"If you're not tackling hard problems, why are you creating a startup?" @bernhardsson was told to use Kubernetes. Instead he built @modal's file system and container runtime from the ground up, tuned for the speed AI workloads demand. With Modal, containers boot in under a second, and workloads burst from zero to thousands of CPUs or GPUs in a few lines of code. Watch @max_rimpel in conversation with Erik. Chapters 00:00 — Learning to Code on a Mac Plus 04:38 — Building the Engine Behind Spotify’s Discover Weekly 09:17 — The Pandemic Project That Became Modal 10:14 — The 1 to 2 Year Rule for Picking Startup Problems 12:36 — Broke Until Stable Diffusion Hit 15:42 — Architecting a New Cloud for AI 17:41 — Agents Want the Same Things Developers Do