BUILD SEARCH

“We’re moving into the 'loopy' era where agents aren't just helping you write code, they are closing the loop on the entire scientific process of discovery.”

“Readwise was one of them. We were preparing for the reader launch. And so I built a small recommendation engine just, okay, let's take the articles that you've recently read. Like, embed all the articles and then do recommendations. It was good enough that when I ran it on one of the cofounders of Readwise, like, I found out that I got articles about about having a child. So I'm like oh my god I didn't I I didn't know that that they were having a child. But this was a company that was spending maybe $5 a month in total on all their infrastructure. And when I did the napkin math on running the embeddings of all the articles, putting them into a vector index, putting it in prod, it's gonna be, like, $30 a month. That just wasn't tenable.”

“We’re moving into the 'loopy' era where agents aren't just helping you write code, they are closing the loop on the entire scientific process of discovery.”

“S three only became consistent in December 2020. NVMe SSDs were also not in the cloud until around 2017. So you just sort of had like twenty seventeen NVMe SSDs and people are like, okay cool. There's like one SKU that does this. And then the second thing is like s three becomes consistent in 2020. So now it means you don't have to have this like big foundation DB or like zookeeper whatever sitting there contending with the keys.”

“I have a document called traits of the p 99 engineer. And it's a bullet point list, and I look at that list after every single interview that I do and in every single recap that we do. And every recap we end with I end with, some version of I'm gonna reject this candidate completely irregardless of what the discourse was. Because I wanna see people fight for this person. Because the default should not be we're gonna hire this person. The default should be we're definitely not hiring this person.”

“What we're seeing more demand from from our customers now is to do a lot of concurrency. Like, Notion does a ridiculous amount of queries in every round trip just because they can't. And I'm also now when I use the cursor agent, I also see them doing more concurrency than I've ever seen before. So a bit similar to how we designed a database to drive as much concurrency in every round trip as possible, that's also what the agents are doing. So that's new. It means there's an enormous amount of queries all at once to the dataset while it's warm in as few turns as possible.”

“It started getting really painful in like mid twenty twenty four because we were closing deals with Notion actually that was running in AWS, and we're like trust us, you really want us to run this in GCP? And the latency across the count were so big. And we had so much conviction that we bought, like, you know, dark fiber between the AWS regions in in Oregon, like, in the inter exchange. And GCP is like, we've never seen a startup. Like, what's going on here? We're tuning, like, TCP, Windows, like, everything to get the latency down because we had so high conviction in not doing, like, a metadata layer on s three.”

“There's a lot of database companies. And I think if you wanna build a really big database company, sort of, you need a couple of ingredients to be in the air. You need a new workload. You basically need the ambition that every single company on Earth is gonna have data in your database multiple times. The second thing you need, the second condition to build a big database company is that you need some new underlying change in the storage architecture that is not possible from the databases that have come before you. I think the third thing you need to do to build a big database company is that over time, you have to implement more or less every query plan on the data.”

“One time, Swalley emails me at like 4AM Pacific time saying, like, hey. Are you open for a call now? And I'm on the East Coast, and I it was, like, 7AM. Something then I didn't know anything about sales. It would something just compelled me. I have to go see this team. So I went to San Francisco, and I went to their office. And the way that I remember it is that Postgres was down when I showed up at the office. They migrated everything over the next, like, week or two, and we reduced our cost by 95%, which I think, like, kind of fixed their per user economics.”

“Someone just gave me the advice at the time of just choose the person where you just feel like you can just pick up the phone and not prepare anything and just be completely honest. And I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lachie and was like, look, Lachie, like, if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like, we'll just, like, return all the money to you. Lockie was the only person that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before.”

“When you're a startup, your only moat is really just focus. So you have to lay out the facts and you have to not get overeager. And I think we've seen some of our peers get very overeager and overextend themselves. And what I keep telling the team, I was just having breakfast this morning with our CTO and chief architect, and we were talking about, like, what we're most likely to regret at the end of the year is having tried to do too much.”