All speakers

Pete Soderling

Founder & General Partner, AI Council & Zero Prime Ventures

Pete Soderling is the Founder and General Partner of Zero Prime. A former software engineer and serial founder, Pete built Zero Prime on the belief that the most transformative companies begin with exceptional technical talent. His lifetime goal is to help 10,000 engineers start successful companies. Pete is also the Founder of AI Council, formerly Data Council, the world's largest independent community and conference series for data and AI professionals. A community builder since his earliest work with data engineers in 2013, he has seen firsthand the power of specialized networks to bring inspiration, knowledge, and support to technical professionals. Over the past decade, Pete has been an active angel investor and advisor to more than 100 startups, including Notion, Anthropic, Hightouch, Placer, and Tabular. He has founded multiple startups — Hakka Labs, Stratus Security and Mechanikal — and was previously a software engineer at Ziff Davis Media. Pete holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems from NYU in New York City.

Pete Soderling

Sessions / 2026 / 1 talk

  • The End of the Internet As We Know It

    In a recent New York Times op-ed, Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian warned that the informal detente that kept the internet secure — where writing software and finding vulnerabilities were equally hard — is over. Raffi sits down with Pete Soderling to go deeper: what the Mythos moment means for builders right now, how teams should think about AI as co-author rather than tool, the economics of open source in a world of expensive foundation models, and whether open models can offer a credible alternative to the frontier labs. Read Raffi's NYT essay: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/opinion/mythos-open-souce-internet.html

Sessions / 2023 / 1 talk

  • How Investors Think About Data

    Pete Soderling welcomes several investors from top firms Founders Fund, Sequoia and Bain Capital Ventures to discuss their thoughts on investing in both data infrastructure and AI. They discuss the latest trends in investing in data/ML/AI companies, what they look for in early stage engineering-led teams and what they're most excited about for the future.

Sessions / 2022 / 1 talk

  • The Next Big Opportunities in Data Infrastructure

    Data infrastructure as a category is booming with the global market expected to exceed $100B by 2027 reflecting 200% growth since 2020. We’re also seeing an explosion of data itself, with total data produced expected to top 175 Zettabytes in the next 4 years; that’s up 350% from 2020 numbers. As a community, we’re also seeing a proliferation of data infrastructure options across both the traditional analytics stack as well as in innovative ML tooling and platforms. Data is hot, and data tooling of all kinds is even hotter. But how are we to make sense of these new data tools and new categories of tools? How should we be thinking about the modern data stack when it comes to cloud & hosted options vs. OSS and self-hosted infra? Which tools and categories of tools play together nicely, and where might we start to see consolidation across the stack? For the Next Big Opportunities in Data Infrastructure panel, we’re joined by 4 top investors who look at data infrastructure tools every day. They’ll share with us their mental models of the space and insights into how they make investment decisions across the expanding data infrastructure landscape. Founders and practitioners alike will benefit from their insights on which categories are here to stay and which are yet to be proven. Join us for a lively discussion on where the future opportunities of data infra are and where these experts think the field is headed next.

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