Sean Knapp, Founder & CEO of Ascend: $50 Million to Power the Future of Data Engineering

In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Sean Knapp, Founder & CEO of Ascend, a data engineering platform that's raised $50 Million in funding, about why, in an era where every company is transforming into a software company, getting the right digital infrastructure in place is critical for optimizing productivity. Providing a single ‘pane of glass’ through which their clients can create, ingest, transform and ultimately utilize data, Ascend is positioning itself as an essential backend software system for the digital economy.

We also speak about Sean's career in tech, what it was like getting in on the ground floor during the early days of google, the lessons he brought forward to his own tech startup, why the inexorable rise of data presents its own challenges of scale for an increasingly interdependent commercial landscape.

Topics Discussed:

• Sean’s career in the software engineering space, and what he learned from joining Google during the early days of 2004


• How it felt to leave a stable, secure position and take a leap into the unknown by risking it all on a startup


• Why ‘data is eating the world,’ and forcing every company to essentially become a software company


• How the deluge of data in the modern marketplace presents its own unique challenge for businesses


• Why most companies’ data teams spend 80% of their time trying to integrate different software solutions


• Why Sean is actually excited to see a bit of a down market in the years to come, cutting out some of the background noise

Favorite book: 

Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity