eng @turbopuffer | ex: @dragonflydbio , @gitpod , @BuoyantIO
Hyderabad, India
Joined February 2015
- Tweets3.9K
- Following2.2K
- Followers1.9K
- Likes74.2K
🥹
The people of Silicon Valley are unwell.
If you work at a frontier lab or decacorn, you’ve got it bad. You haven’t seen your kids, your girlfriend’s annoyed, invites from friends to hang out are waning, even weddings are on hold. This is the time to make your mark and make your money, after all.
If you’re building a startup that’s trying to compete with or be one of these companies, you’ve got it bad. Maybe you passed up a job offer at one a couple years back, which means you left $100M on the table, you fucking idiot. Being an underdog isn't as fun as you thought.
If you’re working on a pre-AI startup, you’ve got it bad. Not too long ago you were the belle of the ball, but now your 30% year-on-year growth doesn’t feel like growth at all. It feels like death.
"Too many of my friends are spiraling," Brie Wolfson writes. "I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this."
It’s all too much, too fast. Too much money, too much growth, too much power, too much change. Every month, a new frontier model is released. Every day, a new unicorn is minted. Seriously. 300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far.
So what’s left for the sane ones? Brie went looking for teams playing a different game. She found one in Ottawa: a search infrastructure company that many of the AI darlings rely on.
It's growing fast, and its people are well.
Read @zebriez’s latest company dispatch from inside the sane asylum of turbopuffer.
colossus.com/article/sane-as…
whether as individuals or as a company, just asking "is this a real preference or is it cope?" can bring a lot of clarity
tarun retweeted
everyone at WarpStream sells, but @turbopuffer takes it to the next level
the employees will look you in the eyes at a dinner party after just meeting you five seconds ago and ask “does your company puf? should you be puffin’?” with a completely straight face
tarun retweeted
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.
I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.
In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.
They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.
I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.
I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.
I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.
Number one tip: act with agency.
tarun retweeted
turbopuffer's first public Azure region, azure-eastus2, is now in private preview
contact us for access
. @Sirupsen has a story about how, in the early days of tpuf (ran in prod on tmux), he did upgrades by Ctrl+C. We decided that was a bad idea, but the spirit of moving fast lives on
we run 100+ tpuf clusters, including many that live inside customers' clouds (BYOC). how do you operate a cluster you can't touch?
we don't use Terraform for this. instead, we build a custom control plane to manage the entire fleet without ever reaching in
tpuf.link/control-plane
tarun retweeted
i’ve had jobs where teams just accepted that 500s were a thing that happened (potentially correlated with ex-googlers)
but nope, we will page an operator at any time of night if our application returns a single 500 error.
500s are for real problems which either indicates an incident starting or a bug that needs to be fixed
completely aligned with tpuff
tarun retweeted
Got a note from the @turbopuffer team that they were seeing 500 errors on a small number of our requests and they would investigate. Found the issue, patched it, and shipped it to prod. Continually impressed with their team. Can't think of another vendor has been so proactive
tarun retweeted
Globe&Mail wrote a generous piece about turbopuffer theglobeandmail.com/business…
tarun retweeted
turbopuffer crossed $100M run-rate in March. 19mo after $1M. Profitable & <$1M raised.
Cursor・Anthropic・Notion・Cognition・Harvey・Bridgewater・Ramp・Linear・Legora・Superhuman・Atlassian・Granola
We’d be nowhere without them. We work like hell to exceed their expectations.
tarun retweeted
SID-1 is an agentic search model by @SID_AI
→ 1.9x recall over RAG + rerank
→ 24x faster, 99% cheaper than GPT-5.1
trained using large-scale RL on turbopuffer at 1k+ QPS bursts over 10M+ document corpora across thousands of steps
tpuf.link/sid-1
tarun retweeted
A conversation with @sirupsen on scaling Shopify, building turbopuffer, and the future of databases.
0:00 - Scaling Shopify through flash sales and outages
8:13 - How top infrastructure teams collaborated in the 2010s
10:35 - Engineering principles from Logrus and on-call
17:38 - The story behind Simon’s famous-ish blog, Napkin Math
23:05 - Why new database companies keep winning
32:21 - How Simon became a fan of databases
35:45 - AI coding, and where agents still fail
42:10 - Hiring P99 engineers in the AI era
48:45 - What’s next for databases
someone said @turbopuffer is the fastest infrastructure company buildout they've seen, and we're not kidding!