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6. From Engineer To Businessman
Coding Life
Ghodsi was born in the middle of the revolution in Iran. At five years old his family was given 24 hours to flee the country. His parents secured a path to Sweden and they got out.
Not having a lot of money in their new circumstances, they ended up with a semi-broken Commodore 64. No games would play on it. So, Ali began doing what he could. He read the manuals, figured out he could still program on it and started coding.
By the time he was eight years old, he was writing games on his computer. He’s been coding almost every day since.
Because he was staying up all night programming and conversing with people in the US, he had a 70% absence rate in high school.
When he arrived at university, his roommate explained that the business degree he was working on would make him Ali’s boss one day. Ali wasn’t a fan of ending up working for this guy. He got his MBA instead.
The Founders Of AI
Ali Ghodsi and his team are recognized as some of the true founders of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
After his MBA, he went on to his Ph.D. He and Ion Stoica from MIT began collaborating. They ended up working together at UC Berkeley.
They worked on early decentralized systems, the precursors to today’s bitcoin. They started working on software for new data centers. Many of their projects are now being used by almost every enterprise on the planet.
One of their projects, Apache Spark, has become the largest open source project in data processing and was the foundation for Databricks.
The World-Changing Tech They Couldn’t Give Away For Free
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