Geordie Rose knew he could keep going. It was his mind that gave out.

It was May 2017. Rose, a serial tech entrepreneur, was halfway through his second marathon, clocking record splits. He was on track to smash his personal record. Then, he stopped.

“I just had this feeling, like—I can’t do this,” Rose says. He mostly walked the rest of the race, stumbled to the finish line, collapsed in the middle of the road, swore he’d never do it again, and wept. “All these emotions just poured out at the end,” he says.

Rose has been on a decades-long sprint: founding, growing and leading technology companies. Now, he is literally going to walk. Across all of Canada. 

An entrepreneur and quantum physicist, Rose co-founded B.C.-based D-Wave in 1999. It claims to be the first company to commercialize quantum computing, and sold computers to NASA and Google. After, he was the CEO of AI startup Kindred—which was sold to Ocado Group in 2020. Most recently, at Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI, Rose’s teams were amongst the first to develop humanoid robots for commercial use. 

Then, in November 2024, the company’s board forced him out. In an email to investors, Philip Smith, Sanctuary’s chief financial officer, said the board had decided to remove Rose as CEO and “separate him from the company.” No further details were provided. Rose, too, says he cannot comment further on his departure.

“I’m kind of worn out,” says Rose, who recently turned 53. “I think I may be done with my formal career, living the early-stage startup lifestyle now for 25 years.” 

As for what’s next? A walk. A really long one. He’s now in the midst of planning a solo trek across Canada, starting in May. The 8,000-kilometre journey works out to around 22 kilometres—a bit more than a half marathon—every day. He’ll dip his toes in the ocean at the tip of Tofino, British Columbia, and end in Cape Spear, Newfoundland. Packing all of his belongings in a jogging stroller, he’ll stay with friends, acquaintances, and camp his way across the nation.

Rose has excelled in a series of other eclectic physical challenges throughout his life. He was an international champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, won national championships in wrestling and provincial competitions in powerlifting. 

Rose even claims to have held the Guinness World Record for most yogurt eaten in one minute—1.5 kilograms, to be exact. When contacted about this claim, Amanda Marcus, a spokesperson for Guinness World Records, said Rose had never held any such title. In response, Rose said he “never actually officially had the record”—even though his personal website says he “held the Guinness Book of World Records world record for the most yogurt eaten in one minute.” Rose added he did break the record but, before he could submit proof, someone else had officially broken the record.

He claimed there was a video of his record-breaking yogurt-eating attempt but that he didn’t have access to it. He suggested that Suzanne Gildert, another co-founder at Sanctuary AI, might still have it but that the two were no longer “on speaking terms.” In an email to The Logic, Gildert said she would “prefer not to comment on the yogurt story.”

The trek Rose plans to embark on is a different type of challenge, he says. It’s a luxury, an antidote, to the psychological pressures of leading tech startups. “8,000 kilometres is going to change who you are,” he says. Rose also wants to see if tech actually makes his life better by physically separating himself from it for a year. 

“I have a desire to decouple myself from technology,” he says. “It’s weird because I’ve been working in advanced technology my whole life, but actually don’t like most of it.”

He wonders if, in hindsight, society will look back on “all this technological development, and think of it being poison.”

Rose says he lost his “enthusiasm” for developing humanoid robots—something he worked on at both Kindred AI and Sanctuary. When he started, he says, the work was exciting because it wasn’t mainstream. Once it was, he began to lose interest.

Yet the itch to learn and build hasn’t gone away. Rose still plans to bring his laptop on his trans-Canada trek so he can work on Snowdrop Quantum Applications, his quantum computing research project.

Rose says he wants to bring together his background in AI and quantum computing to find real-life uses. He says such research could one day form a new category of technology—AI agents that he tentatively calls “quantum agents.” 

He started Snowdrop during his last few months at Sanctuary from an idea that’s been gnawing at the back of his brain for a decade. Rose doesn’t plan to commercialize it and wants to forever be the only employee. It’s only a formal company because he wanted to put his work forward for the XPrize competition for quantum applications, he says. 

There are some things that AI agents trained on classical computers can’t achieve, which limits their intelligence, Rose says. The agents he wants to build can do things based on quantum computations. This means they should be better than AI trained on classical computers. “If it’s correct, there’s a possibility of building a new kind of AI that is so much better than us at certain things that we could never even understand what it was doing or why,” Rose says.

He’s built some of these agents in a game environment, documenting it on Snowdrop’s blog. But Rose isn’t sure if it’s going to work. “This is the sort of thing I really like—it’s a new thing, no one’s doing it. I’m off on the frontier, right at the end of the spear, the whole thing could fall apart,” he says.