Greg Dick

Co-Founder & CEO, Open Quantum Design (OQD). Greg Dick is Co-Founder and CEO of Open Quantum Design (OQD), a Waterloo-based non-profit that has released the world's first open-source, full-stack architecture for trapped-ion quantum computing—every layer, from ion-trap hardware to user-facing software, freely available under Apache 2.0. Co-founded in 2024 with physicists from the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute, OQD exists to accelerate quantum computing to scale, attacking the access and talent bottlenecks that hold the whole field back. Dick brings a builder's view of that problem: before OQD, he spent nearly two decades in senior leadership at Perimeter Institute and built a career in physics education. He is also a private equity investor in the quantum sector, giving him a deep, cross-cutting view of the vibrant emerging quantum industry ecosystem. He'll make the case that open infrastructure is quantum's fastest path to scale—an economic engine that lowers the cost and compresses the time of building real capability, while keeping the talent, IP, and supply chains within reach of the firms and nations that depend on them. The constraint, he argues, was never hardware; it's access—and open is how you widen it, for the economy and for sovereignty alike.