it's hard to express how excited I am about doubling down (once again) into @arena's latest round including our friends at Lightspeed, Khosla, a16z, AMP PBC, Felicis, and others @ml_angelopoulos, @infwinston, @istoica05, and team are building a generational company on a truly stunning growth trajectory 📈

.@arena is among the fastest-growing and most important startups in the world thanks to its world-class founders @ml_angelopoulos, @infwinston, @istoica05 and team btw they're hiring! (link below) cc @thehousefund

It would be hard to do a weekly series on Berkeley's impact on technology without getting to @matei_zaharia. His Berkeley story starts with Apache Spark, which began as a research project on campus in 2009, when Matei was a PhD student in the lab that became AMPLab, working on ways to make large-scale data processing faster and more flexible. Spark eventually became one of the most widely used open-source systems for processing enormous datasets. Then the researchers behind it set the foundations for @databricks. Matei and a group of fellow Berkeley researchers turned the technology they had been developing on campus into a company that has since become one of the defining data and AI platforms of its generation. It's now valued at $190B! The story didn't end with Spark, either. Matei has continued working on widely used open-source data and AI projects including MLflow and Delta Lake, while Databricks has grown from a Berkeley research spinout into a company serving organizations around the world. And now there's another Berkeley chapter. Matei is still Databricks' Co-Founder/CTO, but he's also back at Berkeley as an Associate Professor in EECS, conducting research and working alongside another generation of students who may eventually spark pioneering research and/or companies of their own. Today, his research focuses on one of the biggest open questions in AI: how to build and scale reliable agents. He's a co-author on recent open-source projects including DSPy and GEPA, which automatically optimize prompts and models so agents get better at specific tasks. This April, ACM awarded him the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for the distributed data systems that made large-scale analytics, machine learning, and AI possible. A fitting bookend: his Spark dissertation won ACM's Doctoral Dissertation Award back in 2014. I talk a lot about Berkeley's startup flywheel because Matei's career is a pretty clean example of how it works. A PhD student invents important technology on campus. The work is released openly and gets adopted around the world. A company grows out of it and becomes a category leader. The people responsible stay connected to Berkeley, and the next generation gets to learn and build alongside them. Nearly two decades after Spark got its start on campus, that cycle is still going.

.@alighodsi none of us can even begin to imagine how massively impactful you & Databricks investing in the next gen of Berkeley students, builders, & athletes is for us... It's changing the game for Berkeley. And will shore up / scale the next 150 years of Berkeley's impact on society & the world... Not to mention bringing home a Rose Bowl soon & beginning our football dynasty under @CoachLup... Thank you & Go Bears!

Databricks Field was just announced ~ BIG NEWS for the Cal Bears!!! All seven Databricks co-founders started at Berkeley. The company began in a room in Soda Hall, and its co-founders still teach on campus. Now their name is on the 50-yard line, in the largest partnership in Cal Athletics history and Databricks' first ever in college sports. My favorite detail: the deal is funded by UC Berkeley becoming a Databricks shareholder. Ali Ghodsi said it best: this is about "investing in the next generation of students and builders who'll do their best work on that campus" - including on the gridiron. That's the Berkeley flywheel in one sentence. Research becomes a company, the company becomes a giant, and the giant pays it forward. Grateful to have been in some of the rooms that helped bring this together. More on the big news below. Thank you to the founders, execs, and Databricks team. See you tomorrow night against Clemson. Go Bears!

The last time a portco hosted at One Liberty Plaza in NYC, they were acquired for ~$1.7B soon after. Complete coincidence, of course. It's a big city. (And to be clear, Laurel is not for sale) Today @getlaurel is hosting its first conference, called Proof. Laurel captures professional services work automatically at the source, so lawyers, accountants, and consultants stop reconstructing their week from memory. Firm leaders finally see where their time goes and where each matter earns or loses money. The premise of Proof is simple: less theory, more receipts. Leaders from PwC, EY, Freshfields, Reed Smith, Cozen O'Connor, and more are sharing how their AI rollouts actually went and what it means for how firms staff and bill. Meg Whitman and @ariannahuff close out the day with a fireside chat. Congrats to @ryanalshak & the Laurel team on this epic first one. I've already learned a ton.