I’m Andy Konwinski. I co-founded Laude (Institute and Ventures), 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, and systems.
• At Laude we co-created Terminal Bench and Harbor with Ludwig Schmidt’s group at Stanford.
• I ran the K Prize, a $1M competition for the first AI that could get 90% on a contamination-free version of SWE-Bench (also at Laude).
• I co-founded Databricks, where I was VP Product AI/ML, created the Data+AI Summit, and co-authored the O’reilly Learning Spark book.
• I’m a co-founder of Perplexity and was one of the first investors and founding President.
• 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.

Find me on Github, Google Scholar, Twitter.