Erik Bernhardsson

Erik Bernhardsson is co-founder and CEO of Modal, the cloud-compute platform that lets developers run Python and AI workloads as simple functions in the cloud. He spent seven years at Spotify building music recommendations, then led data and engineering at Better, before starting Modal to fix the lowest layer of the stack: getting code onto machines without the usual cloud tax.

Building Music Recommendations at Spotify

He grew up coding competitively in Sweden, then joined Spotify early, as roughly its fortieth employee, and spent most of seven years on the music recommendation system. That work shaped how he sees infrastructure: most of the effort went into plumbing around the recommendation idea. He later open-sourced Annoy, a vector-nearest-neighbor library that became a staple for embedding search, then spent about six years as CTO at Better managing data and other teams.

Founding Modal as a Spite Startup

When he set out to start a company he kept circling the data stack, then decided the honest place to begin was compute. On Practical AI he joked that Modal was almost a "spite startup" for the problem of "I have code, and I want to deploy it in the cloud... Why is that so hard?" The product bet is serverless-style containers and GPUs that feel like local Python: decorate a function, run it at scale, pay for what you use.

Chasing the Wait-a-Minute Moment

On The Peel with Turner Novak he compared Modal's onboarding goal to early Spotify. Trying Spotify for the first time, he recalled, you clicked a track and thought "Wait a minute, this is in the cloud?" Modal aims for the same jolt: "You're running the code. And you're like, 'Wait a minute. This code is running in the cloud?'"

Running Modal with Less Structure

From Spotify he took a culture lesson he still repeats: with smart, autonomous people on a mission, "you need a lot less structure than you think." People should ask each morning what they can do for the business and then do it. He also talks about posturing like a larger company in visual language and product quality even when the team is small, another Spotify habit he brought to Modal.