CEO of Xanadu, Christian Weedbrook, Talks on Company In Fireside Chat

In late September 2026, on a stage in Toronto at the festival that had been called Elevate until its opening night, Christian Weedbrook offered the room some career advice. “The take home is don’t go to film school,” said the founder and chief executive of Xanadu, who failed the course twice before he sold heat packs at a flea market. The audience laughed, as he meant it to. Earlier that week he had sold almost a tenth of his shares in the company. Christine Li, the BNN Bloomberg anchor interviewing him, wanted to talk about that as well. Weedbrook’s story is one of stubbornness rewarded. He describes a grade average of “pretty much zero”, a side door into mathematics through an arts degree, and a PhD in which he was “never the best”. In 2016 he founded a company to build quantum computers out of light, at a time when, he says, that was “not a thing”. Each time Li pressed him on the share price, his own sale or the new shares the company keeps issuing,…