Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder, Databricks

Ghodsi co-founded software developer Databricks in 2013, becoming chief executive officer at the start of 2016. Ghodsi has been leading teams to develop new data solutions including Lakehouse: new types of open data platforms that have full support for machine learning while supporting all traditional data warehousing workloads.

Academia has played an important part in Ghodsi’s career, with six years as a visiting scholar and six years as an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, five years as an assistant professor at the Royal Institute of Technology and two years as a senior researcher for the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.