An interview with Eric Takeuchi, Chief Commercial Officer
What is your role at Monarch Quantum?
As the Chief Commercial Officer here at Monarch, I have a broad ranges of responsibilities, though they primarily revolve around our strategic growth and market positioning. The best way to accomplish this is to ensure that our entire organization is aligned and focused on serving our customers to help them achieve their goals; if they’re successful, we’ll ultimately be successful. I also have responsibilities for products & services development, technology roadmaps and corporate development.
What is the most challenging aspect of what you do?
Our customers are working hard to accomplish amazing things. Their products and technologies require complex, multi-functional, well-engineered photonics subsystems to enable their success. For me, working to understand these complexities so that we can best serve them is not only very challenging, but also the most rewarding part of my job.
How do you ensure you have the right customer requirements?
Everything starts with developing meaningful relationships and earning the trust of our customers. When we work in true partnership, it allows for free exchange of initial requirements, allowing Monarch’s team of experts to listen and interact in a collaborative environment. This collaboration involves more than just technical performance. It necessarily includes discussions about use cases, quality attributes, service & support, delivery, and ultimately cost in order to really capture the full set of requirements that help define success.
How do you evolve subsystem architecture to meet both current demands and the future needs of quantum systems?
We are investing significantly to develop photonics systems that will scale with our customers’ demands over time. In the near term, we are focused on integrating best-of-breed components into turn-key, ruggedized, reliable sub-systems (we refer to as “Quantum Light Engines”), assembled using high-precision robotics in a commercial manufacturing environment. In parallel, we are developing integrated photonics components that can operate in wavelengths that are required by the quantum ecosystem (e.g., those that operate in the visible and short-wave infrared). As those integrated photonics capabilities mature, we will self-obsolete legacy technologies to enable our customers to scale in performance and cost.
When you aren’t working, what are you doing?
When I’m not at work, my happy place is spending time with my family. My wife, Kathryn, and I recently celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary, and these days we spend a lot of our time following our two college-aged kids to their activities, whether that’s cheering on our daughter at her rugby matches, our son on the baseball field, or all of us enjoying a night out at a musical together.