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The House Fund Welcomes New Part-Time Partners
The House Fund Welcomes New Part-Time Partners
We are proud to welcome Brett Wilson, Co-founder and CEO of TubeMogul, and Jason Wang, Co-founder and founding CEO of…
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Jeremy Fiance shared thisIt 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.
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Jeremy Fiance shared thisLargest individual gift in higher education history - inspiring!
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Jeremy Fiance reposted thisJeremy Fiance reposted thisA decade ago, I started dreaming about creating enough customer love to host a Customer conference. Last week, the dream came true. More than 100 leaders across professional services, financial services, and tech came to New York for Proof, our first customer summit. The customers in that room have entrusted us with $13.4B of revenues. Much more importantly, our partnership has returned 1.56 million hours to over 45,000 professionals across 70 countries. That is 736 years of human time. Returning time is personal for us. Once life teaches you that time is finite, you understand it is all that matters. Proof was filled with people who understand that. Meg Whitman reminded us that AI will change everything, and yet timeless principles, like working hard, being passionate, and delivering customer value, will always matter most. Arianna Huffington reminded us that AI makes "busy" the new stupid. We haven't stopped repeating it. Charles Pickett of PwC showed how his team measures both the inputs and outputs of AI (quality, efficiency, speed to insight) to find its real ROI. There is a lot of noise in AI right now. A lot of demos that don't work in production. A lot of AI spend disconnected from customer value. A lot of fundraises with splashy numbers. Proof is the signal in AI. The most incredible people in the world, connecting in real life, to build the future of work together. That is being human in the age of AI.
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Jeremy Fiance reposted thisJeremy Fiance reposted thisToday, we’re proud to announce Databricks as the new sponsor of the Databricks Field at California Memorial Stadium! 🐻 All seven of our co-founders are Cal alumni. The earliest lines of what would become Databricks were written at Berkeley’s Soda Hall, fueled by late nights and a shared belief that data and AI could accelerate human progress. This sponsorship is our way of investing in the next generation of researchers and builders who’ll have their own breakthroughs there. Our mission has always been to democratize data and AI. It started at Cal. We’re glad to help it continue there. Go Bears. 💙 https://lnkd.in/giTRx-xp
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Jeremy Fiance shared thisAli Ghodsi none of us can even begin to imagine how massively impactful you & Databricks investing in the next gen of Berkeley students, builders, and 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. Thank you & Go Bears!Jeremy Fiance shared thisAll seven Databricks co-founders began our journey together at UC Berkeley. We started the company in a room in Soda Hall, moved to a small office on Addison Street, and spent our first few years in Berkeley before eventually heading to SF. Two of our co-founders are still on the faculty. Today we announced Databricks Field at California Memorial Stadium, our first collegiate athletics sponsorship. Berkeley shaped everything about how this company thinks, and this is our way of investing in the next generation of students and builders who'll do their best work on that campus. Go Bears! https://lnkd.in/g9McUUVYFrom Soda Hall to the Football Field: Databricks Returns to Berkeley Roots with Cal Athletics PartnershipFrom Soda Hall to the Football Field: Databricks Returns to Berkeley Roots with Cal Athletics Partnership
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Jeremy Fiance shared thisDatabricks 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." 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 in the comments. Thank you to the founders, execs, and Databricks team. See you tomorrow night against Clemson. Go Bears!
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Jeremy Fiance shared thisThe 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 Laurel 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 Arianna Huffington close out the day with a fireside chat. Congrats to Ryan Alshak & the Laurel team on this epic first one. I've already learned a ton.
