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Ethan Aaron
Ethan Aaron is the founder and CEO of Portable, a New York based ETL/ELT company that builds the data connectors nobody else wants to build. Where the rest of the data-pipeline industry chases the same handful of popular sources, Portable went after the long tail - thousands of niche, bespoke business applications - with no-code connectors and flat, no-volume pricing. A Penn-trained mechanical engineer and Wharton economist who passed through Goldman Sachs and LiveRamp before founding the company, Aaron is one of the data world's most prolific public voices, posting daily on LinkedIn and pushing a blunt thesis: data teams exist to make money, not to collect tools.
Armon Petrossian
Armon Petrossian is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coalesce.io, a cloud-native data transformation platform built for the modern data stack. A first-generation Armenian-American from Portland, Oregon, he spent nearly a decade at WhereScape solving data warehouse challenges for Fortune 50 companies before co-founding Coalesce in 2020 with CTO Satish Jayanthi. Under his leadership, Coalesce has raised $81M+ in funding, achieved 4x year-over-year ARR growth, and grown to 140 employees, positioning itself as a leading ELT transformation platform for Snowflake, Databricks, and other cloud data platforms.
Sean Knapp
Sean Knapp is the founder and CEO of Ascend.io, an AI-native data engineering platform that unifies ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability into a single product. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously built iGoogle at Google and co-founded Ooyala — a video platform that raised $120M and sold for $400M+. At Ascend, he is building what he calls 'Agentic Data Engineering,' where AI agents handle the operational burden that buries data teams, freeing engineers for strategic work.