Jack Hidary on Quantum Information Sciences, Grand Challenges and Moonshots by Living a Life in Full with Dr Chris Stout

Jack Hidary has been a successful serial technology entrepreneur and is a regular guest on Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNBC, as well as a frequent keynote speaker, having presented at the business schools of Yale and Columbia, and at TEDx.

Jack established EarthWeb and led the company through its IPO as Chairman and CEO three years later, which, by the way was one of the largest first-day openings in history. EarthWeb then acquired Dice and changed the company’s name to Dice.com and is now listed on the NYSE. He co-founded Vista Research in 2001 as an independent financial research company serving institutional investors and sold it to the Standard & Poor's division of McGraw-Hill in 2005. In 2013 he ran for Mayor of New York City, and the New York Times described him as "socially progressive, fiscally reserved, and digitally savvy."

Academically, Jack studied philosophy and neuroscience at Columbia University and was awarded a Stanley Fellowship in Clinical Neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health. Under the fellowship, he conducted research in functional neuroimaging, using techniques such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain and disease states.

Jack and I first connected 20 years back (gosh!) in Davos via the World Economic Forum, having been invited to be members of the group Global Leaders of Tomorrow.

Currently, Jack is a Senior Advisor to Alphabet X Labs—the advanced innovation lab of Alphabet/Google, where he focuses on AI and quantum technologies. He is also an investor in Primary Insight and serves as a trustee of the X Prize Foundation and the co-founder of the Auto X Prize, which inspired the development of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. He’s committed to community and philanthropic causes and established the Hidary Foundation which focuses on medical research in oncology.

In this episode we do a deep dive into his new book, Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach, which has been adopted for a number of courses. It can serve as a textbook for STEM majors, or physics grad students (augmenting Mike and Ike’s textbook on quantum computing and quantum information), or computer science grad students; and it can serve as a primer for non-quantum computing experts who are software engineers, physicists, engineering and business folks, and for independent study.