About Me

My name is Alexander Azzam; I go by Adam. I live in Brooklyn. I'm the first Member of Product Staff at Modal, infrastructure built for AI applications — training, inference, agents, and simulation — spinning up in seconds and scaling from zero to thousands and back (here's why I joined). I spend a lot of my time working in Python and open source, and probably too much of it obsessing over developer experience.

With Samuel Colvin, I co-created and organize PyAI, which is like PyCon but for people who like AI, and I host the FastMCP Podcast.

Before Modal, I was VP Product at Prefect, where we built automation software: Prefect for workflows you write and FastMCP for workflows agents write. I also built Marvin, which went on to inspire Instructor.

Before Prefect, I co-founded and was CTO at OpenRole, where I did a little bit of everything — sales, fundraising, product, and engineering. We ETL'd Common Crawl to discover every applicant tracking system on the internet, used LLMs to normalize millions of job descriptions, and built an explainable recsys with an agent layer that told you why a role was a good fit. Tens of thousands of happy users accepting over 90% of our recommendations, hundreds of thousands in revenue.

Before OpenRole, I was Director of Product at Insight Data Science (YC 2011). Insight was basically "Y-Combinator for Data Science," a postdoctoral fellowship for STEM PhDs transitioning into the field. My focus was largely on using data to improve admissions, introductions to recruiters, and job seeker outcomes. Along the way, I did a few hundred interviews, personally mentored hundreds of postdocs, and was a surrogate data PM to a few dozen YC startups.

Before all of that I was a mathematician. I earned my PhD at UCLA studying nonlinear dispersive PDEs under Rowan Killip and Monica Visan (see my math genealogy), specifically the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. I thought a lot about modeling the long-term behavior of waves that interact with themselves via their medium, like laser light in a fiber-optic cable, or a Bose-Einstein condensate. I got my BS in Mathematics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where I studied Math, Economics, and Political Science and coached the Lincoln-Douglas debate team.

Selected talks

What else?

  • Born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I spent my childhood save a year in Settat, Morocco and a year in Uppsala, Sweden
  • My Erdős number is 3
  • I have aphantasia: no visual imagination or memory, no auditory imagination or memory, no imagined taste, etc.
  • I'm a sucker for mechanism design, two-sided matching markets, and survival analysis
  • I play competitive Magic: The Gathering; I got my start in data science in 2014 to do price modeling of the secondary market
  • I eat Starbursts with the wrappers on
  • You can probably understand my French, I can probably understand your Swedish, and neither of us can understand my Arabic
  • My mother's father's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's father's mother's father's mother's father's mother's father's father's mother's father was Gustav I, the first King of Sweden — go back a few more centuries and you get to Erik the Holy, the patron saint of Sweden (see my Swedish lineage)