Edo Liberty
Founder & Chief Scientist, Pinecone. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderscientistexecutiveacademic@EdoLiberty ↗LinkedIn ↗edoliberty.com ↗
Edo Liberty is the founder of Pinecone, a vector database company used in AI and retrieval-augmented generation applications. Prior to Pinecone, he held senior research leadership positions as Head of Amazon AI Labs at AWS and Head of Yahoo's Research Lab in New York.
3shows
3appearances
41statements
6resolved
3supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
Everything Edo Liberty said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Liberty: OSS Vector Database Competitors Are Already Struggling With Commercialization
“And in fact, we already see, even though new players in the vector database space that, that, that basically started to try to take us down, all took the open source angle. We already see them, even young as they might be, they are already struggling, struggli…”
Liberty: Prompt engineering is a fad, not a long-term profession
“A lot of people believe that prompt engineering is incredibly crucial. I don't necessarily buy into that. I don't know if you remember, but people, like, thought that, like you know query building for Google would be a profession too, right? And that didn't qu…”
Liberty: Operating vector databases at 100x scale requires blob storage over SSDs
“If we need to do this at what, if we need to do this at the, you know, hundred X scale of where we are today, we're going to have to build something very, very, very different. Separate, separates writes and reads, that multi, that has multi-tenancy sort of bu…”
Liberty: RAG Levels the Playing Field Across Different Foundation Models
“Interestingly enough, many of them actually start behaving quite similarly in terms of level of accuracy, even though without RAG, they actually have quite different behaviors. So it's sort of both like a uniform improvement and a little bit of leveling the pl…”
Liberty: Foundation Models Fundamentally Flawed by Combining Reasoning With Knowledge
“Foundational models get it fundamentally wrong. When we learn how to Build the subsystems of AI correctly, and for each one of them to do their roles optimally. Either we're going to do, be able to do the, to achieve the same tasks much cheaper, faster, better…”
Liberty: Founders Should Not Factor Financials Into Defining a Good Outcome
“When you're a startup founder, you really have to think about what's important to you, what you're willing to tolerate, what is a good outcome in your opinion. My suggestion is to not factor in financials into what a good outcome looks like.”
Liberty: Serverless reduced Pinecone customer costs from $4,000 to $200
“So now we're, we could run, we can offer the service to be 10 X cheaper. So the cost, so people who used to pay us, you know, three, 4000 dollars a month started paying 200 bucks a month.”
Liberty: AI Agents Will Know All Internal Company Data Within Five Years
“I'm telling you in five years, the thought that maybe the conversational agent that you are talking to inside your company hasn't Listen to all the sales calls that ever, ever happened. The company knows everything about your product and can talk about it inte…”
Liberty: RAG Over Internet Data Reduces LLM Hallucinations by 50%
“And you could see that if you augment all of them with RAG on, even on the internet, which is data that they were trained on, you can reduce hallucinations significantly up to 50% sometimes.”
Liberty: Retrofitted Vector Indexes Like pgvector Fail at Production Scale
“Those other products don't work. They don't work either because they don't scale in terms of the efficiency scale, cost, the trade-offs that they can offer, because they're not designed to do this. They're designed to do something else. They kind of thought ab…”
Liberty: Keyword search is a deeply flawed retrieval method for AI
“With other search technologies, this is again, this is the wrong search mode. If you're searching with keywords and just not finding The relevant information, because the embeddings, the contextual space in which these pieces of text, documents, or images live…”
Liberty: Proper embedding retrieval rarely requires keywords alongside embeddings
“Our research actually shows that when you do this well, we, you very rarely need keywords alongside embeddings, but getting embeddings to perform perfectly is, is actually, it could be quite intricate.”
Liberty: High 90s Percentage of OSS Code Comes From Vendor Employees
“And in fact, if you look at statistics, even companies that are open source, 99% of the contributions are actually from the company itself. Not 99, but high nineties.”
Liberty: Context Window Stuffing Increases LLM Costs Without Improving Results
“There's plenty of evidence that increasing the context size doesn't actually improve results unless, you know, you do this very carefully, right? So just what's called constant stuffing is not helping. You just pay more and don't actually get much for it.”
Liberty: Fine-tuning without expert teams often worsens model performance
“Unless you have the research team and the AI experts that know how to fine tune, you might actually make things significantly worse. Okay. So there is, there's nothing that says that more data is going to make your model do better. In fact, it oftentimes gets …”
Liberty: Staying at AWS Would Have Paid More Than Founding Pinecone
“Even now to this day, we're five years in. Pinecone is a raving success and so on. I have, I would have done much to this day. I mean, put my stock aside, I will have done a lot better had I stayed at AWS, right?”
Liberty: The term 'vector database' did not exist when Pinecone started
“The term vector database didn't exist. It just didn't exist. We'd, nobody talked about it this way.”
Liberty: 70% of Early Users Already Called Pinecone a Vector Database
“We literally asked them like, Hey, you internally in your team, you talk about using this pine cone thing. What do you think it is? What do you call this internally? Seven out of 10 would say, we just call it a vector database. It's like, that's where it's, we…”
Liberty: 40 Bay Area VCs Rejected Pinecone's Initial Seed Pitch
“I have at that point spoken with Every VC in the Bay Area have gotten a brutal rejection from each and every one of them. Like I swear to God, like there's not a third rate VC in the Bay Area that I have not pitched to with like all my, you know, with, you kno…”
Liberty: Pinecone Saturated Entire Cloud Regions Post-ChatGPT Demand
“We got to the point where we would saturate whole, like, regions in, in, in AWS and GCP. We just couldn't meet the demand.”
Liberty: Pinecone Finished 2022 With ~$2M Revenue
“We finished that year with roughly two million in revenue and roughly... We finished with roughly two million in revenue with a few hundred customers and an insane growth.”
Liberty: VCs sent 50-page pitch decks to win Pinecone's Series B
“VCs would send me their pitch deck on Pinecone about why it's a great investment. Their entire research, they would send me like, 50 page documents on all the market research and exactly how we're the leader and how we're gonna win and how we're, what we're go…”
Liberty: Pinecone 5x'd paying customers between term sheet and Series B close
“We closed the round between when we signed the term sheet and when we, when, and closing, we five X'd the number of five paid customers. And this is the year go, you know, go, this is the year after. Yes. This is a beginning of 23.”
Liberty: Pinecone spent over a year rebuilding its core database mid-flight
“Well, we had to rebuild the entire system, which is a huge bet for a company, for a database to go rebuild the, like, what it is mid-flight and keep serving all these workloads was a massive strategic bet that was sunk in probably more than a year of the compa…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Edo's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Founder & Chief Scientist, Pinecone | 1 | 17 | 50% 2/4 | full record on No Priors → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founder & Chief Scientist, Pinecone | 1 | 14 | 0% 0/1 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
 MADLEDGER | Founder & Chief Scientist, Pinecone | 1 | 10 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |