Fireside Chat: Simon Eskildsen on Building Turbopuffer

Turbopuffer's early search engine combined object storage with a cache to address two different needs: durable storage and fast retrieval. In the fireside conversation, founder Simon Eskildsen describes grouping numerical document representations into clusters, storing those clusters as files, and fetching the groups nearest a search query.

That first implementation still faced the delay of fetching remote objects. He describes adding a cache in front of the object store so previously fetched files could be reused. The account explains how the prototype paired persistent backing storage with faster repeat access; it describes the early design, not the company's complete present architecture.

“I hate benchmarks so much because that's not a satisfying answer to me”

Simon Eskildsen

“the entire internet runs on small towns in Bavaria. I'm convinced.”

Simon Eskildsen

“if you're wondering about the name, it's like if everything goes south, we can always pivot into vapes”

Simon Eskildsen

“when I don't know how to play a game I just play with open cards”

Simon Eskildsen

“you could do a million vectors for a dollar”

Simon Eskildsen