I’m Andy Konwinski. I co-founded Databricks and Perplexity AI. I advise and invest in startups coming out of top CS departments. I also teach a PhD seminar called Research to Startups in the Berkeley CS dept.

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, and built the Professional Services + Training orgs from scratch.

Find me on Github, Google Scholar, Twitter.