Erik, thank you so much for joining us. I wanted to sort of start this conversation with little Erik in Sweden. I think you taught yourself how to code from a very young age. Think at the time with age? You know, it's probably before most people in the company were born.
What was sort of the moment or sort of the program you built that sort of anchored that passion that's followed you for many decades now?
Yeah, my parents bought a Mac Plus a long time ago. It had 1 MB of RAM, I believe.
Exactly. It had like a floppy, had to have an external hard drive. It was like a very cubic mouse. And it came with a multimedia thing called HyperCard. It was actually sort of like a Visual Basic, but for Mac. And yeah, I realized you can kind of write your own scripts, and I figured out how to, I don't know, control, you know, things jumping around. It's funny because I didn't even know English. I actually learned a lot of English through code. It's kind of funny. But yeah, it was just a little thing I discovered I enjoyed doing. Just trying to build very basic games. It was fun.
I guess that's a good summary of who you ultimately became, you know, learning how to code before you could even speak.
In many ways, like what's surprising, and I know in Sweden and as a European and fellow European, like, you know, people tend to be shy and, like, you know, you can't think you're special, but you've always gravitated towards running at hard problems. You know, you've competed in national championships. You've won IOI gold. You're building a company, which is freaking hard. Where's that drive coming from?
I mean, part of it was like kind of going back to when I was writing code. Like, back then I had no idea that I could make money from it. I just enjoyed it. And it's kind of funny when I think back, like my hobby when I grew up was like writing code. And like my friends' hobbies were like collecting hockey cards or whatever, you know. Guess who makes money now from their hobby? It's kind of funny when you think about it. I'm so grateful for it, like the fact that today I can make money, you know, and enjoy what I'm doing. It's actually incredible. And so a lot of it is just, you know, enjoying what I'm doing. The other part is like I kind of like to challenge myself. So I think that was what drove me to compete in these programming competitions and, you know...
Did you grow up in a competitive household or...
No. Like the weird thing is like my parents were very stoic and they kind of never really pushed me or really cared in any way. But I think actually in a kind of ironic way that sort of led me to challenge myself instead. And like everything I've always done was always like not because I was trying to make my parents proud, but because I wanted to do it. And I think that was something I learned at a pretty young age is I just want to see how far I can go, you know, kind of just, you know, see where the limit is.
If you sort of look at this era's outlier companies, many of them for some reason are started by a disproportionate share of competitive programmers. Like, you and Nachshon are two of those. Any reason why that is? Is it sort of the mindset, the skill, the way you guys think about problems or...
Yeah, it's weird because I don't think it happened much in the past. And but I clearly like the sort of the ambition is there. Like if you're, you know, and to some extent, you know, also the intelligence. Like if you do well in programming competitions, you're clearly like, you know, fairly good at like solving hard problems. It doesn't translate fully. Like I think there's an element of like, you know, also thinking on a very different time horizon that's very different, and which is like why I think a lot of competitive programmers aren't necessarily very successful at starting companies also. There's many, many examples. But what a big shift I think that happened in the last decade maybe is like when I think back at like startups like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, like the founders tended to be more like businessy and they tended to be, you know, like a guy in a suit and then that person would hire a bunch of engineers. Whereas like in the last 10 years, it's like, no, it's like the engineers are on top and like they hired the people in suits. And so I do think there's like a little bit of a shift towards like more technical founders and I think there's also kind of a shift away from like, you know, the sort of traditional VC model where you would hire, you know, a bunch of engineers and then, you know, then bring in a professional CEO. Now it's like the engineer is at the center of the company and like they get to do whatever they want and there's more of an appreciation for technical founders, I think, and I think that's like a big shift, too.
We're finally getting it right, I think in many ways.
I want to fast forward a little bit to I think what's probably your first formative sort of work experience. I think you wrote a master's thesis, which I think did really well. And ultimately, you joined a company that's now known to be Spotify. They were a tiny, tiny team at the time. You were responsible for building the recommender system. Take us to that era a little bit and how that really shaped you to this day.
Yeah, I mean, Spotify when I joined was just a bunch of smart people from my school, a little bit older, so I was kind of looking up to them. It was a bunch of friends from competitive programming. And the only reason I joined Spotify at that time was actually just like they're smart and I kind of wanted to just work with smart people. I actually didn't necessarily love the product. Spotify was weird in that sense because like it clearly had product market fit, but like not business model fit. Which is kind of different than most companies. Like everyone loved the product, but everyone was like, 'This is never going to work. Like you're just going to get sued by the labels.' But anyway, I liked the product, I liked the team, and so I joined the company and I was able to convince them that I should build a music recommendation system, which I had very little experience with. And I think one thing I learned about, you know, what creates successful companies is like Spotify, there's like very beautiful but also kind of messy anarchy, which is like people just running around just like doing whatever they felt like. No one told me who my manager was for the first year or two. Like I didn't even know and I thought it was like normal. Like I didn't realize like you're supposed to have a manager and do one-on-ones and stuff like that.
No, we, I mean, we do have managers. I don't think it was good that I didn't have a manager. But it was like very chaotic. But yeah, but I think what was good, and it's kind of maybe going back to what I said about like having an inner drive, is like people just gave me a computer and they were like, figure out how to add value. And like I spent two years building a music recommendation system and just kind of building it, you know, according to what I felt like would be useful for the company. And it turned out to be quite useful for Spotify, I think. And so that to me was, you know, hire smart people, like the people around me were incredible. They're very good at building systems. And then like kind of give people a lot of freedom. And I think I had that at Spotify.
So you're to thank for Discover Weekly?
Yeah, I mean, that was like many years later in my team. That was one of the crazy ideas. It wasn't my idea, but you know, someone in my team built it. But yeah, it was built on top of the system that I had built, which is fun.
