the airport, you walked in, you gave them rupees and you got $8. So I knew I had to do far better than that.

[00:10:00] And so I had to figure out how to get the scholarship and the fellowship. And then the challenge became, how do I buy an airline ticket? Because the university was not going to buy that for me. I was going to get paid with my scholarships once I came to the United States. So there I was. I was trying to figure out. So you were determined. It took determination. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I was in Calcutta one day.

[00:10:28] And they still run the double-decker British-style buses. Red British buses. So I get on to one. And one of my classmates with whom I graduated said, hey, what are you doing here? Aren't you leaving for the United States? I said, yeah, I have everything set. But I'm trying to figure out how to buy my airline ticket. He said, really? He said, why didn't we get off at the bus stop? I work for my uncle. And you just come and talk to him.

[00:10:59] So that's what I did. I went and talked to him. And he said, so which bank are you with? So I told him. He said, oh, no problem. I know the general manager. He calls up the banker. And he said, I'm sending this guy. I'll certify his loan to buy this airline ticket and make sure I give him the money. And then through my scholarship earnings, I paid it off. So. I love that story. It's courage. It's courage.

[00:11:23] It's also the universe showing up at the right time and then you stepping into it, which I just think happens. And we might get there. That stuff starts to happen in different ways. It sounds like showing up throughout life for you. Yes. So you could have built an extraordinary career purely as a scientist. So you came here. You obviously continued your education and working.

[00:11:44] But I'd love to maybe share a little bit about the journey to where you chose to become also an entrepreneur and take responsibility for bringing these ideas out of the laboratory and into the world. I think what made me do that is I realized that if you have a challenging thought process to win the world over, you've got to take some risks. You've got to roll the dice.

[00:12:14] And entrepreneurism is not what was taught to me. And it wasn't a part of the family culture. It was don't take any risks. There are certain cultures from India where you learn how to do business. And I said I didn't have that. And I hadn't gone to B school. Everything I learned in business was called the School of Hard Knocks. Yeah. Good school. It is a good school. You don't forget those lessons. No, no, no.

[00:12:43] And I always felt challenged by the companies I worked for. And I worked at great companies. They were the best of the brightest. And Ronnie Reagan came along as President of the United States. And he threw a challenge to this nation. And that is peace through strength. And I had worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab. And I knew some of the main technical challenges that we were going to face. And that peace through strength resulted in major inventions that are today being talked about.

[00:13:12] He talked about Star Wars, which became Golden Dome today. He conceived of it. A lot of the planes and aircrafts, the stealth, that came from there. And here we are today, decades later. The national strength is through those discoveries. But if you really think about it, what was my motivation? Where did I get that inspiration? Yeah.

[00:13:40] That inspiration really came from John F. Kennedy. Yeah. He was this man who challenged the world and said, we're going to beat the Soviets. And we're going to get to the moon first. And that's what tempted me to study space physics and space science. That's why I went to IIT to do just that.

[00:14:07] And, you know, America was going to send men to the moon. And that challenge inspired me. Inspired those of us who had the vision and the desire to dream. And I continued that dream even today. Because one of his challenges, of course, was we can't do computation using vacuum tubes.

[00:14:32] If you looked at the history of our computer technology, the Iliac, those were vacuum tubes. And along came the PNP junction and the transistor got invented. She won the Nobel Prize. And today, everything is computerized and the digital world came in. Zeros and ones. And so there we were.

[00:14:53] It's just fascinating to me because the problem that you've solved and it's taken years or decades to work on. And maybe you can share, like, how did you know when you started working in that space the problem that you were solving? I mean, because today we just see the synergy of market and need and all these things. But you didn't know that then. I didn't.

[00:15:19] But I was fortunate enough to be challenged by people and the American ethos. The U.S. government has an organization called, today it's called DARPA. It used to be called ARPA. And people forget, today the Internet used to be called ARPAnet. It was invented by ARPA.

[00:15:44] And the reason it was created was to create this challenging problem so that we couldn't suddenly find ourselves in this problem of the Soviet Union and now Russia is going to beat us to the moon. We are America. We have to be number one in everything. And that was the drive. And so ARPA came into existence and the Internet was invented. And there were a handful of us, defense companies, that got the award and we created the ARPAnet.

