Quantum computing has spent a decade as a science story, which is precisely why most boards governing it are set up to miss the commercial one. Directors have been trained by their own agendas to evaluate qubit counts, error rates, and research milestones, because that is what management brings them. Meanwhile the first commercial contracts in the sector are closing now, and the companies signing them are not necessarily the ones with the best physics. They are the ones that built a commercial organization before anyone asked them to. Gregg Carman, who has sp ent 34 years leading commercial and go-to-market (GTM) efforts at the front of breakout technology markets, and most recently built and led North America for a quantum computing infrastructure company, has seen this sequence before in other categories. His argument is uncomfortable for boards that pride themselves on capital discipline: the governance instinct that protects the profit and loss (P&L) in 2026 is the same instinct that loses the market in 2029.
The Question Boards Are Not Asking
Board packs in deep technology are heavy with technical progress and light on commercial mechanics, and that imbalance feels responsible. The science is the hard part, the reasoning goes, so the science deserves the scrutiny. Carman does not dispute that the technology matters. He disputes that it is the live question. “Most board updates focus on the science, which matters,” he says. “But the real question is whether the company can ship when the technology is ready.”
That reframing carries a specific deadline, and it is nearer than most directors assume. Carman works backward from where he expects volume to land. “Orders in 2028 and 2029 mean the commercial infrastructure has to be in place by early 2027. Push for that timeline now.” Read that as a governance instruction rather than a forecast. A board reviewing commercial readiness in 2028 is reviewing it after the window has closed, because sales organizations, channel relationships, and enterprise procurement cycles are not standing capacity. They take years to build and cannot be bought in a quarter. The useful question for the next board meeting is not what the roadmap says. It is what has to be true about the commercial organization 18 months from now, and who owns getting it there.
Why Too Late Is A Different Category Of Failure
Directors are rewarded for spotting waste, and premature commercial spend is the most visible waste there is. A sales team hired ahead of a shippable product shows up on the income statement every month as headcount without bookings. It is legible, it is attributable, and it is the kind of thing a board can act on decisively. That legibility is exactly what makes it dangerous, because it draws governance attention toward the error that is cheap to fix and away from the one that is not.
Carman puts the asymmetry plainly. “Building a commercial organization too early is painful, visible on the P&L, and fixable in two quarters by cutting. Building it too late surfaces in 2029, after the reference accounts have been taken, the design-in windows have closed, and the consortium participant lists have been published.” Each of those is a door that shuts once rather than a cost that recurs. A reference account belongs to whoever landed it first. A design-in window closes when a customer commits an architecture to a supplier. Consortium lists get published with names on them, and the names do not change because a competitor got serious later. “Boards optimizing against the failure they can see on the P&L risk being too late,” Carman says. “The pitfall is that being too early is recoverable. Too late is not.” For a board, that reduces to a question of which error to prefer, and the honest answer is the expensive, visible, reversible one.
Hiring Commercial Leadership Before It Feels Justified
The standard sequencing in deep tech is to finish the product, then hire the people who sell it. It feels rigorous. It matches how the budget conversation naturally unfolds, since nobody wants to defend a chief revenue officer before there is revenue to be chief of. Carman’s objection is about timing rather than prudence. “The instinct is to wait until the product is finished, then hire go-to-market,” he says. “By then the first contracts are already being written.”
The alternative he proposes is parallel construction rather than sequential. “Build that capability alongside the engineering, so the company is ready the moment demand arrives.” That does more than shorten the ramp. Commercial leadership brought in early changes what engineering builds, because someone in the room is carrying live customer requirements, rather than reconstructing them after the architecture is frozen. It also means the first enterprise buyer does not encounter a company learning procurement, pricing, and deployment for the first time on a deal that will define its reference story. Boards can test this without waiting for a strategy offsite. Carman frames the diagnostic as three questions a director can put to management directly: “Are you commercially ready?” “Are you too early or too late?” and “Are you considering adding commercial leadership now?” The answers will separate companies that have thought about the transition from ones still assuming the market will wait for them. In a category where the first contracts are already being signed, that distinction is the whole governance job.
Follow Gregg Carman on LinkedIn for more insights on GTM strategy, commercial readiness, and board governance in quantum and deep tech.
