Meow

This founder decided to compete with incumbents worth a combined $10 trillion and build an AI-native cloud provider from scratch: "When I was doing machine learning at Spotify, 90% of the work was just building the infrastructure, not the application. And traditional infrastructure is not built for fast feedback loops. When you're building with AI, it's really annoying to test locally and then deploy into production. You can split it into two environments, but then you run into the problem of switching between them. This wasn't a problem pre-AI. But now, you have GPU's and very large models that take a long time to load. So this initiation step takes a very long time. We built Modal to enable fast feedback loops. I can hit enter, and run immediately in the cloud. This also lends well to running AI apps in the cloud. Because no traditional cloud provider has capacity to handle dynamic GPU scaling needed for running inference. We ultimately ended up creating an entirely new cloud provider, native to AI." Check out my full conversation with Erik Bernhardsson below, going behind the scenes of the great GPU shortage, how Modal solved AI's inference problem, and lessons on hiring and culture from joining Spotify as the 40th employee. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ehqbPw7s Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eBKnyXki Apple: https://lnkd.in/enxEBZCV

🎧🍌 New podcast out today with Erik Bernhardsson, Co-founder and CEO of Modal We talk about building what is essentially a new cloud provider, created from the ground up, optimized for AI. We also talk about what actually happened with the great GPU shortage, how Modal fixes the inference problem in AI, and why he thinks AI will lead to 10x more developers. He also shares lessons on culture from joining Spotify as the 40th employee, treating hiring like a prediction problem, what most people get wrong working with early customers, why more people should start companies in their 30’s and 40’s, and reflections on fundraising in a hot market. Shoutout to Timothy Chen at Essence Venture Capital and Erik’s Co-founder Akshat Bubna for their help brainstorming topics for this conversation! And thank you to Meow and Hanover Park for supporting this episode. Links to stream YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ehqbPw7s Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eBKnyXki Apple: https://lnkd.in/enxEBZCV Quick preview here, link to subscribe to my newsletter in the comments to get new episodes in your inbox every week.

Obsessive U.S. CPAs. Quality bookkeeping. Your own 24/7/365 Slack channel. See if you qualify for Meow.

Our WeWork neighbor tells us what it’s like to share a wall with Meow. Also our office looks like "a CVS without security guards" apparently.

Left: 0 customers, 0 assets on the platform, burning Right: Thousands of customers, billions on the platform, profitable To the next 4 years!