[00:16:12] Unfortunately, intelligent as we were, it also showcased our stupidity because on the business side, we didn't make any money. Today, you look at this great place we call, you know, in the Bay Area, we have this area called Silicon Valley. Right. And they do all this great stuff. They didn't invent the Internet. They figured out how to milk the Internet. Yeah.

[00:16:39] My original email address, which is a three-letter word, it was called RDL. I still own it. And it's a huge value to it because we own all these domain names. Yeah. Dot com. Boy, you could still make a lot of money if you registered 50 of those names like NBA.com, NFL.com. Right. That's fascinating. All right. Let's start to shape for the audience.

[00:17:03] You've spent much of your career pursuing a problem that the broader market now is really only starting to fully appreciate. What did you see decades ago that others did not see? What I saw and what I think the government, the United States, saw that there were certain challenges that were going to come up with this new evolution of transistors. Processes were going to follow Moore's lot.

[00:17:32] Moore was the founder of Intel. And they had predicted that they would pack more and more transistors in smaller and smaller areas. And every couple of years, they'd be the next generation. But the question was to all of us as scientists, was there a challenge that was going to come up, which was how far could you go? And if you saw that evolution, you knew that we had to come up with other ways to do it.

[00:18:01] And so many of us said, hey, we're going to try to figure that out. Which idea is going to stick? And so obviously I was biased. I was in the boson, the photon and particles of light. And so I said, if we do that and we separate what electrons can do and photons can do and get those two married properly, then we'd be able to solve this problem of the energy use and the amount of heat.

[00:18:31] And that's what really happens in computers. You have a lot of copper and you have lots of transistors and you have a lot of copper wires. And you say, fine, I can do more and more of that. But you get heating and then you have to figure out how to cool them. Which is the big challenge we're facing with the data centers. Exactly. Exactly. So it was way ahead of its time.

[00:18:55] But when the government said, solve this problem for that specific requirement, there is a specific requirement for the Joint Strike Fighter. And it was to get rid of the copper cables that carried electronic warfare information. And we figured out how to do that and solve that problem. It was a very challenging problem. Yeah. It's what we call DARPA hard. And we solved that problem.

[00:19:22] And then there was a U.S. government organization that was watching that evolution. And they said, if you have solved that problem, I have the same problem, but I have it on computers. Can you solve that problem? And so we went from... Like, bring it on. Bring it on. Device physics. Yeah. And said, build systems. So we solved the problem on how to replace electrons with photons. And the U.S. government has very smart people and their team.

[00:19:51] And they put specific thresholds of performance. And so we had to break the code to solve those problems with the devices. And we did. We did solve the problem. And then the government said, great. So if you're talking to a layperson, most people understand that we have a challenge right now in the energy consumption with AI. People understand that at a basic level.

[00:20:13] But how would you explain it in a couple sentences what the breakthrough technology that you have or a solution and what it's going to solve or the potential of what it can solve? Sure. Sure. In a simplistic way, information that flows on a board or between chips is done electronically. Today, that has been solved for long distances with fiber around the world. But in short distances, there's still copper.

[00:20:44] But it has its problems. And when there's electrons flow, there's resistance and there's heating. Now, if you could replace that with particles of light, that means you need a laser and you need a detector to see it. And then you need to modulate the information. If you can do that right and you ever hit the numbers, there's a certain threshold you've got to hit.

[00:21:09] You've got to be able to do this information with spending energy at less than one picajoule per bit of information. With zero error. Yeah. And if you couldn't do it, you didn't make the cut. And once you did that, there was just the device physics part of it. Because government doesn't buy just for devices. They buy a system. And so this other government agency said, all right, here's a challenge. Design a system that can do that.

[00:21:38] And so we put our nose to the grindstone. We got competed and won a contract to design a system. We had already gotten the patents on the device physics. And so we went and solved that problem on how to build a system of high-performance computing with significant drop in power. So it's a contained system that, I think you said it's 20% reduction in, or tell me, remind me. It's actually a factor of 20. Factor of 20. Okay, I remembered.

