The founder used a "Napkin Math" approach, analyzing fundamental computing metrics (disk speed, memory cost). This revealed a viable architecture using cheap S3 storage that incumbents overlooked, creating a 100x cost advantage for his database.
To land Notion, co-founder Justin worked with extreme intensity, finding 300ms of latency in three hours and building a requested feature in 24 hours after promising it on the spot. This level of obsessive commitment is required to win transformative customers.
To land an unresponsive prospect, the founder flew to their office. He arrived as they were fighting a database fire and immediately helped them fix it. This impromptu help session proved his expertise and built immense trust that led them to become a customer.
After TurboPuffer quoted a price, Notion's team asked if they would lose money on the deal. This concern wasn't a negotiation tactic but a genuine fear that their new critical vendor was unsustainable. This is a powerful signal of true market disruption.
The founder classifies fundraising into six buckets: finding PMF, funding growth, employee liquidity, trust/publicity, strategic partnerships, or ego. This framework helps founders avoid raising capital for momentum's sake, which often adds unnecessary risk and dilution.
TurboPuffer achieved its massive cost savings by building on slow S3 storage. While this increased write latency by 1000x—unacceptable for transactional systems—it was a perfectly acceptable trade-off for search and AI workloads, which prioritize fast reads over fast writes.
To build a multi-billion dollar database company, you need two things: a new, widespread workload (like AI needing data) and a fundamentally new storage architecture that incumbents can't easily adopt. This framework helps identify truly disruptive infrastructure opportunities.
Founders with deep market fit must trust their unique intuition over persuasive, but generic, VC advice. Following the standard playbook leads to cookie-cutter companies, while leaning into the 'weird' things that make your business different is what creates a unique, defensible moat.