# Ep 71: CEO of TurboPuffer Simon Eskildsen on Building Smarter Retrieval, AI App Must-Have Features & Current State of Vector DBs

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/unsupervised-learning-with-jacob-effron-6041643/ep-71-ceo-of-turbopuffer-simon-eskildsen-on-building-smarter-retrieval-ai-app-must-have-features-current-state-of-vector-dbs
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Podcast: [Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron](https://stenobird.com/podcast/unsupervised-learning-with-jacob-effron-6041643)
Published: 2025-07-22T12:50:04+00:00
Episode link: https://unsupervised-learning.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-71-ceo-of-turbopuffer-simon-eskildsen-on-building-smarter-retrieval-ai-app-must-have-features-current-state-of-vector-dbs-wDVoriM7
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Duration seconds: 3068

## Resource

In this episode, Simon Eskildsen, co-founder and CEO of TurboPuffer, lays out a compelling vision for how AI-native infrastructure needs to evolve in an era where every application wants to connect massive amounts of context to large language models. He breaks down why traditional databases and even large context windows fall short—especially at scale—and why object-storage-native search is the inevitable next step. Drawing on his experience from Shopify and Readwise, Simon introduces the SCRAP framework to explain the limits of context stuffing and makes a clear case for why cost, recall, performance, and access control drive the need for smarter retrieval systems. From practical lessons in building highly reliable infra to hard technical problems in vector indexing, this conversation distills the future of AI infra into first principles—with clarity and depth.

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## Transcript

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