Pinecone founder Edo Liberty shares 6 insights on building AI startups, crafting product strategy, and earning customer trust
AssemblyAI CEO and founder Dylan Fox sat down with Pinecone CEO and founder Edo Liberty to discuss what it’s like to build an AI startup, craft AI product strategy from the ground up, and earn customer trust in the process.
As a former research director at AWS and senior director of AI infrastructure at Yahoo, Edo Liberty wanted to research how AI models and vector search systems could combine to dramatically improve AI applications like AI search, recommendation systems, spam detectors, and more. At those companies, Edo noticed that others couldn’t build out such capabilities without the enormous data science and engineering resources available to him to look into the problem.
This glaring need for an easier, more user-friendly solution for all is how the idea for Pinecone was born. Founded in 2019, Pinecone provides the critical storage and retrieval infrastructure needed for today’s companies building and running accurate, secure, and scalable AI applications — all in an accessible, fully managed package.
Now, Edo continues to build on this founding principle of Pinecone while scaling out the company for future growth and expansion opportunities.
Edo recently sat down with AssemblyAI’s CEO and founder Dylan Fox to discuss their shared experience in building AI startups, as well as in crafting AI product strategy and earning customer trust.
Here are a few takeaways from that conversation:
1. Everything is so new in AI that it can be difficult to help people understand (and name) what you're building
Edo Liberty: “I also thought it was too early because nobody knew what the hell a vector database was — I didn't know to call it a vector database… I was on the verge of giving up…like I was speaking a different language.”
“At some point I just asked one of our early customers: hey, when you talk about the thing that you buy from us, what do you say it is? I'm just curious. And he said, ‘we just call it the vector database because it's a database for our vectors.’ I'm like, sounds good, thank you, we'll go with that.”
2. Building a prototype and building a true product that works at scale are two different things
Edo Liberty: “I myself built a vector database four or five times in my career in my first startup, at Yahoo and Amazon...And every time we had to build something bespoke because we try to use whatever existed, and it was always too slow, too whatever, too expensive, didn't respond, couldn't be updated.”
Dylan Fox: “And a lot of people are building new applications so they don't have a project at scale. They haven't faced these pain points that you faced because you were working on this technology five, six years ago… How do you think about, as a founder and you guys as a go-to-market team now that you're trying to scale and grow, like effectively communicating that to prospects, to users, to developers that are really early in their journey that are maybe like, I don't even know what you're talking about?”
Edo Liberty: “It’s very hard, to be honest.”
3. Engineers want the best tools for their task, not to be sold to
Edo Liberty: “You don't speak with engineers [over email]. Like I don't want to be spoken to when I build something…Like God forbid I need to take a sales call with somebody.”
“I mean if you are building whatever it is you're building, you just want the best tools. You want to move fast and you want to make good decisions and really like just build whatever it is you're building. And our job [at Pinecone] is to make that as seamless and fantastic a journey as possible.”
4. Building valuable AI products for developers requires authenticity, love, and trust
Edo Liberty: “There are two states of mind that I talk about a lot here in our product, and hopefully people get to see it — It's love and trust.”
“First of all, you have to love the experience... We really try to be super minimalistic and kind of automate everything that [our customers] shouldn't be worried about... And in the beginning, people kept like, oh, I want to change from this to that. I'm like, why — don't you just want it to be fast and easy and cheap and performant? Like okay, are you happy with what you're getting? Yeah. Great. Then why would you want to tinker with it?... And you're like, I get, as an engineer, I just love it. These people get me. I get what I need.”
“The second thing is trust…[Customers] will not do is work with a technology or with a company they don't trust. Okay? And so we go above and beyond to be absolutely transparent and open, and at the same time, as an environment, be super, super robust and trustworthy.”
5. Rate of change in AI infrastructure is even faster than we expected it to be
Dylan Fox: “I talked to a lot of other founders in the AI infrastructure space and everyone's dealing with that because you're almost sometimes caught off guard by how much faster or lower cost something gets, right? You build a new model or you build some new serving infrastructure, put it in production, and then you realize this thing's actually like super efficient. Okay, now we got to go get this thing to market. How do we think about that?…Oftentimes you're surprised by just how much the rate of change is and how much better things are getting.”
6. Building an AI company is a journey, so take time to care for yourself in the process
Edo Liberty: “The most important thing is be gentle with yourself. Your own mental health, your own physical health, your own mood, your own state of mind are a critical asset not only for your well being, but for the well being of the company. And I think it's very easy to work 18 hours a day for three years and burn out and be dead.”
“Building companies is hard. You know, you're in a world-changing environment. You're doing a million things for the first time. You're going to make a thousand mistakes. Whatever, it's okay. That's sort of, that's the journey.”