Eskildsen: Turbopuffer is profitable
Simon Eskildsen · Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Eskildsen of Turbopuffer · Mar 12, 2026 · at 35:46
Turbopuffer founder Simon Eskildsen discusses the startup's early infrastructure unit economics and forced optimization.
0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It now means that we're profitable because we had so much pricing pressure in the beginning.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Simon Eskildsen
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: 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…”