I remember that back when they were all the rage (and got huge investments) I met an employee at a coffee shop at an optics conference I was attending (I didn't

I remember that back when they were all the rage (and got huge investments) I met an employee at a coffee shop at an optics conference I was attending (I didn't know who they were at the time). IIRC she had been a postdoc at some research lab until a while before. She obviously didn't talk about what they were doing exactly, but more about the surreal experience working for them after uni. They had just bought several ebeam writers (multimillion $ equipment used in lithography) without anyone really knowing what they would use it for. It sounded a lot like they were just throwing lots of money at equipment for doing work on hype research topics (metamaterials was a big thing at the time) to see if it could solve some of their problems, but really without much thought on if it makes sense. She was talking about how it was cool to work for a place where there were absolutely no money constrains, but it also sounded a bit like "I am at a company but doing stuff which seems more blue sky research than at uni... Why?". To me the current wave of quantum computing startups sound very similar.