Ali Ghodsi

Founded

Co-founded Databricks in 2013 with Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, Andy Konwinski, and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji — seven academics who had never run a company; he became CEO in January 2016. Co-founded Peerialism, a Stockholm peer-to-peer data-transfer company, before moving to Berkeley. Ghodsi co-founded Peerialism AB, a Stockholm-based company developing a peer-to-peer data transfer system. Ghodsi co-founded Databricks in 2013, a company that commercializes Apache Spark.

Education

Co-authored foundational work on Apache Mesos and Spark SQL and co-invented Dominant Resource Fairness at Berkeley's AMPLab, where he is still an adjunct professor. Studied at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (PhD, Computer Science, 2006) Studied at Mid-Sweden University (MBA, Logistics and Marketing, 2003) Studied at Mid-Sweden University (MSc, Computer Engineering, 2002)

Family

Born in Iran in 1978; his family fled to Sweden during the Iran–Iraq war, and he holds both Swedish and American citizenship.

More

Taught himself to program on a broken Commodore 64 after arriving in Sweden. Publicly calls parts of the AI funding market a bubble — companies with billions raised and zero revenue are 'clearly a bubble… it's, like, insane.' Ghodsi helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects and co-invented the concept of Dominant Resource Fairness. Ghodsi holds American and Swedish citizenship and is of Iranian-Swedish-American background.

Mentioned above: the KTH Royal Institute of Technology mafia →

From published sources — common ground for a warm intro.

Intro paths

Co-founders at Databricks

IS

Ion StoicaExecutive Officer, Director, Promoter

MZ

Matei ZahariaExecutive Officer, Director, Promoter

RX

Reynold XinFounder

PW

Patrick WendellFounder

AK

Andy KonwinskiFounder