Liberty: Staying at AWS Would Have Paid More Than Founding Pinecone
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 7:05
Pinecone founder and CEO Edo Liberty discusses the financial trade-offs of leaving an executive role at AWS SageMaker to build a startup.
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“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?”
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Liberty: Founders Should Not Factor Financials Into Defining a Good Outcome
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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.”
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“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…”
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“The term vector database didn't exist. It just didn't exist. We'd, nobody talked about it this way.”
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“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…”