[00:22:08] Factor of 20, less energy requirement. Yeah. What were the others? The other one is latency. Yeah. Which other words is called speed. And the third one is size. Colloquial defense language we call swap. Size, weight, and power. Okay. So see if you can solve all of them. And so we were able to hit, relative to what systems were available at that time, we were able to hit factors of 20 on each one of them. Factors of 20.

[00:22:37] I am so excited as you just think about, we hear the challenges with data centers around land and energy and cost and all the things that come with it. And so this is poised to be a very significant game changer. This is finally the way we have to look at it is we solved the problem too early. And now we're at a crossroads where the challenge is the power, the energy consumption. Yeah.

[00:23:03] And we had already solved that problem, but we needed to come back again and revisit it to see this new domain that we are entering AI. The big processes, the GPUs and the CPUs, they're massive. They're very expensive, but they consume a lot of power. And now you look at data centers, local areas can't deal with it with the amount of energy consumption there. And so the government has said, all right, you data center guys can own the ecosystem.

[00:23:32] You can own the power infrastructure. America generates X amount of power. And that's quite a bit. I don't know. It's 800 gigawatts or something like that. And you're going to need two to three times. We are barely able to meet today's requirement. How are we going to do with three or four of that times more? So now you say that we have a solution. It's an American solution supported by the American government. And of course, the commercial market is massive. It's like what happened to the Internet.

[00:24:02] Oh, yeah. It was really done for the ARPANET for a commander in chief giving an order so that the soldier on the field knew what it was. Yes. But we have a similar situation now. Yeah. We have a challenge. And we have solved that challenge. I'm so excited for you. This is really thrilling. Sometimes we celebrate breakthroughs when the world finally sees them. Right. And it's really clear that there's been years of work put into this before.

[00:24:31] You know, I can imagine, I can see for you as this market understanding of what you've solved and the implications of the technology. There's going to be all these accolades. And we know that's coming. You might not always get the opportunity to talk about what it actually took personally or as an individual to stay with this when that wasn't there. Would you be willing to share something? Sure. Absolutely. To everyone who wants to become an entrepreneur, don't try it. Don't try it.

[00:25:02] Why? It's a very painful process. The sacrifices you have to make are immense. Not only do you have to believe in yourself, you have to believe in a lot of other things. You believe that the system will support you. Society will come together. Truth will prevail. And it's very painful because it takes a lot of money.

[00:25:26] And I'd already gotten burned quite a bit by trying to play the Silicon Valley game of getting venture capitalists. Because if you are a venture capitalist, you're also a vulture capitalist. So where's the happy line? Because the happy line over here is entrepreneurs and the team needs to get rewarded. And you've got to give them the freedom to think and continue their journey. And so it has been a very painful process.

[00:25:55] At times, I wasn't sure I wanted to continue anymore. But the belief where I came from, nothing. And the belief that the science was really good. And it had major implications. And there were people within the government system and other systems who believed in you and provided you the encouragement. And you woke up every morning and said, I can do it. And so I kept going. I love that.

[00:26:25] It's to solve challenging problems. It's not like you turned on one day and said, I want to be an influencer. Right? And you just started taking pictures and it took off. Right? Like it takes years. And it takes the space. Like literal space, like you said, for creativity and innovation. And trying things that don't work until I'm finding what does. And this is not a fast thing. And so that determination and it's confidence, but humble confidence, right?

[00:26:52] Of like willingness to work the problem and stick with it, which we've talked a little bit about. Not everyone has that right now in our culture. And yet I think for those people who really are successful, that in life, the people in business, a lot of times we're talking about resiliency. We're talking about how they deal with conflict and those kinds of things. And like a failed experiment is not conflict, right? It's learning. Exactly.

[00:27:20] The scars on your back actually help you continue to solve the problem. Because one of the things you learn in the professional training we have had to go through. A lot of people make it big by hitting it big because they got a great app that made the money. In the world that I come from, you have to go through the professional training, the degrees and the qualifications and the publications and the patents that you have to get. Like hard earned.

