UW Allen School honors Ridwell co-founders and Focused Space with 2026 alumni awards
Two University of Washington students who built companies out of everyday frustrations — hard-to-digest household waste and the struggle to focus when working alone — have been honored with the Allen School’s 2026 Alumni Impact Awards.
David Dawson, founder of Ridwell, and Nodira Khoussainova, founder of Focused Space, received the award at the Allen School graduation ceremony on June 12.
The goal is not only to recognize the graduates but to “show all of you, all of you who have just graduated, that you are joining a long line of people who are changing the world,” said Dan Grossman, the Allen School’s vice dean and professor, who introduced Dawson and Khoussainova at the school’s graduation ceremonies Friday evening.
Dawson, who graduated from the Allen School in 2006, has been involved in Seattle startups for nearly two decades. After working as an engineer for Zillow, Dawson went on to found a series of Seattle startups across hospitality, food delivery and recycling.
In 2018, with two starts already underway, he focused on the problem in front of him. Frustrated that recycling something as common as a battery is so difficult, he 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 exceeded 130,000 customers, and it has exceeded 150,000.
Dawson credits the computer science program with helping her become more resilient, both personally and professionally. His advisors emphasized that the setback was part of the process, a lesson that has become valuable in the unpredictable world of early-stage startups:
“It’s okay to fail at something and pick yourself up and ask for help,” he said in the UW announcement about the award. The mentorship and community he built on campus eventually gave him the strength to take risks and build meaningful companies.
Recently, along with tech veterans Marius Ciocirlan and Wesley Yun, Dawson founded MarkOS, an AI tool that allows companies to continuously research marketing media to ensure content is relevant and up-to-date with their latest messaging as soon as it goes out.
Grossman, in his remarks, noted that Dawson “has spent two decades since graduating from technology companies building community, purpose, and the people around him.”
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Khoussainova received her PhD from the Allen School in 2012. After a stint as a software engineer at Twitter, leading the product information team and the testing team, he 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.
That experience gave him a front-row seat to the day-to-day realities of technology work, allowing him to see how technology affects human behavior and mental health. In 2021, he founded Focused Space, a platform that allows people, especially ADHD or neurodivergent remote workers, to be more productive using neuroscience.
By providing on-demand “double exercise” sessions, users can gain accountability and positive results from working intentionally in tandem with others, helping people get into a “flow state” more easily, according to the company’s website.
He praised the Allen School’s focus on systems that he thought would help him as an entrepreneur, noting that “running a company is a systems problem.”
Previous award recipients include:
- Paul Mikesell, who received the award in 2023, founded Isilon Systems and founded Carbon Robotics, a startup using AI and lasers to replace chemical killers and address the labor shortage with self-driving tractors.
- Joe Heitzeberg, who received the award in 2019, co-founded Crowd Cow, a direct-to-consumer beef company focused on sustainability. The startup also won GeekWire Startup of the Year in 2018.
- Nicki Dell, 2025 recipient of the award, is a Cornell Tech professor and founder of Clinical to End Tech Abuse, a nonprofit organization that helps survivors of intimate partner violence navigate digital safety and stalkerware. His research earned him a 2024 MacArthur Fellow “Genius Grant.”
- Karen Liu, who received the award in 2024, is a professor at Stanford University and the principal investigator at Stanford’s Movement Lab, researching physics-based character animation, biomechanics, and assistive robots for people with physical disabilities.
- Heather Underwood, the 2022 recipient of the award, is a health technology entrepreneur and former CEO of EvoEndo, a medical device company that develops a safe, non-sedating endoscopy platform for pediatric and adult patients. Her research on midwives and nurses in Kenya earned her an NSF Graduate Research Grant and a Gates Grand Challenges Grant.
A full list of past recipients can be found on the Allen School’s alumni page.
