Reza Bosagh Zadeh is founder and CEO at Matroid, and an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where he teaches two Ph.D.-level classes: Distributed Algorithms and Optimization, and Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms. His work focuses on machine learning, distributed computing, and discrete applied mathematics. His awards include a KDD best paper award and the Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award. Reza has served on the technical advisory boards of Microsoft and Databricks. He is the initial creator of the linear algebra package in Apache Spark. Through Apache Spark, Reza’s work has been incorporated into industrial and academic cluster computing environments. Reza holds a Ph.D. in computational mathematics from Stanford, where he worked under the supervision of Gunnar Carlsson. As part of his research, Reza built the machine learning algorithms behind Twitter’s who-to-follow system, the first product to use machine learning at Twitter.