[00:27:46] Yeah, it's hard earned and it takes years to be able to solve some of those problems. And every time you think you've solved one problem, there's another problem sitting right there that needs to be solved. So it's a series of breakthroughs you've got to go through. And you can't give up because there's someone else chasing you right behind. So if you have to make the entrepreneurial business success is you've got to keep that person who's chasing or the company that's chasing. And you don't know what that person is doing.

[00:28:16] You don't know. It's interesting because there's kind of two things that I think in this too. There's one, you resisted the temptation to just solve the one problem. And really we're looking more at a system, right? We talked a little bit about that. And I talk a lot about system thinking and capability design systems. And just things as organizations are changing and they're bringing in AI and they're innovating around how work gets done.

[00:28:43] And you can talk about one process or you can talk about one specific thing. But often the big wins, the return on AI that everybody wants to talk about from a business perspective is really looking holistically at the system and finding those really significant shifts.

[00:29:01] So is there a way that you describe the difference between the temptation to solve the one thing and what you did, which was like really looked at the larger problem? The bigger picture. The bigger picture, yeah. It's interesting you bring this up.

[00:29:17] It's a very intriguing question because unless you solve the whole problem, even that system solution that may give you satisfaction doesn't satisfy me.

[00:29:31] Because once I realized we solved that system problem and I look deeper, I realize there's another problem staring me in the face that if I don't solve, I have not fulfilled my dream of being a good scientist. Let me explain to you what that is. So in this system, you say, I solve the AI problem in the sense that I take less power and faster and smaller size.

[00:30:00] But then you step back a little bit and you say, okay, where's my challenge? And you look at to make those chips, the devices, in order to hit the right price points, you got to do what is called photolithography. There's one company in the world that owns that whole market, global companies, foreign companies from Netherlands.

[00:30:25] And to do this new devices that we are hearing about that can do this massive AI processing, right? The amount of energy, power, this new generation of lithography machine stake, which is like $400 million a machine. And you need about 30 or 40 of them to build a full fab. It's like half of New York City energy.

[00:30:54] So, hey, that's not going to work. They're going to focus on that. And so now you're in a different domain. You're now trying to solve the problem of equipment to manufacture your devices. You're building a new system. And you figure out how to do that and solve that. Because if you don't, you have not solved the whole problem. So you're, yeah. But that requires foresight. It does.

[00:31:21] And then you have to stay focused on making sure that you've thought through all those processes and solved that problem too. Because now you're creating a system of systems solution. It's not just solving that system. Yeah. You solve the system of systems. It's just because of where I, the lens I see the world through, right? And I think about people. And people call me, companies call me when we need engagement with our people. We need our culture to be different.

[00:31:50] We need a different caliber of talent. Whatever the thing is that they want. But a lot of times those are symptoms of something much more significant. And I think we're at a place in this reset around, yes, how we're going to use technology and how humans can apply skills. And I think it's very similar. It's just don't ask it in the context of an old system or a lagging system or just a system that is no longer relevant, right? Exactly.

[00:32:16] What makes it more complicated is that, is the pushback that we get from society, okay? There's a major pushback going on this AI system, right? I remember as a young kid in India, right before I was coming to the United States, there were these long marches going on because the computer was coming in because the labor force said, hey, I'm going to be out of a job.

[00:32:43] Isn't it interesting that one of the nations in the world that has the most prolific IT business are those very computers that that nation and those big crowds are saying, hey, automation is coming. I'm out of a job. I'm out of a job. That would happen. Same thing is happening with AI. People say, I'm going to get replaced. You're not going to get replaced. You're just going to move up in the value chain. And the things that are more conducive for the machine to do, the machine will do.

[00:33:12] And the human is never going to get replaced. I'm hearing this huge push for human consciousness to be in Mars. But some of us are trained in very simple things and building it on basis of information that is valid. The laws of physics cannot be violated. The speed of light is the speed of light. That's a fundamental fixed number.

[00:33:38] The pull of gravity of planet Earth is a certain number. And you're certainly not going to go from here to Mars with humans and have that populated without a stepping stone. And the stepping stone is we've got to go and land on the moors, build a society over there, build launch pads over there.

