Ali Ghodsi is the CEO and Co–founder of Databricks, responsible for the growth and international​ ​expansion of the company. In addition to his work at Databricks, Ali serves as an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley and is on the board at UC Berkeley’s RiseLab. Ali was one of the creators of open source project Apache Spark, and ideas from his academic research have been applied to Apache Mesos​ ​and Apache Hadoop.​ ​​Ali​ ​received his MBA from Mid-Sweden University in 2003 and PhD from KTH/Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden​ in 2006​ in the area of​ ​Distributed Computing.