How Customer Language Coined the “Vector Database” (Full Transcript)
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, jokes aside, the company almost died on the vine because we didn't have any. Yeah. What did you call it back then? I forget exactly what, I tried everything. This is the most, like, depressing part. Like, I tried to learn from one minute to the next. I tried everything and nothing landed. It was the most depressing thing in the world. Like, I, you know, I was almost, I was on the verge of giving up. Like, people have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. Like, I was speaking a different language. Like, they just look at me like, nothing. I'm getting nothing. At some point, I just asked one of our early customers, we just asked them like, 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 a vector database because it's a database for our vectors. I'm like, sounds good. Thank you. We'll go with that.
[00:00:53] Speaker 2: So you guys, that's something I didn't realize. Like, you guys really were, like, first to market with publicly talking about this thing and branding it as this is a vector database.
[00:01:03] Speaker 1: Yeah. And I got a lot of heat from my investors for that too.
[00:01:07] Speaker 2: How so?
[00:01:08] Speaker 1: Because they said, hey, who gives a shit about databases? Who builds a database anyway? And B, what the hell is a vector?
- If your messaging isn’t landing, ask customers how they describe what they bought—then adopt their language.
- Clear category naming can unlock market understanding even if it sounds technical.
- Being first to publicly define a category can create differentiation but may draw investor pushback.
- Simple, concrete descriptions often outperform founder-invented jargon.