Strangeworks, Inc. and the Strange Case of the Curley-Wurley Man
Strangeworks, Inc. sounds like something from the movie A Clockwork Orange. But even the mind of Stanley Burgess couldn’t invent William Hurley, commonly known as Whurley, maybe quantum computer’s very first poster boy
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Ode to the Curly-Wurly Man
When I was a child, I loved the chewy chocolate bar called a Curly-Wurly (don’t think they’re available in the US). Don’t know why, really, as there were better ones: Snickers, Mars etc. The chewy, elastic consistency of the bar was annoying and really quite bad for your teeth: You took a bite, pulled it, twisted it a few times — like a crocodile with its prey — then, with an almighty yank, it came loose. The movement, and the action in general, was very quantum, very qubitty in its randomness, a candy superposition surprise of, though not quantum physics at his purest, the closest thing to it in the physical world.
All that reminds me, strangely — and a bad analogy, for sure — of something quite similar, a man with a ‘ley’ suffix to his surname, William Hurley, otherwise known as Whurley, also very quantum, very qubitty in his thinking, a man ahead of his time and with more ideas than probably 99.99% of people on the planet.
‘Quantum will only become useful through collaboration.’
- Whurley
Model Entrepreneur
Whurley, founder of the quantum computing (QC) Austin startup Strangeworks, Inc., has started more companies than I’ve had hot dinners, and is an entrepreneur (though maybe we shouldn’t call him that anymore) who breaks the boundaries of technological innovation all the time.
With no formal higher education after dropping out of junior college, he has been at the head of Chaotic Moon Studios, a mobile software design and development company, Honest Dollar, a financial technology firm and Equals, a global partnership organisation for gender equality in the digital age, respectively (which he still runs). His enthusiasm and ability to talk about complicated scientific topics in…
