Andrew Konwinski

Andy Konwinski was born on October 15, 1983, in rural Wisconsin to a religious family of Jehovah's Witnesses. His father worked as a machinist, and his mother was a homemaker and school bus driver. Raised in the Jehovah's Witness faith, Konwinski and his four siblings frequently traveled with their parents, who were senior leaders in the organization, to religious conventions.

During high school, Konwinski began to question the tenets of his religion. His inquiries were discouraged by the community, and at age 18, he was disfellowshipped (expelled) from the faith. Consequently, he was estranged from his community and family members. Following a period of personal difficulty, a high school counselor encouraged him to pursue higher education.

Konwinski attended a trade school and a community college before transferring to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Konwinski received his PhD from UC Berkeley, advised by Randy H. Katz.

2013–2022: Apache Spark and Databricks

While at UC Berkeley, Konwinski was an early organizer of the Computer Science Graduate Entrepreneurs club. Working in the computer lab alongside fellow researcher Matei Zaharia, he helped develop open-source architectures for large-scale data processing, including Apache Mesos and Apache Spark.

In 2013, Konwinski, Zaharia, and five other researchers founded Databricks to commercialize their open-source work. Konwinski's early role in the company was akin to a product manager; he focused on community building, organizing user conferences, and assisting early customers with software deployment. He stepped back from day-to-day operations in 2019.

2022–present: Perplexity and Laude

After leaving daily operations at Databricks, Konwinski began investing in early-stage startups. Through his initial investment fund, Computer Science Graduate Ventures (CSGV), he met Aravind Srinivas. In 2022, he co-founded the AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI with Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, and Johnny Ho.

In 2024, he co-founded Laude Ventures, an early stage venture firm focused on investing in technical founders, mostly with research backgrounds, with Pete Sonsini and Andrew Krioukov. In 2025, he pledged $100M to establish Laude Institute, an organization for computer science researchers, with Dave Patterson, Jeff Dean, and Joelle Pineau.

He co-teaches UC Berkeley’s Research to Startup seminar.

Konwinski is married and has two daughters.