Benjamin Hindman

Hindman graduated from the University of Washington in 2007 with a B.S. in computer science.⁠[1]

The University of Washington’s Programming Languages and Software Engineering group (PLSE) later noted that as an undergraduate he took part in the group under an earlier name, took graduate courses and worked as a teaching assistant.⁠[2]

As a PhD student at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, Hindman worked on parallel computing and distributed systems research in the AMPLab, which led to the cluster manager Mesos, later Apache Mesos. He recalled that the aim was to “figure out a better way to run things like Hadoop on our clusters.”⁠[3][4]

On May 26, 2010, Berkeley’s EECS department published the technical report “Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center” (UCB/EECS-2010-87), with Hindman as first author alongside Andrew Konwinski, Matei Zaharia, Ali GhodsiAli GhodsiAli Ghodsi is a computer scientist, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks, and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his higher education in Sweden, later took part in distributed computing and big data research at Berkeley, co-founded Databricks in 2013, and formally became its chief executive officer in 2016, leading the company from open-source technology toward an enterprise data and AI platform.Open the full entry, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy H. Katz, Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica. The report presented Mesos as “a platform for sharing commodity clusters between multiple diverse cluster computing frameworks.”⁠[5]

Hindman met Florian Leibert, a foreign-exchange student from Germany, in high school in Colorado. After hearing about his research, Leibert and Abdur Chowdhury, then Twitter’s chief scientist, invited him to give a talk at Twitter; he recalled Twitter’s request as “You gotta help us use something like Mesos.”⁠[6]

Hindman joined Twitter in 2010 and spent about four years there on the technical staff, working to put Mesos into production. Mesos went on to run on thousands of machines at Twitter.⁠[6][4]

Mesosphere was founded in 2013 by Florian Leibert and Tobias Knaup, who had run applications on Mesos at AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry, to build a business around Mesos. Hindman had advised the company since its founding and described himself as a “founding advisor.”⁠[6][7]

On September 22, 2014, Mesosphere announced that Hindman had left Twitter to join the company and lead the design of its data-center operating system, with Apache Mesos as its kernel, as chief architect. He said at the time, “Today's applications -- not servers -- should be the first class citizens in our data centers.”⁠[7][6][3]

Later University of Washington profiles described Hindman as a co-founder of Mesosphere. In January 2019, Software Engineering Daily introduced him as having worked since 2013 to bring Mesos to market.⁠[2][8]

On January 5, 2015, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry published the podcast episode “a16z Podcast: The Datacenter Needs an Operating System,” a conversation between Hindman and Steven Sinofsky, an a16z board partner who formerly oversaw MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry’s Windows division. The episode page introduced him as Mesosphere’s co-creator of Apache Mesos, which came out of the Berkeley AMPLab.⁠[9]

The episode discussed how the new class of applications developers were building were really distributed systems that needed a new level of abstraction, argued that machines were the wrong abstraction, and explored what an operating system for the datacenter would look like and what lessons earlier operating systems offered.⁠[9][10]

The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019, under the title “a16z Podcast | Why the Datacenter Needs an Operating System.”⁠[10]

In January 2016 the University of Washington announced that Hindman had received the College of Engineering’s 2016 Diamond Award in the Early Career category, noting that Mesosphere grew out of his graduate work at Berkeley. He had earlier spoken to undergraduates in the 2015 UW CSE Leadership Seminar Series.⁠[1]

On May 20, 2016, he gave a talk titled “The Case for Multi-Level Scheduling” at the University of Washington PLSE colloquium.⁠[2]

On August 5, 2019, Mesosphere announced that it was renaming itself D2iQ (Day2IQ) and shifting its focus to Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies while continuing to support its Mesos-based DC/OS product; its chief executive at the time was Mike Fey.⁠[11]