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Jeremy Fiance reposted thisJeremy Fiance reposted thisToday, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates. We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past. The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley. The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website. We raised $42M in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. I'll be CEO and Marc Andreessen and Erik Torenberg will join me on the board. Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university. We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco: theacademysf.com
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Jeremy Fiance shared thisA fun piece of House Fund history: the first company we ever invested in was tbh, founded by the now-legendary Nikita Bier, where we were his first investor when he started building social products. That was back in the earliest days of the fund, when we were doing more consumer investing and still figuring out what The House Fund itself would become. tbh became #1 in the US App Store and Facebook acquired it soon after, Nikita went on to become one of the best-known consumer product builders in the world, and over time our own portfolio shifted much more heavily toward areas like enterprise software, infrastructure and AI. For a few years, we made relatively few consumer investments. This year, that has started to change. We’ve made more consumer investments in 2026 than we did in roughly the previous four years combined, largely because AI is opening up a new set of opportunities to rethink products, interfaces and behaviors - that either didn’t make sense before or would have required a much larger team to build. There are categories that have felt relatively settled for years where suddenly the assumptions underneath them are changing. A small team can build much more capable products, software can adapt much more deeply to an individual user, and entirely new interfaces are becoming possible as people get more comfortable interacting with AI in different ways. None of that makes consumer investing easy. Human behavior is still incredibly difficult to predict. You can have a market that looks enormous, a product that works beautifully, and a thesis that makes perfect sense on paper, and people may simply decide they don’t care. Then occasionally something that looks almost too simple catches on because it hits exactly the right behavior at exactly the right moment. tbh was a pretty good early lesson in that. Nearly ten years after our first investment was a consumer company, it feels fitting that we’re spending more time in the category again.
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Jeremy Fiance liked thisJeremy Fiance liked thisDatabricks Field at California Memorial Stadium makes its debut tonight. Cal vs. Clemson on ESPN. Go Bears. 💙 🐻
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Jeremy Fiance reacted on thisJeremy Fiance reacted on thisarxiv is tapping the brakes. Announced today, the new cap of two submissions a month looks like a small policy change. For many of us in science, it's a sea change.
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Jeremy Fiance liked thisJeremy Fiance liked thisExcited to announce our new partnership with Decagon to bring richer enterprise data intelligence directly into customer conversations. AI agents are only as useful as the context they can access. Enterprises already have an incredibly rich record of their customers in Databricks. Orders, payments, product usage, preferences, and countless other signals all help explain who a customer is and what they need. Through this partnership, Decagon agents can access governed data from the Databricks when they need it, while insights from those conversations can flow back into Databricks and become useful across the rest of the business. We’re excited to work with the Decagon team to make enterprise customer agents more context aware while keeping data governance at the center. https://lnkd.in/gpTT8gWXDecagon partners with Databricks to bring enterprise context into every customer conversation | DecagonDecagon partners with Databricks to bring enterprise context into every customer conversation | Decagon
Experience & Education
Projects
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Startup Weekend UC Berkeley
Startup Weekend Berkeley is a 54-hour weekend competition during which groups of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists, and more pitch ideas for new startup companies, form teams around those ideas, and work to develop a working prototype, demo, or presentation by Sunday evening. The teams pitch these ideas to a panel of Venture Capitalists, who then select a winning team. Winning team receives seed funding, incubator space, and various other…
Startup Weekend Berkeley is a 54-hour weekend competition during which groups of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists, and more pitch ideas for new startup companies, form teams around those ideas, and work to develop a working prototype, demo, or presentation by Sunday evening. The teams pitch these ideas to a panel of Venture Capitalists, who then select a winning team. Winning team receives seed funding, incubator space, and various other prizes.
Keynote Speakers:
Adam Cheyer: Co-founder & VP Engineering at Siri, Inc.
Craig Walker: CEO/Founder of Firespotter Labs & former CEO at GrandCentral (now GoogleVoice)
Sponsors/Partners:
Microsoft, Uber, Skydeck Incubator, Foundry Accelerator, Lowenstein Sandler LLP, EQ Network, Draper University, Berkeley Startup Cluster, City of Berkeley, Big Ideas @ Berkeley, Runway SF, Keiretsu Forum, ReadyForce, Dorm Room Fund, Strikingly, Highland Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Blackbox.vc, Blue Fog Capital, Matrix Partners, Accel Partners, Firelake Capital, and AlumniFunderOther creatorsSee project -
Givair
Givair is a social gifting platform for spontaneous and occasion gifting with apps developed for iOS and Android incubated at UC Berkeley's Skydeck.
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"Baking & Entering" an NYU Student Film
Assistant Director for short film called "Baking and Entering"
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Upstart Ambassador
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See projectUpstart lets you raise money in exchange for a small share of your income for 10 years. It's an investment in you, not your idea or your business. Pursue your dreams with guidance from backers who believe in your aspirations. You share some of your upside, but payments are capped regardless of your success.
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