Simon Eskildsen
Co-founder & CEO, turbopuffer. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer
Simon Eskildsen spent a decade at Shopify scaling database infrastructure before tackling the high costs of vector databases for AI applications. His solutions helped companies like Cursor and Notion migrate workloads and reduce database expenses.
2shows
2appearances
45statements
11resolved
10supported
0contradicted
91%fully supported
Everything Simon Eskildsen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Eskildsen: IOI computer science competition contributes more to GDP than the Olympics
“The problem is that no one's heard about it, but it contributes more to GDP than the real Olympics.”
Eskildsen: Model weights compress reasoning, not all world knowledge
“We can take all of the world's knowledge, all of the exabytes and exabytes of data that there is, and we can use those tokens to train a model, but we can't compress all of that into a few terabytes of weights, right? We can compress into a few terabytes of we…”
Eskildsen: Object-storage-first databases trade 200ms write latency for pure upside
“The only real downside to that is that if you go all in on object storage, every write will take a couple hundred milliseconds of latency, but from there, it's really all upside, right? You do the first query, it takes half a second”
Eskildsen: Neon retrofitted Postgres for S3, while Turbopuffer built pure object-storage consensus
“I think neon neon was first to, and they're trying to retrofit it onto Postgres. And then they built this whole architecture where you have it in memory, and then you sort of like, you know, mmap back to S-III, and I think that was very novel at the time to do…”
Eskildsen: Offered to return capital if Turbopuffer lacked PMF by year-end
“I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Locky and was like, well, Locky, like, if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like, we'll just like return all the money to you. But it's just like, I don't really, Justine and I don't w…”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer outperforms Lucene on long LLM search queries
“Turbo Puffer today has a fairly start of the state of the art full text search engine.
We beat Lucene on some queries, in particular, very long queries that we've optimized for, because those are the text search queries we see today.”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer is 100x cheaper than incumbent vector databases
“The innovation of Turbo Puffer is that it is almost a hundred times cheaper than the incumbents at the time to store that coordinate system.”
Eskildsen: Sacrificing write latency to S3 reduces search database costs 100x
“So, okay, you might give up three orders of magnitude in write latency, but actually you don't have to give anything else up. And then you have this true two orders of magnitude decrease in the base cost of the system. That's a great compromise if you're build…”
Eskildsen: AI models cannot compress all human knowledge into model weights
“When you train an AI model, you're trying to basically compress all of human knowledge into a few terabytes. That's impossible. You can't do that. At least not by any computer science or any science really known. It does not make sense that you can compress al…”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer told seed investors it would shut down without 2024 PMF
“If Justin and I could not find product market fit by the end of 2024, we were just going to close up shop. Justin and I were very clear about this. We even told the investors Who were invited for that round in 2024 that we were going to close up shop by the en…”
Eskildsen: Elasticsearch Was the Most Difficult and Aggravating Database at Shopify
“The database that was the most difficult for me to scale during that time, and that was the most aggravating to be on call for, was Elasticsearch. It was very, very difficult to deal with, and I saw a lot of projects that were just being held back in their amb…”
Eskildsen: Vector Search for Readwise Would Have Cost Six Times Its Total Infra Bill
“But this was a company that was spending maybe five grand a month in total on all of their infrastructure. And when I did the napkin math on running the embeddings of all the articles, putting them into a vector index, putting it in prod, it's going to be like…”
Turbopuffer Bought Oregon Dark Fiber to Serve Notion Across Clouds
“It started getting really painful in like mid-twenty-twenty-four, because we were closing deals with Notion actually, that was running in AWS, and we're like, trust us, you really want us to run this in GCP?
And they were like, no, I don't know about that, lik…”
Eskildsen: Macro AI predictions are a waste of time because nobody can forecast AI
“I don't like just doing like thought pieces on this is where it's going and like trying to be all macroeconomic about AI. That's as turned out to be a giant waste of time because no one can really predict any of this. So I just, Collect case studies.”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer is profitable
“It now means that we're profitable because we had so much pricing pressure in the beginning.”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer benefited from having an investor without database expertise
“The other people were talking at the time where database experts, like they, you know, knew a lot about databases and Lockheed didn't. This turned out to be a phenomenal asset, right? I like Justine and I know a lot about databases. The people that we hired kn…”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer ANN v3 searches 100B vectors with 40ms p50 latency
“ANN v. Three can search a hundred billion vectors with a p-fifty of around 40 milliseconds and a p-ninety-nine of 200 milliseconds. Maybe other people have done this. I'm sure Google and others have done this, but we haven't seen anyone at least not in like a …”
Eskildsen: Scaling a database company requires supporting almost every query plan
“If you want to build a big database company, The database over time has to implement more or less every query plan, because when you have your data in a database, you expect it to over time, not just search, but also, Hey, I want to aggregate this column. I wa…”
Eskildsen: Cursor moved 20 terabytes from Postgres to Turbopuffer
“Like at some point, cursor moved like 20 terabytes of Postgres data into Turbo Puffer, because it's like, it's there, it works, and these particular query plans we know work well, and so they just moved it all to defer sharding.”
Eskildsen: Readwise vector recommendations would have cost $30k/month on incumbent databases
“They have hundreds of millions of articles, and it would have cost about 30 grand a month to put in the production on one of the incumbents at the time. And that was just way too much, right?”
Eskildsen: Generational database companies require fundamentally new workloads
“If you want to build a generational database company, you need two and a half things. The first thing that you need is that you need a new workload, because if you want to make it as a really large billion dollar plus database company, you need a reason for mo…”
Eskildsen: Founders should hire corporate lawyers who only represent founders, not VCs
“You want a corporate lawyer who sees a lot of activity and ideally a corporate lawyer who never works with VCs, but only ever works with founders.”
Eskildsen: Every company will connect all data to AI within years
“I don't think you're going to find a company over the next few years that doesn't directly or indirectly have all their data available for search and connected to AI.”
Eskildsen: Modern hardware requires databases designed around concurrent requests, not sequential roundtrips
“You really have to build a database where you have as few round trips as possible, right? This is how CPUs work today. It's how NVMe SSDs work. It's how S three works that you want to have a very large amount of outstanding requests, right? Like basically go t…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Simon's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, turbopuffer | 1 | 30 | 88% 7/8 | full record on Latent Space → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, turbopuffer | 1 | 15 | 100% 3/3 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |