modern-data-stack
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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.
Peter Fishman
Peter Fishman is the co-founder and CEO of Mozart Data, a Y Combinator-backed startup that lets anyone spin up a modern data stack in under an hour without hiring a data engineer. An economics PhD who once crunched numbers for the Philadelphia Eagles and ran a bacon hot sauce company, Fishman spent fifteen years building the same data pipelines over and over at Yammer, Zenefits, Opendoor, and Eaze before deciding to package that work into a product everyone could use.
Owen Frivold
Owen Frivold is the CEO of Cleartelligence, a modern data and AI consulting firm headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts. A Stanford-educated co-founder of Hero Digital, Frivold brings 14+ years of experience shaping customer experience and digital transformation for brands like Apple, Sephora, Airbnb, and Lucid Motors. After founding Winter Sun LLC as a boutique strategy advisory, he joined Cleartelligence as President in April 2024 - when the company acquired Winter Sun - and was elevated to CEO in April 2025. He is known for turning complex data problems into actionable intelligence and driving enterprise AI readiness across financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, and retail.
Tristan Zajonc
Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a San Francisco-based AI agent platform enabling enterprises to automate complex workflows. A Harvard-trained public policy PhD turned serial AI entrepreneur, he previously founded Sense.io (acquired by Cloudera in 2016) and served as Cloudera's CTO for Machine Learning before pivoting back to founding. With over 15 years building machine learning infrastructure across academia and industry, Zajonc has been quietly shaping how enterprises operationalize AI - from SQL-driven ML pipelines to LLM-powered agents - long before it became fashionable.
Matt Bornstein
Matt Bornstein is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads infrastructure investing focused on AI, machine learning, and data systems. Promoted to GP in January 2026 after joining in 2019, he co-authored some of the most widely-read frameworks in modern AI - including 'Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications' and 'Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?' - shaping how the industry thinks about building with AI. His portfolio includes landmark bets on Cursor, Mistral, Character.ai (acquired by Google), Tabular (acquired by Databricks), and Replicate (acquired by Cloudflare).
Benn Stancil
Benn Stancil is a co-founder of Mode Analytics (acquired by ThoughtSpot for $200M in 2023), one of the most widely read voices in the data and analytics world, and an angel investor. He writes the popular newsletter at benn.substack.com - known for its witty, intellectually honest takes on the modern data stack, BI, AI, and startup culture. After a stint as Field CTO at ThoughtSpot post-acquisition, he now runs independently via benn.company, investing and writing with signature Friday dispatches that open with 'it's friday, and...' - a ritual his thousands of subscribers recognize instantly.