You’ve had a fascinating career with so many accomplishments: Compsci PhD from UC Berkeley, contributor to Hadoop, helping to create Apache Spark at AMPLab, co-creator and committer of Apache Mesos project, co-founder and VP of AI/ML at Databricks, creator of the Data + AI Summit, and co-founder and president of Perplexity. What motivates you to keep creating new things?

Impact motivates me. Since becoming a parent, that drive has sharpened into something more urgent. I want to use whatever time, skills, and leverage I have to help move all of humanity forward, faster. For me, that starts with bringing people together. I’ve realized that everything I’ve done well in my career traces back to getting smart, driven people in the same room for something new and big to happen. I call this “big group energy” and it’s the motion I’m built for. 
 

You teach a seminar at Berkeley called Research to Startups, along with Ali Ghodsi and Ion Stoica, among other Berkeley legends. Why do you think the number of startups has slowed in recent years? Has technological innovation slowed or is there something else at play?

Believe it or not, entrepreneurship still isn’t a straightforward path for top researchers. I think it should be. We started Research to Startup to help change that. The goal of the seminar is simple: Give academic researchers the tools, examples, confidence, and connections to turn their work into companies. We’ve had a rotating lineup of instructors and some pretty incredible guest speakers. This idea – that researchers should ship things – has been a throughline in my career. Discovery is important, but deployment is where the real impact happens. I’ve also worked on this with labs across top schools, and I’m convinced: the people who understand the technology most deeply can achieve the biggest outcomes.
 

You’re scheduled to speak at the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society undergraduate commencement ceremonies on May 22. Would you care to give us a preview?

I’m really looking forward to it. I walked the Greek Theatre myself when I finished my PhD at Berkeley, so this feels personal. Preparing my speech has made me reflect – on building companies, on becoming a parent, and on what really drives me. At the core, I’m a scientist. And I believe scientists, perhaps especially computer scientists, have a special role to play in what comes next. My goal is to share a bit of my own path and, more importantly, invite these new graduates (and the families cheering them on) to see themselves as part of something bigger. Our field has the potential to move all of humanity forward faster, and I want them to feel the weight and the excitement of that.
 

You co-founded Laude Ventures in 2024. Can you tell us about the firm? What sort of companies are you looking to invest in?

We go in early during the discovery/inception phase, on breakthroughs we believe can become billion dollar companies. We only work with deeply technical founders, mostly research-based. That’s my own background and my co-founders share that DNA. Laude is unique in that we really are technologists investing in technologists. We’re deeply networked into academia, with some of the best computer scientists on the planet as our LPs – 1 out of 3 have already founded a $B+ company. We announced our debut fund, which was $150M, in December, and have been having a lot of fun since then. Our investments mostly span deeply technical infrastructure and applications, but we’ll take a look at anything that is rooted in research or built by a stellar technical team. 
 

What can you tell us about yourself outside of the professional sphere – unique hobbies, favorite places, etc.? Is there anything about you that your colleagues might be surprised to learn?

I love being outdoors, even if I’m a little out of practice. I recently backpacked a 28-mile stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail with some friends, rolled my ankle halfway through, and had to limp the last 5 miles out. Luckily one of them had better first-aid skills than I did. It wasn’t exactly comfortable – but honestly, I still loved every minute of being out there. As profound as the AI breakthroughs of the last few years have been, nothing compares to the way hiking around the mountains makes me feel.