Insider Brief
- Shih served a principal of technical products at Slack; director of product & ecosystem at Planet Labs; led emerging market products and initiatives at Twitter and built developer products and integrations at Airbnb and Google.
- “My aim is to leverage my experiences building and scaling products from various domains to deliver real value to our customers, from speed of delivery to performance gains to cost savings, which is simply infeasible with alternative technologies.”
- Q-CTRL is focused on delivering hardware-agnostic, error-correcting infrastructure software products that makes quantum computing and sensing useful.
PRESS RELEASE – Q-CTRL, a global leader in developing useful quantum technologies through quantum control infrastructure software, today announced the addition of Alex Shih as Head of Product. In his new role, Shih will lead the company’s product management teams to deliver the technology’s value and ROI to customers and end users in new, broader markets.
Shih has spent his career working on products and tools that aim to increase access to information and opportunity, a personal mission of his. Prior to joining Q-CTRL, Shih was a principal of technical products at Slack; director of product & ecosystem at Planet Labs; led emerging market products and initiatives at Twitter; built developer products and integrations at Airbnb and Google, and co-founded a social enterprise called Global Cycle Solutions (later acquired by Sun King).
In his top-tier experiences, Shih honed his expertise in bringing proof-of-concepts to market and expanding to new regions and segments. For example, Shih was instrumental in building products that helped Planet Labs reach $100M+ TCV and scaling Twitter growth beyond Silicon Valley into Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and other emerging markets, which led to extensive adoption and new use cases from millions of new users.
“Moving from large, traditional Silicon Valley corporations to a fast scaling quantum software company brings new challenges and exciting opportunities that I look forward to embracing in this new role,” said Shih. “I am inspired by quantum technology’s potential to revolutionize computing and accelerate resource-intensive applications and use cases across industries. My aim is to leverage my experiences building and scaling products from various domains to deliver real value to our customers, from speed of delivery to performance gains to cost savings, which is simply infeasible with alternative technologies.”
Shih continued, “Productizing the user experience for Q-CTRL’s technology will unlock the potential for our customers to solve complex, meaningful challenges, from new drug discovery to logistics optimization to climate change mitigation, and I really hope to inspire others to join the field. Q-CTRL is actively hiring!”
Shih holds a master’s in engineering and management from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Cornell University.
“Alex’s consumer and enterprise expertise will help us deliver Q-CTRL’s powerful capabilities in quantum computing and quantum sensing to the broadest range of end users, regardless of their experience levels,” said Q-CTRL founder and CEO Professor Michael J. Biercuk. “His addition to the team highlights the true product focus we have at Q-CTRL, where we know that building technology is not enough – we have to truly delight our users as we help them achieve their ambitions.”
Hardware error and instability are holding the industry back from achieving the full potential of the quantum opportunity. Q-CTRL is uniquely focused on delivering hardware-agnostic, error-correcting infrastructure software products that makes quantum computing and sensing useful for organizations around the world. Q-CTRL’s investment in world-leading product management is strategically designed to support the company’s scaling goals and to ensure that their performance-accelerating technology empowers customers to achieve their greatest ambitions for the quantum era.
To learn more about Q-CTRL, please visit: q-ctrl.com.
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