Ep 39: TextQL’s Ethan Ding: Every question has a price. Make sure the answer is worth more.

Ethan Ding, co-founder and CEO of TextQL, joins ZeroPrime and AI Council Co-founder, Pete Soderling, to make an argument that most data leaders have been waiting years to hear: you don't have to clean everything, migrate everything, or centralize everything before AI can work on your data.

Ethan's path from Bessemer to a hypergrowth stint at Tackle, let him see how much time teams spent moving the same business logic from one database to another, over and over. TextQL was born from a different premise — that agents make data and business logic portable at near-zero cost, so the stack can be reimagined around data staying exactly where it lives.

Today TextQL's agentic analyst, Ana, works across warehouses, BI tools, ERPs, and CRMs at enterprises like Dropbox.

In this conversation, Pete and Ethan discuss:

• Why enterprise data teams are still running a 1970s Detroit assembly line
• Why dashboards become just-in-time, throwaway artifacts
• How governance shifts from three-week committees to canonized metrics sourced from actual usage
• Where DIY coding agents on the warehouse break down: RBAC, semantic layer ownership, and runaway token costs
• Why warehouse bills are about to spike
• Why data leaders should own their storage, logic, and compute in an open stack

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