Emil Eifrem on graph and vector databases, LLMs, and building an American company with a Swedish Soul.
Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Stitcher • Google • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon • RSS.
Emil Eifrem is co-founder and CEO of Neo4j, the leading graph database and graph data science software provider. We discussed a range of topics including: the current state of graph databases, graph data science and graph neural networks, vector databases, the interplay between LLMs, knowledge graphs, and graph databases.
Interview highlights – key sections from the video version:
- The state of graph databases
- Graph database use cases
- Workloads (OLTP vis a vis OLAP)
- What is “graph data science” and why is it becoming so popular?
- Graph Neural Networks in real-world applications
- Platform shifts and the rise of new database companies
- Embeddings, vector search and vector databases
- LLMs, knowledge graphs, and graph databases
- Using an LLM in an existing graph data science project, or using a graph to enhance and LLM
- Custom Foundation Models and Custom LLMs
- Lessons learned from building a successful startup
- ❛ We opened sourced right from day one. And we started building a community from day one, but we were a little bit contrary, and we started monetizing pretty early as well because we wanted to get both signals of feedback, both from the open-source community as well as from paying customers. We also knew that if you looked at the database companies, any database company at scale, 80% of their revenue is from the global 2000. And so we knew that selling into the enterprise is not an afterthought. We need to train that muscle right away. ❜
– Emil Eifrem on building an Enterprise Software startup based on open source technology.
Related Content:
- A video version of this conversation is available on our YouTube channel.
- My 2015 podcast conversation with Emil Eifrem.
- What is Graph Intelligence?
- The Vector Database Primer
- Building LLM-powered Apps: What You Need to Know
- Navigating the Future of Search
- Louis Brandy: The Future of Vector Databases and the Rise of Instant Updates
- Amin Ahmad: LLMs Are the Key to Unlocking the Next Generation of Search
- Bob van Luijt: An open source, production grade vector search engine
If you enjoyed this episode, please support our work by encouraging your friends and colleagues to subscribe to our newsletter:
