June 5, 2026 · 3,487
Joining Modal
Why I joined Modal.
Three years ago, I signed up for Modal. Today, I'm joining the team that builds it —1 as its first Member of Product Staff.
My journey to Modal started in 2023. Like any other Tuesday as a seed-stage founder: a demo due Wednesday, a prospect I'd made overpromises to, and me on the path to underdelivering.
What I'd promised worked on my machine, days ago, but only on my machine. I'd spent the early morning the way I'd spent the (late) night before: wrangling ECS2 from WeWork at 222 Broadway.
As data scientists cosplaying as backend engineers larping as infra people, ECS made a promise we wanted to believe: while our users slept, we'd pay nothing; when they all showed up at once (the good kind of problem), it would scale up to meet them, batteries included.
It turns out the batteries were sold separately. For the uninitiated, imagine having a heated argument over Zoom on a 30-minute lag: each attempted fix bought me half an hour to reflect on my life choices and reword the email pushing our meeting to next week.
We wanted to move fast and break nothing. Instead, nothing moved and everything broke. So six deploys and nearly as many hours later, I bat-signaled a good friend for help.
His advice? Check out Modal. Unbeknownst to me, they were down the hall.
Beta heads up
Erik replied in two minutes. By that evening (most of it spent reading docs3), I was live. I'd spent all day rewording an email to buy myself a week; I deleted it. Modal let me move fast and break nothing.
A few weeks later I left my startup and joined my kindred spirits at Prefect4. Building integrations there finally put me across the table from Erik, the neighbor who'd been down the hall all along.
When Erik and I first sat down to talk integrations, he mentioned he and Akshat were experimenting with sandboxes for running untrusted LLM code. June. 2023.
I filed it under "faster k8s," the ECS2 that was promised, and moved on. That was the miss. I'd already lived the answer and didn't recognize it. Modal hadn't saved me from containers. It had saved me from friction, and friction compounds. First you fight to get the thing running at all. Then you fight to fix it. Only then, if there's any will left, do you reach the part worth doing: trying the next idea, and the one after that. I'd burned six deploys on the first stage and never made it to the last. I was rewording an email instead. Erik had been chasing this since Spotify. They took speed seriously because friction is where the joy of building quietly goes to die.
What I missed is that the sandbox was that same idea aimed at a world that barely existed yet: one where the thing iterating isn't a person. Friction that just annoys a human gets multiplied a hundred-, a thousand-, a million-fold for an agent: code that writes and runs and breaks things, training loops spinning up that many environments only to learn whether the tests passed. The thing that turned my three-day slog into three hours, now the floor the whole thing stands on.
Now I get to help build that — so everyone, and everything, can focus on building.