[00:34:01] And then from there to Mars is an easier play because the gravity of the moon is one sixth at a planet Earth. Okay, I see the path. So I'm sure you've developed and mentored many scientists throughout your career. And there's a lot of conversation about how do we develop people, especially as this role that humans may play may shift. And so they might not learn, cut their teeth away the same way that we all did in our careers.

[00:34:31] Specific to teaching them to be more systems thinkers in the science, how have you done that? That's a very interesting question. See, the world we grew up in was filled with the knowledge of electronics. The digital world would come along. The universities taught that. Today, photonics or quantum physics is really more at the PhD level.

[00:34:55] And the general undergraduate student does not get that exposure. But what I did is I brought in talented people in the field of electronics and then created the path. We were the first company to build a photonics, silicon photonics fab. And it was a challenge. But we convinced people that this was the future.

[00:35:24] And that takes a lot of effort, convincing numbers. Which stakeholders were you convincing? Outside the U.S. government is a very company that was doing the lithography machines. Yeah. Because that is the most expensive machine. So I was in the Netherlands convincing them to let me have one of their machines because I couldn't afford to buy one of those machines. And they said, all right, we'll take some equity in your company. I said, it was fine. And I get a machine.

[00:35:52] In the end, they didn't take equity because they're a major public company. But we figured out a business deal that was a win for them and a win for us. And I got many patents out of it. And they shared those patents. Oh, that's fantastic. That's really cool. Let's talk about courage. Yeah. So I know you're a prolific reader. You shared a little bit about a book. Profiles of Courage. Profiles in Courage.

[00:36:15] And one of the things I think we have to appreciate that courage or talent is not something necessary that comes out of birth. It's not pure genetic. The basic foundational IQs that come with genetics. But then if you don't polish it, it's like you're a diamond in the rough. To get the sparkle out, you've got to make the cuts.

[00:36:38] And you've got to, there are certain subjects you just can't say, I've just got to hire a lot of people and it's a great idea and we do it. But you can't be a leader unless you practice what you preach. And science, the tough sciences are just that. Outside of Sutton Bowers, I started my business with the winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics, Julian Schringer. So you hang around just people who are boring and don't. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

[00:37:06] And it just showed that here were these men and women who sacrificed so much to bring science to the forefront. Our lives today, whether it be as Americans or the globe, is because of science, because of technology. And that takes a lot of sacrifice. And my dream always was, okay, how do I make it happen so as a scientist, I can leave behind a legacy for mankind?

[00:37:36] And that talent is not just, hey, I was born. Think about it. I came from Kalkara, India. I hear leadership in that. I'm sure there's lots of scientists that just do the science. Yes. They don't want to change mankind. That feels different to me. Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head over there. Leadership requires sacrifice. In order to build this team, I had to make the sacrifice.

[00:38:05] And the sacrifice was this new rebuild after COVID when everything came to a stop. Whatever little money I had for my retirement, I said, I got to keep rolling the dice. And I kept taking everything out until I had literally nothing. And then it came through, because I always believed in my science. And there were days to get a call from my sister.

[00:38:33] And she used to say, what are you having for dinner? I said, oh, it says, really low on money. So I'm just going to go home and make myself an omelet. And that's my dinner. And I said, well, I'd already achieved it. So what? So what if you achieved it? It was then. This is now. We went through a huge once-in-a-century event. And we all got nearly destroyed. But guess what happened?

[00:39:02] Science caused the recovery. Right? And that's what I'm pursuing today, because our technology has many verticals. It's not just the AI and quantum machines. It's also applicable to satellites. It's applicable to cryptography. It's applicable to so many different verticals. So it's going to have an implication to everything.

[00:39:27] It's like even the fundamental patent on the architecture of the system. That really came about from understanding something very simple. And that is, the human brain is so sophisticated that a chess monster and grand chess monster can beat a major IBM Blue. Why is it possible? Why is it possible?

