Emil Eifrem
Co-Founder & CEO, Neo4j. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerauthorinvestor@emileifrem ↗LinkedIn ↗neo4j.com ↗
Emil Eifrem co-founded Neo4j in 2007, pioneering the modern graph database category and scaling the company to power major enterprise and investigative data applications. He is widely credited with coining the term 'graph database' and co-authored the O'Reilly book Graph Databases.
3shows
4appearances
45statements
14resolved
9supported
2contradicted
64%fully supported
Everything Emil Eifrem said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Eifrem: Category creation requires vendor adoption by competitors, not just users
“It ended up creating this critical mass of Both user and vendor adoption, which is important in category creation, to not just have user adoption, but vendor adoption, and that means your competitors using things like your query language.”
Eifrem: Most Successful Infrastructure Companies Start as Open Source
“I don't think applies to everyone, but I think for sure most successful modern infrastructure companies are open source by birth.”
Eifrem: Startups can partner with cloud marketing while fighting cloud product teams
“Typically this ends up being multiple groups inside of the cloud platforms, right? You might have a great relationship with the partnering team or with the marketing team, but then a vicious, you know, competitive relationship with some of the product teams, r…”
Eifrem: Neo4j crossed $100M ARR in 2021
“We crossed a hundred million ARR, you know, in, you know, last year.”
Eifrem: Detecting normal-looking fraud rings requires graph databases
“What it won't capture is that what if you have a number of transactions that are all within this band of what's normal, but they're connected in fraudulent ways, like a fraud way. Like the only way you can find that is if you can operate and connect the data, …”
Eifrem: Physical goods supply chains are frequently 20 to 30 hops deep
“Any company that is producing physical goods is tapping into this global supply chain spanning continent to continent, right? That is frequently 20, 30 hops deep.”
Eifrem: Cypher is the most popular graph database query language
“Cypher is the most popular graph database query language.”
Eifrem: Successful category creation requires attracting major tech incumbents as competitors
“What does success look like? 10 years down the line, what does success look like? Well, success looks like we have a bunch of big companies that are competing against us. That's what success looks like, right? ... That, that you have a thriving category, becau…”
Eifrem: Data scientists now match developers as Neo4j's primary user persona
“Today, and this happened just in the last 12 to 18 to maybe 20, at most 24 months, data scientists are an equally like as big of a persona for us as the developer. So if you look at kind of our top line metrics around kind of awareness or Visits to neo-for-day…”
Emil Eifrem: Neo4j never sells top-down to CIOs
“We don't sell top down ever. We don't go in and knock to see on a CIO door and sell top down.”
Eifrem: Walmart uses Neo4j for real-time customer recommendations
“Walmart is is publicly using us to do real-time recommendations, where you look at the connections between all the customers and the product that, that they've used, and match that to similar similar people, and then do that in real-time, based on purchase his…”
Eifrem: Graph databases were the fastest-growing database category for two years
“Graph databases, whilst being one of the smaller cousins of the former NoSQL phenomena, right has actually been the fastest growing category inside of all of big data, all of databases for the vast majority of the past two years.”
Neo4j ran a social network graph query 1,000 times faster than MySQL
“We ran that in MySQL, and that was a 2000 millisecond operation. 2000 millisecond operation. In Neo-for-J, that was a two millisecond operation. So it's a thousand times faster.”
Neo4j maintained 2ms query latency when scaled to 1,000,000 users
“It's added a million people and 50 friends on average, so, you know, twenty-five million total connections. Grab two people on random, and check to see, and it's a two, still a two millisecond operation in, in Neo-for-J.”
Eifrem: Novo Nordisk graph deployment spans over 60 million documents
“Nowhere, nor this is one of the Like public case studies we have here over sixty million documents, you know, billions of notes and relationships use lots of kind of savvy NER and ER.”
Eifrem: Initial Model Context Protocol release includes in-memory graph database
“Actually the initial MCP release includes like a tiny little in memory graph database.”
Neo4j reaches millions of downloads and hundreds of Global 2000 customers
“We in fact were the leader in the category of graph databases, millions of downloads and hundreds of global 2000 customers.”
Eifrem: Modern open-source infrastructure startups reached $50B-$100B in combined market value
“And if you add them all up together, the market value is just massive. It's between 50 to a hundred billion dollars, right? Just out of these generation of infrastructure startups.”
Eifrem: ISO adoption of GQL broke SQL's multi-decade query language monopoly
“So in databases, there really only been one officially sanctioned blessed query language called sequel until a couple of years ago when the ISO ended up blessing GQ as the formal query language for graph databases.”
Eifrem: Multiple countries and US states used Neo4j for COVID contact tracing
“So a ton of people will have ton of countries, as well as companies, as well as states in the US and things like that. Have used Neo for J to do contact tracing of COVID”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Emil's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Neo4j | 2 | 20 | 75% 6/8 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Neo4j | 1 | 17 | 50% 2/4 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Neo4j | 1 | 8 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Latent Space → |