Database School Building serverless vector search with Turbopuffer CEO, Simon Eskildsen
Nov 13, 2025
Simon Eskildsen, Co-founder and CEO of TurboPuffer, shares insights from his experience as an infrastructure engineer at Shopify and the founding of TurboPuffer, a serverless vector search solution. He discusses the challenges of scaling databases during Shopify's hypergrowth and how that led to his innovative approach using object storage for efficient vector indexing. The conversation touches on TurboPuffer's impact on modern AI workloads and the challenges of existing vector databases, making a case for cost-effective solutions for emerging companies.
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How A Viral Blog Post Launched A Career
- Simon described moving from Rails to infrastructure after joining Shopify and learning about load balancers and containers.
- He credited a viral blog post for getting noticed and hired by Shopify early in his career.
Readwise Prompted The Vector DB Idea
- Simon built a small recommender for Readwise using embeddings and found the results promising but too expensive to run on existing vector DBs.
- The napkin-math cost estimate (tens of thousands/month) motivated him to explore a radically cheaper architecture.
Cursor As A First Big Customer
- Cursor became an early adopter after struggling with vector costs and took a chance on TurboPuffer.
- Simon and Justine built a close partnership with Cursor and helped them tune infra and Postgres knowledge early on.