Ion Stoica

Ion Stoica possesses an absolute world-class academic background in computer networking and distributed systems. Having earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon before securing a professorship at UC Berkeley, his immense background managing massive, DARPA-funded research labs like the AMPLab gave him the exact technical and operational authority needed to foster the creation of Apache Spark and launch Databricks.

Ion Stoica is a brilliant Romanian-American computer scientist, a professor at UC Berkeley, and the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks. A massive titan in the field of distributed computing, Stoica was the founding director of Berkeley's legendary AMPLab, which produced Apache Spark. In 2013, he co-founded Databricks and served as its first CEO, leading the incredibly complex transition from an open-source academic project to a highly lucrative cloud enterprise. In addition to Databricks, Stoica's unparalleled ability to commercialize research led him to co-found Conviva (video analytics) and Anyscale (commercializing the Ray framework), cementing him as one of the most successful academics in Silicon Valley history.