No Priors Ep. 96 | With Modal CEO and Founder Erik Bernhardsson

(electronic music) Today, I'm chatting with Erik Brynjarsen, founder and CEO of Modal. Modal developed a serverless cloud platform tailored for AI and machine learning in data applications. And before that, Erik worked at Better.com and Spotify, where he led Spotify's machine learning efforts and built the recommender system. Well, Erik, thanks so much for joining me today on No Priors.

Yeah. Thanks. It's great to be here.

So, um, if I remember correctly, you worked at Spotify and helped build out their ML team and recommender system, and then were also at Better.com. What inspired you to start Modal, and what problem were you hoping to solve?

Yeah. Uh, so I started at Spotify a long time ago, 2008, and I spent seven years there. And yeah, I, I built a music recommendation system. And back then, there was, like, nothing really, uh, in terms of data infrastructure. Hadoop was, like, the most modern thing. And so I, I spent a lot of time building a lot of infrastructure. Uh, in particular, I built a workflow scheduler called Luigi that basically no one uses today. I built a vector database that... called Innoai that, you know, for a brief period, people used, but no one really uses today. Uh, so I spent a lot of time building a lot of that stuff. Uh, and then later at Better, I was the CTO and thinking a lot about, like, developer productivity and stuff. And then during the pandemic, I, I took some time off and started hacking on stuff, and I realized I always wanted to build, uh, basically a better infrastructure for, for these types of things, like data AI and machine learning. So, so pretty quickly realized, like, this is what I wanted to do, and that, that was sort of the genesis of Modal.

Mm-hmm. That's cool. How did that approach evolve, or what are the main areas that the company focuses on today?

So I started looking into, first of all, just, like, what are the challenges with data AI and machine learning infrastructure? And, and I started thinking about from, like, a developer productivity point of view. What's a tool I want to have? And, and I realized, like, a big, a big sort of challenge is, like, working with the cloud is arguably kind of annoying (laughs) and, like, as much as, like, I love the cloud for the power that it gives me, and I've used the cloud since, you know, way back, 2009 or so, uh, it's actually pretty frustrating to work with. And so I, I... in my head, I had this idea of, like, what if you make cloud development feel almost, like, as good as local development, right? Like, it has its, like, fast feedback loops. And so I started thinking about, like, how do we build that? And realized pretty quickly, like, well, actually, we can't really use Docker and Kubernetes, so we're gonna have to throw that out and, and, and probably gonna have to build our own file system, which we did pretty early, and build our own scheduler and build our own container runtime. And so that was, like, basically the two first years of Modal, is just, like, laying all that, like, foundational infrastructure layer in place.