The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 23 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Turbopuffer is profitable
“It now means that we're profitable because we had so much pricing pressure in the beginning.”
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.”
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…”
Shah: Most vector databases become too slow or expensive at scale
“So, so, better databases, like, at that time, and even now, except a few, like, TurboPuffer and Chroma, Were not really scalable for the scale I was getting to where they were either getting too slow or too expensive to run.”
Eskildsen: Anthropic, Notion, and Cursor use Turbopuffer across three deployment models
“You can run Turbo Puffer either in SAS, right? That's what cursor does. You can run it in a single tenant cluster. So it's just you. That's what Notion does. And then you can run it in, in, in BYOC where everything is inside the customer's VPC. That's what, fo…”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer cuts query pricing 5x for agentic workloads
“We've reduced query pricing. This is probably the first time actually I'm saying that, but the query pricing is being reduced. Like, Five X. And we'll probably try to reduce it even more to accommodate some of these workloads of just doing very large amounts o…”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer reduced Cursor's infrastructure costs by 95%
“They migrated everything over the next like week or two, and we reduced her cost by 95%, which I think like kind of fixed their per user economics.”
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…”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer interview debriefs default to rejecting candidates unless championed
“And so I have a document called Traits of the P-Nine engineer, and it's a bullet point list, and I look at that list after every single interview that I do, and in every single recap that we do, and every recap we end with, I end with some version of, I'm gonn…”
Eskildsen: The worst outages stem from multi-system unsynchronized state
“And the worst outages are the ones where you have state in multiple places that's not syncing up. So it really came from a, like, just a very pure source of pain of just imagining what we would be okay being woken up at three a.m. About, and having something i…”
Eskildsen: Cursor obfuscates file paths and encrypts code stored in Turbopuffer
“Cursors like security posture into Turbo Puffer is exceptional, right? They have their own embedding model, which makes it very difficult to reverse engineer. They obfuscate the file paths. They are like, You, it's very difficult to learn anything about a code…”
Eskildsen: AI shifts build-versus-buy from technical ability to speed
“And I think AI has also changed the buy versus build equation in terms of, it's not really about, can we build it? It's about, do we have time to build it?”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer's Notion workload still runs reliably on GCP
“This workload still runs on GCP for what it's worth, right? Because it's so, it was just, it was so reliable. So it was never about moving off GCP.”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer loses no data if all servers shut down
“In fact, you could turn off all the servers that TurboPuffer has, and we would not lose any data because we have All completely all in on our big storage.”