How does the Data Council conference keep finding future billion-dollar companies?

A recap of Data Council 2025, held at the Oakland Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, highlighting standout talks and startups. Key sessions covered DuckDB's history and DuckLake, Harvey's legal AI agent architecture, Turbopuffer's vector search on object storage, Hadley Wickham on LLMs in data science, SDF's Rust-based SQL engine, and MotherDuck's real-time SQL previews. The conference has a track record of spotlighting companies before major funding rounds — ClickHouse ($350M), Harvey ($300M), and CrunchyData ($250M acquisition) all presented there. Six AI Launchpad startups also pitched, including Quesma Charts (the author's own product). The author concludes Data Council is ideal for technical builders but less effective as a go-to-market channel.