What I Saw at Techweek in Seattle

I kicked off the week with a coffee and a conversation, and the energy was palpable. The first thing that struck me was the sheer scope of ambition. It wasn't just another SaaS/AI week - I saw a week of deep, hard-tech problems being tackled head-on.

Ambition Everywhere: From Clean Tech to the Cosmos

The week was a showcase of industries colliding. I spoke with founders in clean energy who are building new hardware for batteries and manufacturing—sectors that are notoriously difficult to innovate in. I heard folks talking about space, from individual applications, to full satellites, to grids and data centers in space. I also heard so much about more traditional industries, like finance and healthcare, that are being transformed by technology, but held back by legacy systems and data silos.

In every discussion, whether about building new energy infrastructure on the ground or new data networks in orbit, the enthusiasm was infectious. There was a shared belief that no problem was too big to solve. But underneath that optimism, a familiar pattern began to emerge. The plans for generating and analyzing data were massive; the plans for moving and managing it were often an afterthought.

The Universal Data Tax

I saw this pattern repeat at a biotech meetup hosted by a large corporation, but attended by small, agile teams of up-and-comers. The presenters were high-level executives, but the real work was being done by researchers on the ground, all trying to break into the industry. They spoke of the promise of personalized medicine, powered by petabytes of genomic data. They (mostly) skipped over the challenges of patient privacy and HIPAA - as they should! They're early! But that's a can you can only kick so far down the road.

This isn't just a biotech problem. I saw it in conversations with government agencies who know they need to plug into the modern tech ecosystem but aren't sure how. I saw it in a fascinating discussion with a founder building deepfake analysis tools for financial institutions. And I saw it at the Startup Showcase, where every company had a sprinkle of AI, and there were some really cool ideas, from new social networks to platforms for managing visas. But every single one relied on a data pipeline that was either brittle, expensive, or both. It's the universal data tax, levied on every ambitious project.

The Established Players Double Down

What gave me hope was seeing how seriously the big companies are taking Seattle's ecosystem. Databricks, Google, Azure, and AWS weren't just collecting leads—they were having real strategy conversations. At a happy hour, some of the largest financial institutions talked openly about market conditions with genuine curiosity about where the next wave of innovation would come from.

The government presence was particularly striking. Defense, healthcare, financial services—agencies clearly see the opportunity but struggle with execution paths. One presenter working on deepfake detection captured the mood: lots of demand, unclear procurement, and traditional vendors scrambling to catch up.

Space Changes Everything

The second half of the week belonged to space, with the aerospace industry's presence impossible to ignore. What impressed me wasn't the rockets - it was hearing a satellite founder describe their constellation as "edge compute with a 90-minute orbit." The data locality challenges make terrestrial problems look simple. These companies generate petabytes of telemetry and imagery that somehow needs to flow from low Earth orbit through ground stations to processing centers, all while maintaining sub-second latency for critical applications.

The Path Forward

The week convinced me that we're at an inflection point. Every industry is ready to embrace distributed compute, but our data infrastructure is still designed for a centralized world. We solved the "where does my application run" question with orchestration. Now we need to solve "where does my data live" with the same systematic thinking. This is our goal with Expanso!

The companies I met aren't asking JUST for more storage or faster networks. They want declarative data placement—the ability to say "run this analysis on genomic data from these three hospitals" or "process satellite imagery within 100ms of capture" without manually choreographing every step.

That's the real opportunity hidden in Seattle's ambitious week. The compute revolution is nearly complete. The data revolution is just beginning.