[00:39:56] Clock speed of a computer chip is 2.6 billion operations a second. So what's the clock speed of the human brain? And you go measure it. It's 120 hertz. 10 million times slower. And so I said, maybe we need to change the architecture of the computers and the systems. And it became this whole concept of that, and patented it. It's called neomorphic.

[00:40:21] It's to do it in parallel versus doing it in serial zeros and ones very fast. So how do you suddenly come up with that? You come up with it from understanding that this cross-fertilization of structure of the human brain. But you fundamentally are like in that process, I'm just going to use my words, like asking a different question. Yes.

[00:40:49] And I think that it's something that we're just not all trained, right? I think about myself. I was an executive in large Fortune 50 companies, and I loved it, right? But I, like you, neither of my parents had graduated college. One worked at a car dealership. One was a bank teller. Didn't have corporate experience or anything like that. So for me, the structure was set by the environment I was in. Yes. Okay?

[00:41:19] The next, oh, become a director, become a vice president, become a C, whatever. That was like the structure. And which, for someone who's driven, can give you something to strive for. But it can also be limiting because there's much more than achieving those things. And so I had to learn that really the biggest limitation is what we can see for ourselves as people.

[00:41:43] And in what I hear you solving, it's like you had to create the possibility that it wasn't this, it wasn't just do this thing better. It was ask a different question. Yes. And that challenge really comes up. Are you able to address those challenges because of your training? Do you have limiting beliefs? Yeah, yeah. Some of the faculty members and professors and mentors I had, they'd ask difficult questions.

[00:42:12] And they said, well, what about this? And many times, ah, what a stupid question. No, it's not stupid. It's just a challenging question. I remember one of my first classes in the university, the teacher was teaching something and I asked a question. And it was just the question came to me naturally. And the number of guys in that class started laughing.

[00:42:36] And so the teacher stopped the class and he made those kids stand up and said, why are you laughing at this guy? Do you know how deep that question is? And that gave me the confidence. Because they couldn't even see it. They couldn't see it. Oh, I get chills. Yeah. I'm so glad that somebody did that for you. Yeah. How do you foster that within your teams? I do exactly the same thing. I'll tell them, have you ever thought of this question?

[00:43:05] And it's out of the box. How about this? Or I'll go to them and I'll say, I'm not being able to solve this problem. Can you guys go and think about it? Yeah. And come back with ideas. And any idea is good enough. Okay? Don't ever think that your idea is not good enough. And we are going to do this as a team. We're going to succeed as a team. Okay? I just happen to be carrying the baton for this segment of the race. Right.

[00:43:34] I'm going to pass on that baton to the next person. So let's do it. I love that. I think we're in a time where it's kind of collective experimentation. And that can be counter to how a lot of leaders have been taught. Right? We feel like we have to have the answer. We've been rewarded by potentially feeling like we're smart. We know that really effective leaders surround themselves with people that are smarter. So it's not necessarily about that.

[00:44:01] But there is a challenge happening, I think, that is causing many people to reflect. And that idea of when I think about how it applies to what we do, this, I call it activation. Right? So how do you activate your team? It's a really rational response, in my opinion, for people to not be super motivated if it's a perceived waste of time.

[00:44:25] If the priorities are changing all the time, if people don't make tough decisions, if they don't get feedback, if there's a bunch of redundancy in these kind of lagging systems that aren't super healthy. It's a rational response to not want to waste their energy or give their discretionary effort. And so by creating the space and inviting them to show up, quite frankly, and innovate or co-create and imagine what's possible, I just have a fundamental belief that people want to feel productive and want to add value.

[00:44:54] And so I think that really is the answer. It just might look a little bit different depending on what the company is about and what they're trying to achieve. Yeah, one of the things that's a right way of thinking about it for the following reason, I think it's really a dichotomy that businesses feel today because we are really challenged today. The salaries and numbers that techies are getting are just astronomical.

[00:45:21] And the problem is money by itself cannot be the real motivation. Just cannot. I've hired employees at enormous salaries and I don't take a salary. I'm living from hand to mouth and that's not the point. The point is to build something that everyone can be proud of. And you think you can win them all with money. The next company, because they're talented, hire them at 10% or 20% more.

