From Spotify intern to CEO of a $15.75B company: the Modal founder story
graceisford · x · 2026-10-15
Erik Bernhardsson joined Spotify in 2008 while writing his master's thesis on music recommendation, rose to engineering manager, built the Discovery team behind its early recommender, and created Luigi, the open-source Python framework powering Spotify's recommendations. His 2013 meetup slide "Plumbing sucks" became Modal 13 years later: cloud building blocks for running AI/ML, now valued at $15.75B.
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