He built a new database in his bedroom—now he powers Cursor, Notion and Anthropic. | Simon Eskildsen, Founder of turbopuffer

Episode notes

Simon spent 10 years at Shopify scaling databases to millions of requests per second. Then he discovered vector databases were so expensive that companies couldn't launch AI features. So he solved it. When Cursor emailed about their crushing costs, Simon flew to San Francisco unannounced. They migrated their entire workload within a week, cutting their bill by 95%. Then came Notion. Justin pulled 24-hour coding marathons during their POC, fixing 300 milliseconds of latency in three hours. They signed on July 25th—the same day Simon's daughter was born. Now TurboPuffer powers Cursor, Notion, and Linear while staying profitable with just 17 people. Simon shares why he turned down easy Series A money and his framework of exactly 6 legitimate reasons to ever raise capital.