Incredible. Is that also where your obsession came with like this local experience where if you know, if you click play on Spotify, it's in the cloud, but it feels like it's hyper local?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's more like general. Like I think there's like something kind of profound there. Like, you know, with Spotify, like the first experience when you try the product, you download it, you double click a track and it's like just streaming and it's like, is this, this feels like it's local, but it's actually in the cloud. I think more generally it's like, it's like more the experience, you know, creating this like magic moment and doing that very early. And I think that's the best way to sort of promote a product is just get people to try it and just feel the magic. And that is something I took with me to Modal is just, you know, because we've always been obsessed with developer experiences. Like I just want people to just like install the Python library and like just like run some code. Just like get to feel that magic in the first session. And if you get them to feel it, because it's very hard to explain something like Modal. Like I really struggle. My kids have no idea what Modal is. But if you get them to feel that magic and like just feel like, oh, I'm in control. This is very powerful. I think that sets an expectation. It's more than that. Like Spotify also is very good with design. That's something I also carried with me is like, you know, it just sets like a bar. This, you know, for like they have good taste. This is what excellence looks like. In my first experience, if I have in my first session, if I have a good experience, then, you know, that sets an expectation for the rest of the product. From there on in...
You, as one does, went into online mortgages.
I don't know. I mean, I think Spotify grew like crazy and like I was like kind of a nerd and liked to build complex machine learning systems and ended up there was like a lot of like, you know, the company got very big and I wasn't necessarily good at like promoting my ideas and so I was a little bit burnt out and I just wanted to in a way like just do something very, very different. And, you know...
Were you already in New York at the time?
I was in New York. Yeah, I was in New York at the time. So I ended up joining Better. And it was like a fantastic experience in the sense of like I got to build a tech team from like one to 400 and the company grew from 10 to 10,000. The company like sort of collapsed. It was like in that sense it was maybe not the best experience, but you know, kind of came back in the public a few years ago. So it, you know, it was a roller coaster. Very different from Spotify obviously, but I did learn a lot about like building companies, like extreme hyper growth, like raising money, like all these things.
Yeah, super interesting. Did that hyper scale sort of teach you about like the current phase we're going through?
Yeah. Yeah, like, you know, building like a recruiting machine and like, you know, who to hire and when to hire and all these things. These are just things I just had to do like very quickly and, you know, learned a lot from that.
I guess the pandemic then hit, right? You know, we're all stuck at home. You left Better. You were finally back to programming probably after a lot of people management. You take us to that moment and how did that lead to ultimately the formation of Modal?
Yeah, yeah, it was like another burnout moment. I kind of quit my job and, you know, basically took a year off. And this is during the pandemic. I was sitting at home with two kids and, yeah, I just, you know, I'd managed a lot of people. I spent all of my time recruiting. It was kind of nice to just go back and was like build. And so I started building. Like I had a bunch of random ideas that I explored. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I wasn't even like necessarily saying I wanted to start a company. But like I started building stuff just for fun because I just got excited about writing code again. And one of the ideas that I built ended up becoming Modal. And part of what happened was like I started hacking various ideas. And then, you know, what's now Modal, I just, you know, realized like this is actually kind of cool. Like I should maybe start a startup around this. And, you know, now it's Modal.
It's interesting when you came up with the idea, which we'll get into in a bit, but like a lot of people are just like, 'You're insane. You know, just use Kubernetes instead.' You sort of spent many, many years rebuilding a lot of the core infrastructure primitives. Like what ultimately gave you that conviction to do so when maybe a lot of people would have said, you know, do otherwise?
I think a few things. I think honestly the biggest thing is like I kind of feel like if you're building infrastructure, you need to solve the infrastructure problems. And I mean, honestly, like if you're not like tackling hard problems, like why are you creating a startup? Like I think the ultimate startup is like it should take about one to two years to like build something hard. Because if it only takes two months, then like anyone can just copy it. And like what's the, you know, then you don't have a lot of defensibility. If it takes five years to build something, then it's probably, you know, too hard. And like what actually seems like five years is probably actually 25 years. So I think with startups you need to pick something that's like sufficiently hard that you have a little bit of durability or like the defensibility, but not hard enough that it's actually impossible. And so building our own file system and building our own container runtime and all these things, these are problems that are hard, but, you know, they're actually not quite as hard as people think. And I think that's exactly the types of problems that attract me. Like things that you can do, but like other people think are hard. So I think that was part of like what, you know, why we built these things. Like they're very doable but still hard.
Yeah. Good problem founder fit. Talk about co-founder, another contrarian sort of decision you made at the time is, you know, you and Akshat had only spoken a handful of times, maybe more, but you guys hadn't really extensively worked together. And, you know, Akshat ultimately quit Scale, moved across the country, joined you. Like what gave you the conviction that, you know, I guess choosing your co-founder is one of the most important decisions you can ever make, that, you know, Akshat was the guy?
I mean, I think in hindsight it was like bad process, good outcome. Like I don't think you should ever like pick a co-founder or like, you know, find someone who you just met and like... I think you should probably deeply know them, like I didn't. It was an introduction from Zach Frankel, who's a friend of mine and an investor. And I don't know. I mean, if you meet Akshat, he's just like one of these like incredibly smart people, probably the smartest person I've ever met. And so like that did stand out. Like it was very clear. I still, you know, still at the end of the day it was kind of a leap of faith, but, you know, it worked out.
Yeah. We maybe fast forwarding a little bit, I think oftentimes people look at a company and they think it's just a straight line up. You know, in 2022, the market just turned, right? We were sort of in the weeds building our stuff, not too much market pull yet. What sort of gave you the conviction to keep on going and that eventually we'll see, you know, promise and pull?
