Ali Dasdan
CTO, Dropbox. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveengineerscientist@alidasdan ↗LinkedIn ↗dropbox.com ↗
Holding a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dasdan is an engineering executive specializing in distributed systems, search, and AI/ML infrastructure. Before becoming CTO of Dropbox, he served as CTO of ZoomInfo and led engineering for Atlassian's Work Management products.
1shows
1appearances
13statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Ali Dasdan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Dasdan's past teams built custom Kafka alternatives to handle 100 petabytes
“In the past, when we were doing data platform, there was no Kafka, for example, we created a Kafka-like system ourselves, but we are lucky that, yeah, we created an HBase, sort of HHive-like system ourselves with hundred petabytes of size of data, right?”
ZoomInfo claims its homegrown NLP outperforms major external vendors on quality
“Chorus still runs its own, our own homegrown NLP technology. We are doing it because our quality, we believe every time we compare, it's actually pretty good. Actually, we are beating, you know, we've been well-known well-known vendors. Plus it's cheap for us,…”
Adding generative AI call summarization boosted ZoomInfo Chorus's NPS by 20 points
“And the absolute increase in MPS was just amazing, like almost like 20 points. Because people loved what they were getting with that.”
Real-time AI apps require abstraction layers to handle LLM provider outages
“Yeah, I think you have to create a layer on top of these at a minimum, right in the end, whether Entropic or OpenAI, you know, they're companies, right, they sometimes have stability issues, right, if they're down, so what they're gonna do about that? Since ou…”
ZoomInfo engineers accept over 25% of GitHub Copilot's code suggestions
“And our acceptance rate for code suggestions was around 25%, actually over 25%, which is interesting in line with the recent research that GitHub published.”
ZoomInfo operates two distinct core data platforms on different technologies
“On top of it we have actually two data platforms. One is for all the data that customers, you know, need and our products need, and there's another one that's for internally focused for our internal customers, and they're built on different technologies.”
ZoomInfo employs around 300 human researchers for manual data verification
“We also have a good number of researchers about, 300 of them.”
ZoomInfo selected Anthropic over OpenAI and Google for call summarization
“We are using Anthropic, we are using OpenAI, we are using Google, but for that one, we released Anthropic.”
Dasdan: ZoomInfo Copilot users report saving about 10 hours a week
“No, it was released in production, so in May before May, actually, it was in beta. 27 or so thousand customers. I mean, people were saying that they save about, like, 10 hours. Literally one day a week, they were saving by using Copilot.”
ZoomInfo replaced over a dozen traditional machine learning models using generative AI
“Actually, it simplified our life because the typical way of, you know, extracting the features and creating a model and the training and all that, so just it, in some of the cases where we had more than a dozen models that completely were regenerated using Gen…”
ZoomInfo rents GPUs in Oracle Cloud to run open-source models
“We are actually renting the GPUs in Oracle Cloud, actually.”
ZoomInfo deployed GitHub Copilot to all engineers for daily use
“Then we deployed to all, all of our engineering. So everybody's using this daily in their interactions.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ali's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | CTO, Dropbox | 1 | 13 | — | full record on the MAD Podcast → |