I’m Andy Konwinski. I co-founded Databricks and Perplexity. I advise and invest in startups built by technical founders. I also teach a PhD seminar called Research to Startups in the Berkeley CS dept. I hack on researchy AI systems for fun.

Background:

• I got my PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
• My research is focused on AI/data/ML systems like Spark, MLflow, and Mesos.
• During grad school, I contributed to Hadoop, co-created Mesos (NSDI Test of Time award 2021), worked at Google on the Omega cluster scheduler (Eurosys Best Student Paper 2013 / Test of Time award 2023), and was part of the team that created Spark.
• At Databricks, I was VP Product AI/ML, created the Data+AI Summit, co-authored the O’reilly Learning Spark book, and built the Professional Services & Training orgs from scratch.
• I’m one of the first investors, co-founder, and President of Perplexity.

Find me on Github, Google Scholar, Twitter.