Ali Yahya

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our fifteen billion year heritage in meaningless self-destruction.

Carl Sagan

Education

Stanford University

• Master's Degree, Computer Science, Distributed Systems ^ Machine Learning
• Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science, Distributed Systems 2006 - 2010

Experience

Andreessen Horowitz, General Partner April 2021 to present

• Investing in web3.

Andreessen Horowitz, Partner November 2017 to April 2021

• Investing in web3.

Google Brain, Software Engineer, Researcher Dec. 2016 to Nov. 2017

• TensorFlow, Core Contributor

GoogleX, Software Engineer, Researcher Aug. 2014 to Dec. 2016

• Robotics ^ Distributed Systems ^ Machine Learning
• Lead author of: Collective Robot Reinforcement Learning [...] (paper)
  Media coverage: Google Blog, MIT Tech Review, IEEE Spectrum, Wired
  
• Co-authored: Path Integral Guided Policy Search (paper)

Athena, CTO2012 - 2013

• Led a 3-6 person engineering team to launch Athena's main product — a tool that presents the tree of knowledge as a graph where nodes are concepts and edges are dependencies — to over 500 students across two classes at Stanford.
• Went through StartX, Stanford's Startup Accelerator Program.

Nicira Networks, Software Engineering Intern May - Sept, 2011

• Re-implemented most of the configuration protocol (RFC 7047) between Nicira's OpenFlow controller and running instances of Open vSwitch. The goal was to both improve performance and strengthen the logical separation between the two components with a better interface.
• Worked with the Product Management team to increase adoption of Neutron, an open-source project led by Nicira that added Network Virtualization to Open Stack.

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, Research October - December, 2010

• Co-Authored: Parallelizing Machine Learning Algorithms (whitepaper).
• Built a Python framework for the rapid prototyping of distributed machine learning algorithms. Read more in #code.

Stanford High Performance Networking Lab, Research Sept - June, 2012

• Contributed: Using Network Knowledge to Improve Workload Performance in Virtualized Data Centers (paper)
• Built the infrastructure needed to benchmark the above system by running the Hadoop Terasort workload on a cluster of 80 physical machines (each running up to four VMs).
• Built the infrastructure needed to collect and analyze all data produced by the above workload.

Stanford Secure Computer Systems Lab, Research 2011 - 2012

• Co-Authored: Starlight (paper)
• Extended the NaCl system call interface using information flow control to securely support I/O operations like disk or network access.

Stanford Distributed Systems Group, Independent Research January - June, 2009

• Authored: Managing Genomic Information Using Named Descriptions (paper, slides)
• Built and tested a compression system for genomic sequences by leveraging a kind of dynamic programming known as Needleman-Wunsch.

Teaching

Course Assistant & Section Leader

• CS 140, Operating Systems (four times)

  Notorious for being the most programming intensive class in the Stanford Computer Science undergraduate major.

• CS 106A, Programming Methodology

  I led a video recorded weekly discussion section with about 10 students on the course material to complement the professor's lecture.

• CS 249A, Mission and Life-Critical Applications

Random

• For three months in 2008, I slept an average of 2.5 hours a night by taking a twenty minute nap every four hours (i.e. the Uberman polyphasic sleep schedule).
• I type on the Dvorak keyboard layout.