Chang She

Chang She is the co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, the company behind the open-source Lance columnar format and a database built for multimodal AI. A co-author of the pandas library alongside Wes McKinney, he spent nearly two decades building data tooling - from quant research at AQR to the DataPad startup (acquired by Cloudera) to VP of Engineering at Tubi - before setting out to replace the aging Parquet-and-Spark stack with what he calls the Multimodal Lakehouse. In June 2025 LanceDB raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures, with adoption at Runway, Midjourney, and Character.ai.