Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Liberty: Pinecone spent over a year rebuilding its core database mid-flight

Edo Liberty · He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show · Mar 17, 2025 · at 51:15

Edo Liberty, founder and CEO of Pinecone, discusses the operational risk of redesigning Pinecone's vector database into a fully managed serverless product launched in early 2024.

0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.7s
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“Well, we had to rebuild the entire system, which is a huge bet for a company, for a database to go rebuild the, like, what it is mid-flight and keep serving all these workloads was a massive strategic bet that was sunk in probably more than a year of the company to almost stop improving the old product.”

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 Edo Liberty

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…”
Edo Liberty Mar 17, 2025 ▶ 50:22 He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show
Insight
Liberty: Founders Should Not Factor Financials Into Defining a Good Outcome
“When you're a startup founder, you really have to think about what's important to you, what you're willing to tolerate, what is a good outcome in your opinion. My suggestion is to not factor in financials into what a good outcome looks like.”
Edo Liberty Mar 17, 2025 ▶ 7:22 He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show
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.”
Edo Liberty Mar 17, 2025 ▶ 51:56 He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show
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…”
Edo Liberty Mar 17, 2025 ▶ 58:34 He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show
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?”
Edo Liberty Mar 17, 2025 ▶ 7:05 He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show
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.”
Edo Liberty Mar 17, 2025 ▶ 19:52 He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show
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