← All IntelClip / EducationOrigin story: pricing Turbopuffer off a real customer bill
From Fireside Chat: Simon Eskildsen on Building Turbopuffer · ≈43:50
“And that's like a core engineering principle of me is simplicity above everything.”
“It felt like a very niche kind of product, right, to build this particular search engine.”
“no matter how many smiles there are in the room everyone's sort of expecting that you have to earn a big return on that on some timeline that makes sense to everyone involved”
What’s in it
- Founder explains how he priced Turbopuffer's Cursor bill down to $4K/month
- Reveals why 'simplicity above everything' drives his engineering decisions
- Unpacks the real expectations venture capital places on founders
Clip transcript
than what which is typical inside of Silicon Valley. Yeah. So I think to to understand my how I think about capital you have to go back to the the beginning of Turbopuffer, right? where I promised cursor that Justine and I could get their bill to 4K a month. And this was based on some very rough napkin math on, okay, if if Turbopuffer was a better implementation than it currently is, then it should cost this much. And that's the pricing we ship with and that's what we guaranteed um guaranteed cursor. Um but the software was not that good. Like it was very reliable, but it was very simple, right? And that's like a core engineering principle of me is simplicity above everything. Um you and I have talked before about how software that ages well and some of the advantages of seeing be having long tenures inside of companies. You had a long tenure at Uber. I had a long tenure at Shopify. So you see simplicity just almost always wins. Um and at the time I was not convinced whether this was a venture scale opportunity because I understood that if you take venture capital no matter how many smiles there are in the room everyone's sort of expecting that you have to earn a big return on that on some timeline that makes sense to everyone involved and everyone involved are you know pension funds in Canada like that it's like it there's like a whole stack right of of of people that that need to so at the time I was like I don't you I don't know if this could be a billion dollar company. I didn't know that in the very very beginning. Um it wasn't completely clear to me. It felt like a very niche kind of product, right, to build this particular search engine. Um and that was completely fine with me. So I you know it's it's it was fine. And so then I just I just looked at the cursor bill and I looked at my GCP bill which is what we started on. and you know as like a you know dumb Danish person who's just like okay like this number should just be lower than the other number. >> Yeah,
Comments
Checking sign-in…
Loading comments…