I spawned in Iran admist war and revolution. The sirens would blare at night, signaling another round of bombings, and my parents would frantically usher my sister and I under the table. I remember it felt like they actually hit our building. The whole building had just collapsed, the one next to our house.

One day, everything changed. My parents called a friend who didn't pick up- it's time to go. With just 24 hours to act, my parents gathered what they could and we fled our home, boarding a flight out of the country. My uncle stayed behind and said, There's nothing. Eventually he got, captured and killed. So it was, it was a serious we actually had to leave. And it was actually wise with my parents to actually act on that.

We escaped Iran to Sweden with barely any money left, my parents had to scramble to find us a place to stay. At first, we ended up living in these cramped college dorms, sharing a kitchen with a bunch of 18-year-olds. Imagine a family of four, with my dad's big mustache, trying to blend in with all these students - it was so out of place. We kept getting evicted from one dorm to the next, never feeling settled. Eventually, we ended up in the suburbs, in what I now realize were the less desirable neighborhoods.

Developed a fascination with computers, learning to program by tinkering with software and online forums. I wanted to pursue advanced coursework in mathematics and computer science in high school.

Enrolled at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm, in computer science and engineering. I learned distributed computing, and become curious about large-scale data processing.

I earned a Master’s degree and then pursued a Ph.D. in Distributed Computing at KTH, focusing on fault-tolerant, high-performance systems and efficient data processing. My research led to academic publications and practical prototypes, establishing my reputation as an emerging expert.

Completed my Ph.D. in Distributed Computing at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm, Sweden. My doctoral research focused on large-scale data processing and laid the groundwork for later breakthroughs.

Joined UC Berkeley’s AMPLab as a visiting scholar/postdoctoral researcher on an O-1 Visa, where I collaborated with Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica on what would become Apache Spark.

Ben Horowitz of a16z pitches me on taking $14M at $50M valuation for my academic project. Fuck it why not. Co-founded Databricks, a cloud-based data and AI startup that commercialized Apache Spark.

Databricks becomes a $62 Billion company, one of the most prominent data infrastructure and analytics platforms in the technology sector while continuing to innovate around distributed computing and AI