Erik Bernhardsson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modal, the AI infrastructure platform for training models, running inference and powering AI agents. Modal has raised over $1.2 billion, including a recent $750 million Series D led by Accel at a $15.75BN valuation. The company has surpassed $1BN in ARR, growing more than 15x year-on-year. Previously, Erik built Spotify's original music recommendation system.
AGENDA:
05:30 - Why wait until your mid-30s to start a company?
06:40 - Is founding a startup really like "eating glass"?
08:00 - How to Raise $1BN with No Pitch Deck
08:45 - The danger of raising too much venture capital
09:40 - How much cash is Modal burning on GPUs?
10:30 - Do early-stage startups actually have moats?
13:30 - Who wins the inference market in the next 5 years?
15:30 - Are 90% software gross margins dead in AI?
17:45 - The "open-air drug market" for GPUs
21:30 - Will GPU hardware prices ever collapse?
22:15 - Are we about to overbuild data centers?
23:45 - Can custom silicon dethrone NVIDIA's monopoly?
24:30 - Is CUDA really the moat everyone claims it is?
25:20 - Are Neo Cloud providers partners or mortal enemies?
26:35 - Nebius vs. CoreWeave: who built the better business?
27:25 - Open-source vs. frontier models: which takes the lead?
28:20 - Can Europe ever build a competitive frontier model?
30:20 - The bull case for a $100B verticalized model company
37:15 - Modal's biggest resource allocation mistake
38:00 - Has open-source LLM inference already peaked?
41:30 - The real limits of post-training and RL
44:20 - How much does Modal spend every month on coding agents?
45:50 - The massive gold rush in selling data environments to labs
47:20 - Should enterprises own their own intelligence?
49:50 - Is model routing a defensible standalone business?
53:20 - $20M+ compensation packages for exceptional new grads
54:20 - The #1 portfolio company Erik would bet on
55:10 - What Erik changed his mind on most this year