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 Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 00:10 – Ethan's path from Bessemer to Tackle to founding TextQL 04:02 – The quant's lens: why ENT decisions take weeks, not nanoseconds 05:42 – What Ethan is spending his time on today 07:05 – The 1970s Detroit assembly line inside enterprise data teams 08:10 – The case against the dashboard paradigm 09:50 – What keeps teams stuck in dashboard mode 11:25 – How accurate does business analytics actually need to be? 16:00 – Messy data is a solved problem 19:55 – Introducing Ana, TextQL's agentic data analyst 21:43 – How Dropbox's finance org uses Ana across its whole stack 23:02 – Every vendor claims to handle messy data 25:10 – Claude Code on your warehouse: great on day 1, hairy at scale 28:04 – Why queries get cheaper over time, not more expensive 29:47 – Ethan's advice for data leaders: build an open stack 33:01 – The next 18 months: citizen data scientists and AI-written SQL Listen here or on Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/2033251/episodes/19461230-ep-39-textql-s-ethan-ding-every-question-has-a-price-make-sure-the-answer-is-worth-more 👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter ABOUT AI COUNCIL: AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools. FIND US: Website: https://aicouncil.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/ X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf