In this community member profile, we would like to introduce Konstantin Weitz, an ex-Googler and now a co-founder and CEO of an investment company Financial Choice, based in Mountain View, California, USA. Before starting his own company, Konstantin was an active contributor in the Open Networking Foundation PINS community.
Konstantin received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington, specializing in Programming Languages.
As a fresh PhD student at the University of Washington, Konstantin was exposed to programming language theory, and quickly fell in love with it. He then applied that theory in practice, by building systems to automatically verify the correctness of BGP network configurations. After finishing his PhD, Konstantin joined Google’s networking team and applied his verification techniques to Google’s P4 efforts. Konstantin was part of the Google team that is driving many of the core development efforts around PINS.
Konstantin was one of the founders for the PINS project internally at Google, and helped create the high level vision, like building on top of SONiC/SAI, the focus on P4, etc. When PINS was made open source, Konstantin was leading the PINS group from Google’s side.
Konstantin left Google in May 2021 to create Financial Choice, a Y Combinator backed startup that lets people invest their checking account balance for market returns.
“Working with ONF has been incredible,” he says. “ONF not only provides the expertise and resources to build flourishing open source projects, but also provides the technical expertise required to make an open source project successful.”
In his spare time, Konstantin loves spending time with his family. They give him an excuse to disassemble lawn mower engines (it didn’t survive the reassembly), build playhouses, see monster truck rallies, and the likes.