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.
Gary Lerhaupt is VP of Product Architecture at Salesforce leading Agent Interoperability and Orchestration for Agentforce. He co-founded Clockwise, the AI calendar company used by Uber, Netflix, and Atlassian, and was a founding engineer at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce for ~$390M). Earlier in his career he created DKMS, the Linux kernel module framework still baked into most Linux distributions today. He holds a BS from Ohio State and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.