Ali Yahya

Ali Yahya is a partner on the a16z crypto investment team. Previously, he was a software engineer and machine learning researcher at GoogleX and Google Brain, where he worked on learning algorithms for robotic manipulation, and developed Google's open source machine learning library, TensorFlow. Ali discovered the Bitcoin whitepaper as a computer science undergraduate at Stanford University. He became fascinated by the computer science implications and went down the rabbit hole, but somehow missed the economic implications until a few years later, and so sadly did not mine any from his dorm room. While at Stanford, Ali conducted research with Professors David Mazieres, Nick McKeown, and David Cheriton at the intersection of computer security, networking, and distributed systems. Fun fact: For three months in 2008, Ali followed a polyphasic sleep schedule, sleeping an average of 2.5 hours a night by taking a twenty-minute nap every four hours.