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He built a new database in his bedroom—now he powers Cursor, Notion and Anthropic. | Simon Eskildsen, Founder of turbopuffer
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.
Why You Should Listen:
- The power of making something 10-100x cheaper
- Why you need to be willing to fly to early customers (how that landed Cursor)
- The 6 reasons to raise money (and why you often shouldn't)
- How working 24-hour sprints during POCs converted enterprise customers
- Why staying profitable with 17 people beats raising $30M you don't need
Keywords:
startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, TurboPuffer, Simon Eskildsen, vector database, Cursor, Notion, bootstrapping, database startup, AI infrastructure
00:00:00 Intro
00:07:52 Finding the problem
00:12:25 Building alone
00:22:27 Going viral on X
00:26:18 Closing Cursor
00:40:17 Closing Notion
00:45:26 Why he didn't raise $30M when everyone expected him to
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Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago