From left: Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska, alumni award recipients David Dawson and Nodira Khoussainova, and Allen School Vice Director Dan Grossman. (UW Photo / Matt Hagen)
Two University of Washington alumni who built companies out of everyday frustrations — hard-to-recycle household waste and the struggle to focus while working alone — have been recognized with the Allen School’s 2026 Alumni Impact Awards.
David Dawson, co-founder of Ridwell, and Nodira Khoussainova, co-founder of Focused Space, received the award at the Allen School’s graduation celebration on June 12.
The goal is not only to recognize accomplished alumni but to “show all of you, our new graduates, that you’re joining a long line of individuals who are changing the world,” said Dan Grossman, Allen School vice director and professor, introducing Dawson and Khoussainova at the school’s graduation ceremonies Friday evening.
Dawson, who received his bachelor’s from the Allen School in 2006, has been involved in Seattle startups for nearly two decades. After serving as an early Zillow engineer, Dawson went on to co-found a string of Seattle startups across hospitality, food delivery and recycling.
In 2018, with two startups already launched, he turned his attention to a problem right in front of him. Frustrated that recycling something as common as a battery was so hard, he co-founded Ridwell, a subscription service that offers home pickup and mail-in collection of waste that municipal recycling systems didn’t support. Last year, the service announced that it had surpassed 130,000 customers, and it has since surpassed 150,000.
Dawson credited the computer science program for helping him become resilient, personally and professionally. His mentors emphasized that setbacks were part of the process, a lesson that became invaluable in the unpredictable world of early-stage startups:
“It’s okay to fail some and pick yourself up and ask for help,” he noted in a UW announcement about the award. Mentorship and community connections he built on campus ultimately empowered him to take risks and build meaningful companies.
Most recently, alongside fellow tech veterans Marius Ciocirlan and Wesley Yun, Dawson co-founded MarkOS, an AI tool that lets companies continually audit marketing media to ensure that content is compliant and up to date with their latest messaging as soon as it comes out.
Grossman, in his remarks, noted that Dawson “has spent the two decades since graduating building technology companies rooted in community, purpose, and the people around him.”
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Khoussainova received her PhD from the Allen School in 2012. After a tenure as a software engineer at Twitter, leading its product insights & experiments team, she went on to co-found Streamlit in 2018, an open-source front-end framework for machine learning models. The company was acquired by Snowflake in 2022 for $800 million.
Those experiences gave her front-row seats to the daily realities of tech work, allowing her to see how technology was impacting human behavior and mental health. In 2021, she co-founded Focused Space, a platform that lets people, particularly ADHD or neurodivergent remote workers, be more productive using neuroscience.
By providing on-demand virtual “body doubling” sessions, users can find accountability and motivating effects by intentionally working in parallel with others, helping people enter a “flow state” more easily, according to the company’s website.
She credited the Allen School’s focus on systems thinking for helping her as an entrepreneur, noting that “running a company is basically a systems problem.”
Previous award recipients include:
- Paul Mikesell, who received the award in 2023, co-founded Isilon Systems and founded Carbon Robotics, a startup that uses AI and lasers to replace chemical weedkillers and address labor shortages with self-driving tractors.
- Joe Heitzeberg, who received the award in 2019, co-founded Crowd Cow, a direct-to-consumer premium beef company focused on sustainability. The startup also won GeekWire Startup of the Year in 2018.
- Nicki Dell, who received the award in 2025, is a Cornell Tech associate professor and co-founder of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, a nonprofit that helps survivors of intimate partner violence navigate digital safety and stalkerware. Her research earned her a 2024 MacArthur Fellow “Genius Grant.”
- Karen Liu, who received the award in 2024, is a Stanford University professor and co-principal investigator at Stanford’s Movement Lab, researching physics-based character animation, biomechanics, as well as assistive robotics for people with physical disabilities.
- Heather Underwood, who received the award in 2022, is a health tech entrepreneur and the former CEO of EvoEndo, a medical device company that developed a safer, sedation-free endoscopy platform for pediatric and adult patients. Her research for midwives and nurses in Kenya earned her a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Grant and a Gates Grand Challenges Grant.
A full list of past awardees can be found on the Allen School’s alumni page.
