How to Turn Research Into Billion-Dollar Companies, with Ion Stoica

Ion Stoica has done what almost no academic ever does — repeatedly turned university research into billion-dollar companies. He co-founded Databricks (now valued at over $100 billion), Anyscale, Arena AI and Conviva, while his Berkeley lab produced the open source projects the entire AI industry runs on: Ray, vLLM, and SGLang.

In this episode, we ask him how it's actually done. His answer is surprisingly unromantic: solve a problem people already care about, build an artifact good enough that they adopt it, and pay attention to the moment users start asking "who maintains this after the students graduate?" - th...