ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Most co-CEO setups end quietly with a Sunday restructuring nobody talks about. IQM ran theirs publicly for 22 months and ended it on January 1st 2026.
In this episode of Follow the Gradient, Christian Woese and Melanie Gabriel sit down with Dr. Jan Goetz, the sole CEO of IQM Quantum Computers and the founder taking the first European quantum company to a public listing. Jan co-founded IQM in 2018 as a spin-out from Aalto University and VTT in Finland. Eight years later he is taking it public on NYSE and Nasdaq Helsinki at a $1.8 billion valuation.
This is not an episode about quantum technology. It is a retrospective on the deep-tech founder decisions that don't survive press releases: leadership structure under scaling pressure, fundraising mindset in fields with no commercial precedent, and the structural choices that distinguish a company built to last from one built to be acquired.
We talk about:
Why IQM moved to co-CEO in 2024 and back to sole CEO in 2026, and the failure mode of dual leadership that almost no public reversal post-mortem ever names
The founder principle Jan applies to every scaling crisis: either transform yourself alongside the company (painful) or accept a specialised role (clarifying), but stop trying to do neither
How four scientific co-founders raised €11 million in 2018 as Finland's largest seed round, and the product-mindset shift that separates fundable deep tech from another lab project
Why IQM built its own chip factory, assembly line, and data centre in Europe instead of taking the cleaner path of being acquired by a US hyperscaler
The reasoning behind a simultaneous Nasdaq New York and Nasdaq Helsinki listing, and why almost no other European company is choosing this route despite the obvious advantages
What selling 21 quantum systems to supercomputing centres, ministries, and pension-fund-backed enterprises teaches founders about multi-stakeholder sales that the SaaS playbook completely misses
This is perspective over playbook. Jan has been through the parts of the founder journey that founder-tweets compress into a single line: deciding to split a CEO role, deciding to put it back together, choosing a fast-follower strategy in an industry where the leaders are US hyperscalers, and managing a cap table with pension funds, sovereigns, and the parent company of Lidl on it.
Our biggest takeaways, including Jan's view on why most founders misjudge when to split or rejoin the CEO role:
https://www.followthegradient.io/p/jan-goetz-podcast
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Where to find Jan Goetz:
LinkedIn: https://fi.linkedin.com/in/jan-goetz/en
IQM Quantum Computers: https://meetiqm.com/
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🎙 Follow the Gradient: conversations about building a business from Europe while staying sane.
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00:00 Introduction
Sole CEO on Jan 1, 2026
The 2-year co-CEO experiment
Transform yourself or change role
€11m seed: science vs product mindset
Cap table of pension funds and Lidl
Building a full-stack chip factory
Dual NYSE and Helsinki listing
Selling quantum to supercomputing centres
Marathon, discipline, rapid fire
