UC Berkeley Class of 2029 Official Discussion Thread

ucscuuw
Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:42:29 +0000

Ian Stoica was my son’s professor for his operating systems class and at one point he took a bunch of students including my son to review the original research paper that launched the idea of Databricks.

it’s not just Databricks - founders of many successful firms - Perplexity, Covariant and Open AI came from the research labs at Berkeley EECS. Many of the professors also have outside interests - for instance Pieter Abeel has a VC firm called AIX ventures.

I’d also add this is not just a Berkeley phenomenon. For instance I ran into a high flying AI start up called Snorkel AI that came out of a Stanford professors research lab. That company has raised hundreds of millions but the prof is still at Stanford