The Prince of Data
An interview with Databricks cofounder and Berkeley professor Ion Stoica
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Arena Magazine presents an interview with Ion Stoica, cofounder of Databricks and Berkeley professor. The conversation highlights Stoica's life and career, from his upbringing in Romania to his impact on computer systems and networking. The issue is presented by Plaid, which is also featured for its work in streamlining financial account connections and loan processes.
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Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
The Prince of Data
An interview with Databricks cofounder and Berkeley professor Ion Stoica. By Carson Becker.
Today's email is presented by Plaid
A conversation with an AI agent used to end where the real work began. For businesses, that meant manually requesting information before an action could take place. Plaid and Sierra are closing that gap. Users can securely connect their financial accounts, and agents use that data to keep a loan, claim, or payment process moving without leaving the chat. That means faster resolutions, and less time on hold.
Ion Stoica is a Romanian-American computer scientist and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. As cofounder of the unicorns Databricks and Anyscale, Stoica is among the most prolific academic-entrepreneurs of the 21st century.
Born in 1965, he was raised in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, where he served an obligatory nine months in the armed forces. He completed an MS in computer science at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in 1989, a year of profound change across Europe. As the Warsaw Pact disintegrated, Romania’s particularly harsh totalitarian regime collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. A combination of extreme austerity and social repression, combined with Ceaușescu’s distinctive policy of self-reliance, had eroded the regime’s reputation across all levels of society. In December, Ceaușescu was overthrown and executed, and Romania began its westward transition. Not long after the revolution, Stoica departed his homeland for the United States.
Stoica has had an enormous impact on computer systems and networking beginning with his early work as a graduate student at Old Dominion University, a public university in Norfolk, Virginia. At ODU, he devised a process-scheduling algorithm that was later adopted as the default scheduler in the Linux kernel. After moving to Carnegie Mellon to complete his PhD in electrical and computer engineering, and with a brief stopover at MIT, Stoica began teaching at Berkeley in 2001. In 2006, he launched Conviva, a streaming analytics company that was born out of his academic research into video streaming over the internet.
After launching Conviva, Stoica’s research became increasingly focused on big data. In 2009, machine learning researchers at Berkeley’s interdisciplinary AMPLab found that Hadoop, which was then the dominant framework for large-scale data processing, was hopelessly slow for algorithms that needed to iterate over the same dataset many times. In response to this, Stoica’s doctoral student Matei Zaharia built a compact system that kept data in memory rather than repeatedly writing it to disk. Open-sourced in 2010, that system, Apache Spark, has become one of the most influential pieces of data infrastructure ever created.
Databricks was founded in 2013 by Stoica, Ali Ghodsi, and five PhD students including Zaharia. Stoica served as the company’s first CEO from 2013 to 2016, when he became executive chairman. In early August, Databricks closed a $5 billion strategic funding round at a $190 billion valuation. In 2019, Stoica co-founded Anyscale, built around Ray, a distributed computing framework developed in his lab to overcome structural limits in Spark itself. Ray now undergirds much of the AI industry’s training and inference workloads. Meanwhile, Anyscale, where Stoica also serves as executive chairman, has reached a private market value of over $1 billion.
As director of Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, Stoica is currently preoccupied by questions surrounding the reliability of AI and the mounting complexity of the AI stack itself. Some of his recent research projects have included vLLM, Vicuna, MemGPT, and the model-evaluation platform Arena AI (formerly LMArena), alongside work on inference. Professor Stoica continues to teach Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students.
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