Andy Konwinski at the campus of his alma mater, University of California, Berkeley.
Photographer: Manuel Orbegozo/Bloomberg
Billionaires
Andy Konwinski Went From Jehovah’s Witness Outcast to AI Evangelist
He co-founded Databricks and Perplexity. Now he wants to solve ‘species-level’ problems.
Asking too many questions has reshaped Andy Konwinski’s life more than once.
First, his doubts about the Jehovah’s Witness religion cost him his family and his faith. Then, curiosity helped him become a top computer researcher and co-founder of Databricks, one of the world’s most valuable startups. Next, he helped build Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-powered search engine designed to answer questions better than Google.