Today, I’m launching a deeply personal project. I’m betting $100M that we can help computer scientists create more upside impact for humanity.
Built for and by researchers, including @JeffDean & @jpineau1 on the board, @LaudeInstitute catalyzes research with real-world impact.
As a PhD starting Databricks, I did not value sales. Now I see a founder's job is selling: to investors, employees, candidates, customers; and sometimes, myself.
If you had 15min to tell thousands of Berkeley CS/Data/Stats grads what to do with their lives, what would you say? Last Thursday I told them to RUN AT FAILURE.
Afterwards, while we were shaking hands & taking selfies, hundreds of them told me that they are excited to go fail. I
Crazy startup valuations remind me of my @databricks cofounder Ion's advice: stay frugal, stay hungry. We bought rebuilt chairs from some dude's garage in Berkeley and went to Ikea for our first desks.
@LaudeInstitute is a non-profit that gives the right resources to the right researchers at the right time. We help more researchers go from idea to impact.
When @matei_zaharia and I published about Hadoop with Ion Stoica in our first year at Berkeley, we shipped the code too.
That line of research led Matei to build @ApacheSpark.
Spark became @databricks.
The lesson stuck with me.
Breakthroughs only matter when you ship them.
If you are working on something the world should see:
→ Apply on the laude website for support
→ Come to an event
→ Tell your peers
→ Follow us @LaudeInstitute
And ship your research.
We’re at a hinge moment.
Engineered intelligence is no longer theoretical.
The systems we build today will shape our future.
Whether AI moves society forward or fractures it depends on who is building and why.
Seriously, I just gave a whole commencement speech about it.
Two flagship programs:
→ Slingshots fund early-stage research like Terminal-Bench, cited by @AnthropicAI during the Claude 4 launch tbench.ai
→ Moonshots back long-horizon labs solving species-level challenges shapingai.com
I don’t want them to fail. But as I said in my speech, “if you optimize for success, you’re not going to pick a hard enough problem. And our problems are existential."
I told them to pick problems they probably won’t solve in their lifetimes. To think about our institutions
In the first few months Perplexity had a new product demo every 2-3 weeks. Product-market-fit in 4 months. The velocity permanently defined the culture.
