Many technology CEOs come from the nation’s top business schools, or emerge from Silicon Valley garages. Others come by way of Iran, Sweden and the University of California at Berkeley’s computer-science department. That’s Ali Ghodsi’s story, at least. Ghodsi is a PhD computer scientist who, with several others, is the original creator of Apache Spark open-source, unified analytics engine project. He and his co-founders later leveraged that project to create the data and analytics company Databricks, which now has more than 900 employees and $100 million in annual revenue. In this episode of Powered by Battery, Ghodsi talks about Databricks’ early days as well as the challenges that he, as an ex-academic, faced building up core corporate functions like sales, marketing, finance and HR. Have a listen.