How to find the story before the technology is ready

The conversations I find most interesting right now are with companies that are somewhere in the middle. They’re not early-stage, where the story is mostly about potential and team and why the problem matters. Not mature, where the technology speaks for itself and marketing is largely execution. The middle — where the technology works, the use cases are real, but the market doesn't yet have a way to evaluate it. 

The middle ground

Quantum computing is the clearest current example. We're speaking to companies navigating the shift from trapped-ion qubits in university labs to commercially scalable quantum processing units that can sit alongside traditional server racks in a 19-inch chassis. The engineering is sound. The commercial opportunity is vast. And yet the dominant public narrative around quantum is still somewhere between science fiction and perpetual ten-years-away scepticism, which means that every conversation with a potential customer or investor starts from a deficit of credibility rather than a foundation of it.  

Quantum’s credibility gap

The instinct, when you're in this position, is to reach for scale. To try to collapse the credibility gap by making the biggest possible claim about what the technology will eventually be able to do. I get the logic. It's also usually the wrong move. 

The problem with marketing ahead of the technology's maturity is that the audience you most need to convince — the CTOs, the infrastructure engineers, the people who will actually integrate this into a production environment — are precisely the people who will see through over-claiming first. They've heard the roadmap pitch before. They've been burned by it. And once you've lost that audience, getting them back is significantly harder than earning them in the first place. 

Why over-claiming backfires

The other failure mode is the opposite one: waiting. Holding back the story until the technology is fully optimised, fully proven, fully ready for the case study. The problem is that by then, someone else is already writing the category. The framing that will shape how buyers evaluate every solution in the space — including yours — is already being built without you. You can enter a mature conversation, but you can't own it. 

The other trap is silence

So you're caught between over-claiming and silence, and neither works. What does work is finding the story that sits at the intersection of what's true today and what's becoming true — and being honest about which is which. 

For quantum, that means not pretending the use cases are the same as classical HPC. That's like claiming Concorde was going to replace your daily commute. It means finding the specific computational problem that classical hardware genuinely cannot solve efficiently — optimisation at scale, molecular simulation, certain classes of machine learning — and anchoring the conversation there. Not "quantum will change everything" but "here is the specific class of problem where quantum changes the economics, here is what that's worth to the person who has that problem, and here is where we are on the journey to delivering it reliably." 

The qualifying phrase at the end is the one most marketing instinct wants to cut. It's also the one that earns you the credibility to be heard on the rest. 

Finding the intersection

We saw this with ambient intelligence. When the term started gaining traction, the vision was genuinely compelling — environments that understood and responded to human behaviour without requiring explicit input. The use cases that actually got adopted were narrower, more specific, more dependent on particular hardware configurations than the original narrative had allowed for. When the market's actual adoption pattern became clear, the brands that had over-indexed on the expansive vision had to do expensive repositioning. The ones that had built their story around specific, solvable problems in specific contexts were already there. 

The same thing is happening in robotics right now. The general-purpose humanoid narrative is running well ahead of the operational reality. That gap will close — parts of it are closing faster than most people expected. But the companies building durable market positions in robotics are the ones that have found the specific industrial problem where their particular system performs reliably, and are building credibility there, rather than trying to own a category that doesn't yet correspond to anything a buyer can act on. 

There's a craft to writing ahead of the technology that's different from writing about the technology as it is. It requires being precise about what's proven and what's directional. It requires understanding your audience well enough to know what claims they'll accept on evidence and what claims they'll only accept on trust — and building that trust first. And it requires the willingness to update the story as the technology and the market both evolve, without treating that update as a failure. 

The frame you build now shapes how your audience evaluates you when the technology does arrive. Build it too far ahead and you've created a credibility problem. Build it too conservatively and you've created a perception problem. The job is to find the version of the story that's honest about where you are, ambitious about where you're going, and specific enough about the problem to give someone a reason to stay in the conversation until both things are true.

I’m Dale, a Co-Founder here at Latent, and I love these kinds of conversations.