From Research to Impact

Abstract: In this talk I will share the story of my transition from PhD to startup founder and how I continue to work at the intersection of research and real-world impact.

Bio: Andy Konwinski studied CS as an undergrad at UW-Madison, got his PhD at UC Berkeley focused on cluster scheduling and data+ML systems, and then co-founded Databricks and Perplexity. At Berkeley, Andy contributed to Apache Hadoop, co-created Apache Mesos, was part of the team that created Apache Spark, and teaches a PhD seminar called "Research to Startup".

At Databricks, Andy led the AI Product, created the Data+AI Summit, and co-authored the O'Reilly book "Learning Spark. Andy is the President and a board member of Perplexity, and was one of the company's first investors.