Ali Ghodsi is cofounder and CEO of software startup Databricks, valued at $38 billion in August 2021. Investors include cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon. After a career in academia, Ghodsi cofounded Databricks with six UC Berkeley academics who built the popular analytics engine Apache Spark. Databricks is built on top of Spark and uses AI to power, in Ghodsi’s words, a “data lakehouse” that helps companies store and utilize their data. Ghodsi was tapped to lead Databricks in 2016 amid company struggles to generate revenue; initially, he had joined in 2013 as a part-time engineer. The first-time CEO orchestrated a turnaround after revamping Databricks? leadership and product offerings.