Professor Ion Stoica has an estimated fortune of $2.5 billion after successfully starting four companies with his students and colleagues, including two "unicorns" Databricks and Anyscale.

What is special is that, despite becoming a billionaire, he is still attached to the lecture hall, directly teaching undergraduates. “In my heart, I still consider myself an academic. Money has never been my goal. The important thing is to create something meaningful,” he said.

From the lab to the marketplace

Professor Stoica was born in Romania, came to the US in the late 1990s, defended his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon and then taught at UC Berkeley since 2000. His research projects are often quickly commercialized.

Stoica’s first startup, Conviva, which developed streaming TV optimization technology in 2006, still operates with clients like Fox and Peacock. The most successful of Stoica’s startups, Databricks (2013), a big data analytics and artificial intelligence platform, is now valued at $62 billion and has billions of dollars in annual revenue.

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Professor Ion Stoica (center) with his two co-founders of Anyscale, who are all his students. Photo: Anyscale

According to Forbes , in 2019, Professor Ion Stoica and his students founded Anyscale, developing the Ray platform to help programmers easily expand AI applications. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital, becoming a "unicorn" after only three years.

Recently, from a chatbot comparison game, Stoica and the research team developed ChatBot Arena (now LMArena). This is an AI model evaluation platform used by "big guys" like OpenAI and Google. The project has successfully called for 100 million USD in investment capital, valued at 600 million USD.

The millionaire professor still chooses to stay in the lecture hall

The common point of the companies that Professor Stoica co-founded is that they all started from academic research and were developed in an open source direction for the community to benefit from.

Despite being CEO of Databricks, he quickly returned to university. “If I had stayed any longer, I would have had to leave. I chose to be a student,” he said. According to him, it is the creativity and daring spirit of young people that has helped many seemingly “impossible” ideas become real products.

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Despite his successful business career, Professor Stoica chose to stay in the classroom. Photo: Brandon Vallejo/Columbia Engineering

One of Berkeley’s most respected professors, Stoica has also led several private-funding initiatives to support research in the face of budget cuts. More than 80 of his graduate students have gone on to successful careers in academia and startups, including several now at Databricks.

While admitting that AI is disrupting the tech job market, Stoica advises students to embrace it rather than fear it. “AI is a tool that will accelerate human evolution and pave the way for interplanetary civilization,” he confidently shares with his students.

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/con-duong-tro-thanh-trieu-phu-dola-cua-mot-giao-su-dai-hoc-2436306.html