20VC: Who Wins the Inference Market | Has Open-Source LLM Inference Peaked? | What Happens to the Cost of Compute | The Real Limits of Post-Training and RL with Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO
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:
- Why wait until your mid-30s to start a company?
- Is founding a startup really like "eating glass"?
- How to Raise $1BN with No Pitch Deck
- The danger of raising too much venture capital
- How much cash is Modal burning on GPUs?
- Do early-stage startups actually have moats?
- Who wins the inference market in the next 5 years?
- Are 90% software gross margins dead in AI?
- The "open-air drug market" for GPUs
- Will GPU hardware prices ever collapse?
- Are we about to overbuild data centers?
- Can custom silicon dethrone NVIDIA's monopoly?
- Is CUDA really the moat everyone claims it is?
- Are Neo Cloud providers partners or mortal enemies?
- Nebius vs. CoreWeave: who built the better business?
- Open-source vs. frontier models: which takes the lead?
- Can Europe ever build a competitive frontier model?
- The bull case for a $100B verticalized model company
- Modal's biggest resource allocation mistake
- Has open-source LLM inference already peaked?
- The real limits of post-training and RL
- How much does Modal spend every month on coding agents?
- The massive gold rush in selling data environments to labs
- Should enterprises own their own intelligence?
- Is model routing a defensible standalone business?
- $20M+ compensation packages for exceptional new grads
- The #1 portfolio company Erik would bet on
- What Erik changed his mind on most this year