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Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

The place where Apache Spark was born, UC Berkeley's AMP Lab, has not just created a major

open-source software platform. It spun out more than its share of groundbreaking companies.

Full disclosure, A16Z has invested in three of them. So how did they

get there? How is open source and the AMP Lab approach reduced the friction between student

and faculty ideas and launching them into the real world? Co-founder and director of the Amplab,

Michael Franklin, joins A16Z's Peter Levine to discuss

the Amplab model and their own relationship as an academic and an investor.

Howe Yuan Li also joins the discussion, which was part of our 2015 academic roundtable, to offer

another perspective.

Lee's company, Takyan Nexus, came out of work he did as a student in

the AMP Lab and the resulting open source project. Lee describes his struggles and victories in making

the transition from student to founder and leader of a company. The AMP Lab example and what every

academic and entrepreneur can learn from it on this segment of the A16Z podcast.

So let's start with you, Michael.

You were an entrepreneur in between being an academic for a long time, but AMP Lab came out of the desire to do what?

And how did you sort of make that happen?

Yeah.

So, boy, where do you start?

So, yeah, so it was interesting because I was off, I took two years off from teaching Berkeley to get a company started and then,, and then kind of came back after that.

...