Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Hørup Eskildsen of Turbopuffer

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“Just a quick mention of Lucky, just because I'm curious. I've met Lucky and like he's obviously a very good investor now on Physical Intelligence. I call it a generalist super angel, right? He invests in everything. And I always wonder, like, is there something appealing about focusing on developer tooling, focusing on databases, going like, I've invested for 20 years in databases versus being like a Lucky where he can maybe connect you to all the customers that you need. This is an excellent question. No one's asked me this. Why Locky? Because there was a couple of people that we were talking to at the time, and when we were raising, we were almost a little— we were like a bit distressed because one of our peers had just launched something that was very similar to Turbo Puffer. And 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 I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockie and was like, look, Lockie, like, if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like, we'll just like return all the money to you. But it's just like, I don't really— Justine and I don't want to work on this unless it's really working. So we want to give it the best shot this year. And like, we're really going to go for it. We're going to hire a bunch of people and we're just going to be honest with everyone. Like, when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards. And Lockie was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before. As I said, I didn't even know what a seed or pre-seed round was, like, before, probably even at this time. So I was just like very honest with him. And I asked him like, Locky, have you ever invested in a database company? He was just like, no. And at the time I was like, am I dumb? Like, but I think there was something that just like really drew me to Locky. He is so authentic, so honest, like, And there's something just like, I just felt like I could just play, like, just say everything openly. And that was, I think that was like a perfect match at the time. And honestly still is. He was just like, okay, that's great. This is like the most honest, ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say to me. But like that, like that. Why is it ridiculous to say competitor launch, this may not work out? It was more just like, if this doesn't work out, I'm going to close up shop by the end of the year. Right. right? Like, it was— I don't know, maybe it's common. I don't know. He told me it was uncommon. I don't know. That's why we chose him. And he'd been phenomenal. The other people were talking at the time were database experts. Like, they knew a lot about databases, and Locky didn't. This turned out to be a phenomenal asset, right? I, like, Justine and I know a lot about databases. The people that we hire know a lot about databases. What we needed was just someone who didn't know a lot about databases, didn't pretend to know a lot about databases, and just wanted to help us with candidates and customers.”