Founding Weaviate with Bob van Luijt and Etienne Dilocker - Weaviate Podcast #140!

About this episode

Weaviate co-founders Bob van Luijt and Etienne Dilocker return to the Weaviate Podcast to celebrate seven years of building the company, answering questions submitted by the community. The conversation opens with what excites them most in AI right now: Etienne on agentic coding and the "Moore's law" of how long models can sustain autonomous loops, and Bob on world models, new architectures that could slash training energy costs, open source frontier models, and inference on new chips.From there, the discussion dives into taste and the "AI slopification" problem, why AI-generated emails, websites, and decks all look the same, how three job candidates submitted nearly identical AI-built presentations in one week, and why Weaviate runs a dedicated "slop pass" skill over every pull request to strip out phrases like "the smoking gun" and "load-bearing invariant." The human touch, they argue, is now the easiest way to stand out.The Co-Founders then retell their origin story: meeting at a European enterprise company, rewriting a NodeJS prototype in Go, betting on NLP before anyone called it AI, adopting HNSW when it was still a niche paper, and raising a $1.2M seed round from Zeta during COVID. When ChatGPT and the RAG paper hit, Weaviate had a fully working product ready for the wave.Looking forward, Bob breaks down the commoditization playbook that hits every new database category, the same skepticism MongoDB faced, and shares that the number one reason new customers cite for choosing Weaviate is that an LLM recommended it. Etienne makes the case that vector databases are evolving into context engines: context rot is real, stuffing everything into a long context window is inefficient, and retrieval, hybrid search, and structured data all serve one goal, the best possible context. The conversation lands on memory for AI agents, where the hard problem isn't what's worth remembering, but what's worth recalling.