Log in
Sign up
Ali Yahya

Ali Yahya

Ali Yahya is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz(a16z) and a former software engineer at Google.

OverviewStructured DataIssuesContributorsActivity
Contents
Overview

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.

Early Career

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.

Education

Yahya earned a BS in Computer Science with a focus on Distributed Systems from Stanford University in 2010 and continued there to receive an MS in Computer Science with a focus on Distributed Systems and Machine Learning. Yahya is also fluent in English and Spanish.

Timeline

April 16, 2021
Ali Yahya becomes general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
November 2017
Ali Yahya joins Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as partner.
August 2014
Ali Yahya joins Google.
2010
Ali Yahya earns a BS in computer science from Stanford University.

Invested in

Open in Query Tool

Patents

Open in Query Tool

Further Resources

Title
Author
Link
Type
Date

Ali Yahya: Crypto Business Models

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI1N6dY8vSQ

Web

May 27, 2020

Crypto, an Oral Essay | Andreessen Horowitz

https://a16z.com/2021/04/17/crypto-an-oral-essay/

Web

April 17, 2021

Google Builds a Robotic Hive-Mind Kindergarten

Will Knight

https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/10/03/157206/google-builds-a-robotic-hive-mind-kindergarten/

Web

October 3, 2016

Google Wants Robots to Acquire New Skills by Learning From Each Other

Erico Guizzo

https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-wants-robots-to-acquire-new-skills-by-learning-from-each-other

Web

October 5, 2016

Google's Go-Playing Machine Opens the Door to Robots that Learn

Cade Metz

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/googles-go-playing-machine-opens-door-robots-learn/

Web

January 30, 2017

References

Is a
Investor
Investor
Person
Person

Person attributes

Location
San Francisco
San Francisco
Current Employer
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
Educated at
Stanford University
Stanford University
Occupation
Investor
Investor
Computer scientist
Computer scientist

Other attributes

Member of Board of Directors of
Golden
Golden

Find more people like Ali Yahya

Use the Golden Query Tool to discover related individuals, professionals, or experts with similar interests, expertise, or connections in the Knowledge Graph.
Open Query Tool
Access by API
Golden Query Tool
Golden logo
Company
HomePress & MediaBlogCareers
We're hiring
Products
Knowledge GraphQuery ToolData RequestsKnowledge StorageAPIPricingEnterpriseChatGPT Plugin
Legal
Terms of ServiceEnterprise Terms of ServicePrivacy Policy
Help
Help centerAPI DocumentationContact Us
By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Service.