Pinecone founder and CEO Edo Liberty reflects on the motivations required to sustain founder burnout and financial uncertainty.
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
What-if
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?”
Assertion Contradicted
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”