[00:45:48] But the real ones, they must be motivated by the physics and the challenge of what you're doing. And it's that one-two punch. The knockout punch is not just the money, but the challenge. And the reward for that is what we used to have before and now coming back into Vogue quite a bit is ownership. Yeah. You know, the equity. Yeah.

[00:46:16] Because that equity at a buck a share now is three or five years from now is a thousand bucks a share. Boy, you got some money put away. How do you, how in the interview process or when you, as you're finding talent, how do you assess if they have both? You don't. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very big risk because then at the end of a month or two or three, you realize it's wasted money.

[00:46:46] But I've come to grips with that because you are not going to be able to figure out how talented the person is. I don't care if you use headhunters and on past record. Does that individual fit your mold? Are they a big company environment or a small company environment? The big company environment has its privileges.

[00:47:10] But the small company environment is what I think big companies need to create in a lot of small little companies in a big company and let them all talk to each other. You know? Yeah. It's like the scrappiness. And even what I think is super important now is if in some of the large organizations like work is the jobs are so in a box and siloed and teams even are siloed.

[00:47:36] And we already talked about the problems are cross-functional or wider than that. Right? So by definition, you don't want people only thinking within their box. Right? No. That's going to work. Yeah. That's not going to work. And so we see in smaller organizations, I say you wear many hats until they start to become slumbers and then you got to kind of pick one. But you don't ever want to stop the thinking, the thought process of that.

[00:47:58] We even have leaders in often in mid-size organizations that have not learned that enterprise thinking model. They're like, I'm the CFO or I'm the CHRO or I'm whatever I'm responsible for. But then if they're not looking across, nobody is. Right? Exactly. Yeah. And also the other thing is to surround yourself with people who are not yes people. Yes.

[00:48:24] It's so important to be able to have thick skin enough to be told, sorry, I don't agree with you. And being able to tolerate it is not an issue of rank as its privileges. The way I look at it is I'm a benevolent dictator. I always have the right to say no to your challenging me. But I'm open enough to listening to you because you know what? You may have a better idea than me. And that's okay. That's huge.

[00:48:54] I think specifically in some of leadership roles where you find success, where you're really smart, it requires like suppression of ego. Right? And I think that to me, it's just like an absolutely you have to do that. Yes, people, like in my world, that doesn't work because I know I don't have the best ideas. But I want to throw out the crazy ideas and somebody like build on and be like, actually make it into something that is more material. I love doing that. Yeah.

[00:49:24] I had a professor at the university, I will not give his name. And the final exam was quite intriguing. His final exam was always very intriguing. He did win the Nobel Prize, by the way. And if he gave you a problem and he solved it, you're not sure you were going to pass. No. He'd rather you not be able to solve the problem but show two, three, four, five different paths to a solution.

[00:49:54] Because that's what the scientific mind is. Yeah. A true scientific mind is, oh, it's not that I have the solution. I just fail. What is, can I think about it another way? Can I solve it in a different way? Can I do it completely differently and come out ahead? Yeah. What do you unlock by not just doing the shortest, quickest, fastest, most obvious? What can you unlock by exploring other paths?

[00:50:23] I've had experience where that has worked. I'll give you something that was unique in my life. In order to solve this problem on replacing copper cables with fiber for this specific platform for the Joint Strike Fighter, for DARPA, we solved the problem. And one of the challenges was to find a detector that measures light.

[00:50:50] But it was very challenging, the numbers we had, the performance numbers. So luck would have it. When COVID came along, I said, we've got to do some commercial work. And a major U.S. government institution, which is actually a U.S. government institution that has Nobel Prize winners in it, bought a handful of those devices.

[00:51:13] Years go by, and one day I get a call from a professor at one of the major American universities. And this lady says, hi, Dr. Tut, how are you? He said, you supported me when I was doing my postdoc at Stanford University. I said, oh, yeah, how are you? He said, I'm a professor of quantum physics at this university.

[00:51:37] But have you seen this latest paper that came out on a new way to approach solving quantum computers? I said, when did it come out? She said, it came out last night. I said, not yet, not yet. Tell me about it. So she said, here's the paper. And they said that the devices that you made for detectors, they work at quantum temperatures. And I said, really? He said, yeah.

