Erik Bernhardsson joined Spotify around 2008-2009 and spent seven years there, mostly building its music recommendation system.
“I joined after school in 2008, 2009, maybe, uh, and spent 7 years at Spotify”
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Erik Bernhardsson
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While at Spotify, Bernhardsson released an open source workflow orchestration framework called Luigi.
“when I worked at Spotify, I released an open source framework called Luigi, which is like workflow orchestration.”
Modal was self-funded for a while and raised a seed round in early 2022.
“But we didn't raise for a while, and, um, uh, until early 2022, we raised a seed round.”
Modal's monthly revenue went from about $100 in November 2022 to about $2,000 the following month, then to roughly $30,000 in January 2023.
“so so we went from, like, you know, $100 a month in, like, I think, like, November 2022, and the next month, we did, like, $2,000 a month.”
Bernhardsson said Modal's first big revenue came from a single customer, which he thinks was a New York Stable Diffusion company called Mage.
“I think they suspected it was a company in in New York called Mage. They're doing, like, a Stable Diffusion company.”
Modal works with almost 25 clouds and often must sign multi-year deals with large upfront payments to secure GPU capacity.
“We actually work with almost 25 clouds at this point, and in many cases, the in order to get the capacity we want”
Modal built a dedicated procurement team of about four people who work full time sourcing GPU capacity.
“We have to build a whole procurement, like, desk. Like, we have, like, 4 guys working full time, basically.”
Bernhardsson cited the Hunt brothers' failed attempt to corner the silver market as a warning against trying to corner GPU capacity.
“do you know about the Hunt brothers? It's, like, a legendary story in trading. They tried to corner the silver market. It failed spectacularly.”
Some teams run disaggregated inference, using Nvidia chips for the prefill step and Cerebras chips for the decode step.
“some interesting, you know, people doing these, like, hybrid, you know, disaggregated inference, where they run, you know, NVIDIA for the prefill and and Cerebras for the decode”
Bernhardsson cited Nscale as a neocloud that went from nowhere to a pipeline of hundreds of billions of dollars while having little capacity.
“Nscale, which went from, like, nowhere to, like, you know, having, like, you know, whatever, hundreds of billions of dollars in in their pipeline”
Modal Functions launched in 2021, found product-market fit in 2023, and now accounts for about two-thirds of Modal's revenue.
“So, Modal Functions was the the the core. We launched that in 2021. Like I mentioned, we started seeing product market fit in 2023, and now, you know, it's about 2/3 of our revenue”
Co-founder Akshat wrote the first Modal Sandboxes prototype and launched it in about one or two days.
“and Akshat wrote a a a prototype and launched it in basically 1 day or 2 days, or something like that.”
Ramp began using Modal sandboxes for background agents as LLMs improved at generating code.
“and then, you know, companies like Ramp started using Modal for background agents.”
A Modal customer recently needed to transcribe about 5,000 years of audio, a job Modal completed in a few days.
“we had a customer the other day that needed to transcribe, you know, 5,000 years of audio.”
Modal originally built its sandboxes on the gVisor isolation tool and now also offers full virtual machines.
“previously built our our sandbox product on on GVisor, but now we offer full virtualized machines as well.”
Anthropic's managed agents let users bring their own sandbox, and Modal can be used for that.
“the managed agents with with Anthropic, uh, there's a sort of, uh, bring your own, um, sandbox, uh, integration. So you you can use Modal for those.”
Bernhardsson said agents that exploited Hugging Face found a vulnerability in an app deployed on Modal and used it as a springboard, which he says was not a breach of Modal itself.
“the agents running inside, you know, that that that exploited Hugging Face, they discovered a a vulnerability in an app that was deployed on Modal”
Modal has grown its forward deployed engineering team to about 24 people this year.
“I think we have, like, 24 or something like that. So we've grown a lot.”
Modal recently passed 200 employees and expected to reach about 250 by the end of the year.
“we recently crossed 200 people. We're we're growing extremely fast. We'll probably hit 250 by the end of the year.”
Bernhardsson said the median Modal sandbox lasts about 8 seconds.
“I think the median sandbox in modal today is, like, 8 seconds long or something like that”