Venture Capital Fundraising

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

Aug 3, 2026 · 56:30

Gergely Orosz talks with Turbopuffer CEO Simon Eskildsen about how napkin-math engineering took him from high-school Shopify hire to building the S3-based vector database that cut Cursor's bill by 95%. Eskildsen recounts scaling Shopify's infra to 1M RPS, building failure-injection proxy ToxyProxy, and launching Turbopuffer at $1 per million vectors on S3 with an Nginx cache. Cursor became the first customer after he helped debug Postgres/autovacuum issues; he also tells how Jensen Huang ribbed him for choosing CPUs over GPUs. He argues RL workloads are gobbling CPU capacity, making CPU SKUs scarce, and lists six reasons to raise capital, noting his first raise funded R&D and the second let employees cash out. He closes on Turbopuffer's remote culture of campfires and turbo credits for business-class flights.

The AI Engineer’s Guide to Raising VC — Dani Grant (Jam), Chelcie Taylor (Notable)

Jul 27, 2025 · 34:17

Dani Grant (CEO of Jam) and Chelcie Taylor (Notable Capital) give AI engineers a tactical playbook for raising venture capital, arguing that you don't need revenue, a product, or even to leave your full-time job to raise a pre-seed or seed round. They explain that VCs bet on founders' vision and unique insights, not perfect technology or traction, and share real cold emails that led to investments—including one that simply referenced a blog post and another that didn't mention the startup at all. In pitch meetings, they advise focusing on 'why you, why now' over tech deep dives, making the conversation bidirectional, and ending by asking about next steps. Common mistakes include over-engineering the demo, failing to acknowledge competitors, and not having a prepared pitch deck to send afterward. Grant's original Jam pitch deck is still live at deck.jam.dev. Taylor's contact is ctaylor@notablecap.com.