Ali Ghodsi
Background
Ali Ghodsi earned his Ph.D. in distributed computing from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He joined UC Berkeley as an adjunct professor and senior research scientist at the AMPLab (Algorithms, Machines, People Lab).
Role at Databricks, Inc.
Ali Ghodsi is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Databricks, Inc. A brilliant distributed systems researcher and visionary entrepreneur, Ghodsi co-created Apache Spark alongside Matei Zaharia at UC Berkeley, anticipating the massive explosion of big data and distributed machine learning. Since assuming the CEO role in 2016, Ghodsi transformed Databricks from a specialized open-source startup into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise titan generating over $2.4 billion in annual revenue at a $43 billion valuation. Ghodsi championed the 'Lakehouse' paradigm, pioneered the company's first-party partnership with Microsoft Azure, orchestrated the landmark acquisitions of MosaicML ($1.3B) and Tabular ($1.0B+), and is widely recognized as one of the most effective executives in enterprise software history.