Aug 03, 2026

Building Turbopuffer: Gergely Orosz (@pragmaticengineer ) × Simon Eskildsen (CEO)

Simon Eskildsen, CEO of Turbopuffer, discusses his unique path from early computer fascinations to founding an S3-native vector search company. He shares insights from his eight years at Shopify, detailing infrastructure scaling challenges and the development of Toxyproxy for fault injection. A core theme is his "napkin math" philosophy, using fundamental performance metrics to optimize systems and challenge benchmarks. He explains the impetus for Turbopuffer, its initial minimalist architecture, and how it achieved a 95% cost reduction for its first customer, Cursor. Simon also touches on the unexpected scarcity of CPUs due to AI workloads and his unconventional, principled approach to venture capital and building a remote-first company culture.

Jul 30, 2026

Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

Jeff Dean discusses the evolution of AI, drawing parallels between Google's past breakthroughs (like fitting search in RAM and the origin of TPUs) and current challenges. He emphasizes that AI is becoming an energy problem, driving the need for specialized inference hardware. Dean highlights 'context engineering' and multi-agent systems as crucial for long-running, complex AI tasks, and offers advice for startups on finding niches where they can outperform larger entities by focusing on specific domains, data, and models. He stresses the importance of clear specifications for agents and 'taste' in problem selection, encouraging founders to question fundamental assumptions and automate the scientific method to build 'AI that builds AI.'