The Open Source Substrate for Quantum with Ben Castanon

Ben Castanon became Unitary Foundation's first CEO in February 2026, after roughly four years with the organization as Chief of Staff and then COO. He came into quantum from an unusual direction — leadership roles at Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn arts-and-science center — and that background shows in how he thinks about scaffolding communities, funding public goods, and borrowing what works from other fields. This conversation matters now because Unitary Foundation sits at an inflection point. It has scaled from a microgrant program (the "Unitary Fund") into a foundation with a global developer community, corporate members including NVIDIA and IBM, an active compiler collection, a benchmarking initiative, and an annual open-source survey that increasingly serves as the field's ground truth. If you care about how quantum computing actually gets built — not just who wins the hardware race — this episode lays out the infrastructure argument clearly. What You'll Learn Why Ben argues quantum open source falls into a structural funding gap between academia (chasing novel papers) and venture capital (chasing profitable businesses), and what philanthropy has to do about it What "public goods" and "digital commons" actually look like in quantum — from benchmarking to compilation to error mitigation tooling How to interpret the 2025 QOSS Survey finding that ~40% of full-time quantum OSS contributors are unpaid, and why Ben sees it as both an opportunity and a warning How Unitary Foundation is experimenting with continuous compensation for contributors via bounty programs and pilots with Merit Systems Why corporate members like NVIDIA and IBM invest in a vendor-neutral nonprofit — and how governance keeps the "open" in open source What a healthy pipeline from first-time contributor to sustained open-source maintainer would look like, and why Ben wants an endowment behind it Why Ben resists top-down definitions of the "open substrate" and prefers to let the community surface bottlenecks The long-term vision: a "Linux moment" for quantum, and what it would take to install it before proprietary stacks lock in Resources & Links Guest & Organization Announcing Our New CEO — Unitary Foundation — The February 2026 announcement of Ben as UF's first CEO, with the full arc from Chief of Staff to COO to CEO. Ben Castanon on LinkedIn — Ben's professional history, including his Pioneer Works tenure and current UF work. Unitary Foundation — The organization's homepage and hub for grants, tools, membership, and community. Papers & Reports 2025 Quantum Open Source Software Survey Results — The fourth annual QOSS survey, including the finding that ~40% of full-time contributors are unpaid. The Young and the Relentless — The Quantum Insider — Independent coverage of the QOSS survey's demographic findings. Celebrating Over 100 Microgrants — Impact report: 420+ citing papers, 3 startups, 1 nonprofit, and 400+ OSS contributors funded. Tools & Programs Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC) — The frontend-agnostic quantum compiler collection Ben references as a candidate for the open substrate. UCC on GitHub