[00:52:07] So I called up the institution and said, yeah, you sold us a handful of them. And two of them work at quantum temperatures. I said, really, what, did you open it up and measure it with the chips? They said, no, we just packaged it. And I said, can you send me the data? And they did. And quantum physics, everyone thinks that it's like AI is going to solve the world's problem. It's not. It's a very challenging problem. It's not going to happen. And this is what Bose and Einstein created.

[00:52:36] It's called the Bose-Einstein condensate. And it came full circle to me. Bose had predicted that when you drop temperature to some very, very low numbers, like minus 263 degrees centigrade, matter changed. So matter is solid liquid gas. And at very low temperatures, it became a fifth form of matter called the Bose-Einstein condensate.

[00:53:04] It didn't follow the laws of physics that we know it. And so today I'm sitting over there and thinking, how did I do something that was done with classical physics, working at a completely different type of physics? It's the assumptions we make, too. Yeah. That's fascinating because I think we do it all the time. We make assumptions. We don't even know we're making assumptions, right? That matter is matter. Yeah. Or whatever in that example.

[00:53:34] And we see that today in work. We see it in people. We assume things all the time. Yes. That's interesting. That's a great example. And I'm so glad she called you. That's kind of cool, too. All right. So as you look at this next era of innovation, do you believe that Advantage will belong to organizations with the most resources or those that are best able to recognize possibility early and assemble the right people, technologies, and partnerships?

[00:54:03] I think the equation has completely changed now. I think the big organizations felt that they had the power of money and they could build and bring in the innovators. After all, let's remember what? 95% of the employment in this world is created by small companies that have innovation. And so I think the innovators will always be there.

[00:54:32] They are the risk takers. And it's interesting that the American system has now realized that solution is not sending things abroad. And one of the reasons we had this major problem that we all woke up during COVID was the manufacturing of chips had to happen in America. Because, oh, it's cheaper to do it abroad. You lose the intellectual property.

[00:55:01] You lose the talent. You lose that capacity of how to manufacture. And then all of a sudden you wake up and say, I've got to bring it back. We told you not to do it. The patents were all American. Most of them were American. Why did you have to give that away? They realized. So I think innovation will always be if you create the challenge and push people to innovate.

[00:55:28] Our society is changing massively. We live longer. Are we going to live longer? Yeah. Normal ages are going to go to live to 120. Yes, 130 years of life expectancy. But can you have a good quality of life? So now your challenge is also to make the health. So these computer systems can solve that problem.

[00:55:53] Because the human can't solve that problem as fast. Because many of these science is trial and error. And many a time you need a million trial and errors to get the right one. You don't have the time. So you need the machine to help you. The human brain can assimilate it and guide it. But you need the machine's help. Yeah.

[00:56:17] But if people think that AI is going to completely replace the human being, it is not happening. From a scientist. I love it. So, you know, people looking at your career today may see this as the culmination of decades of work. But I suspect that you might see it a little bit differently. What's the courageous choice that is still in front of you? It's really important that I maintain this courage because it's easy to be tempted by the devil.

[00:56:48] And that devil is money. And I have no interest in chasing money. I did. There was a time in my life where it was profound and important. But then at some stage you say, why not? If it happens, the reward will be there if you can change mankind. Because that's that reward. So the challenge for me is to keep the blinders on.

[00:57:18] I got to win that derby. And I'm leading it. But I need that horse also to be with me. Okay? And so the challenge is keeping that focus, waking up every morning, staying healthy, making sure that the foreknowns in the brain are firing the right way. And just keep it on until you get through. I am so inspired by you.

[00:57:48] And I'm so grateful that you agreed to be with us today. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you all for listening to this episode of The Courageous Choice. I have a feeling you'll be seeing Raj again soon. And thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you for listening to The Courageous Choice. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review to help get the word out about the podcast. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our future conversations.

[00:58:15] If you'd like to know more about Gig Talent, please visit gigtalentagency.com or email us at podcast at gigtalentagency.com. See you in the next episode.