Ali Yahya

Ali Yahya is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with a focus on cryptocurrency. Yahya works with numerous portfolio companies, including Dapper Labs, Flow, Compound, Avalanche, Near, Rally, and Dfinity. He is on the a16z crypto team,and was promoted to general partner on April 16, 2021.

Before joining Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a partner in 2017, he worked for Google. He spent a year working at Google Brain,Google’s Artificial Intelligence lab, where he was a core developer on TensorFlow, Google’s primary library for machine learning. Prior to that role, he was a research software engineer for two and a half years at Google Xand worked on the Everyday Robot project, which aims to build a robot that is smart and affordable enough to be viable as a consumer product for the home. While at Google X, Yahya was the lead author of the paper "Collective Robot Reinforcement Learning" and co-authored the paper "Path Integral Guided Policy Search." "Collective Robot Reinforcement Learning" earned media coverage from Google Blog, MIT Tech Review, IEEE Spectrum, and Wired.

From 2009 to 2013, Yahya was a student and researcher at Stanford University, where he focused on the intersection of Computer Security, Distributed Systems, and Computer Networking. He first discovered the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2010 while doing research at Stanford Computer Security Lab, and he has followed the space closely ever since. While at Stanford, Yahya was involved in research in the university's artificial intelligence lab, the High Performance Networking Lab, the Secure Computer Systems Lab, and the Distributed Systems Group. He authored, co-authored, and contributed to several papers and was a course assistant and section leader for computer science courses.

From 2012 to 2013, Yahya was the CTO of Athena, a venture that went through StartX, Stanford's Startup Accelerator Program. There, he led a three- to six-person engineering team to launch Athena's main product, a tool that presents the tree of knowledge as a graph where nodes are concepts and edges are dependencies, to over 500 students across two classes at Stanford.

In 2011, Yahya was a Software Engineering Intern at Nicira Networks, now VMware.

Yahya earned a BS in Computer Science with a focus on Distributed Systems from Stanford University in 2010 and continued there working on an MS in Computer Science with a focus on Distributed Systems and Machine Learning. He is on leave from the master's program. Yahya is also fluent in English and Spanish.