still slingin' gpus around, mostly tweeting about data infra + sports. founding gtm @modal prev @confluentinc, @singlestoredb, @stanford
California
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Alec Powell retweeted
There's two reasons why Phonic has stuck with @modal the entire time:
a) Their platform is just good. Why? They sweat the details on things like sticky routing: modal.com/blog/serverless-ro…
b) They care. When we had issues, @dshaar_ stayed up until 2 in the morning to understand why.
Congrats to @phonic_co on the model launch. The demo is super compelling and sadly relatable given my recent struggle with hotel bookings lol.
One of my earlier (and fonder) @modal memories was staying up late on the phone with @moinnadeem to solve some infra problems together (more on that in thread). Great to see the products growing together too!
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Alec Powell retweeted
Work hard in silence. Let success be your noise. 🏆
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Alec Powell retweeted
Finding it very educational and interesting to learn about the hardware layer of GPUs: how they are structured, the obvious advantages and disadvantages bs CPUs.
This is from Modal’s excellent “GPU Glossary” print book @can gave me (the PDF is free here: modal.com/gpu-glossary)
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Alec Powell retweeted
“Modal is not a place. Never was. This could be Modal. Modal is where our people stand.” - @akshat_b probably
The one thing Modal’s growth can’t quantify is the people. Cheers to the tightest community I’ve ever had, close friends, and my favorite mentor @_gongy
Ft. @teenychairs, me, @akshat_b, @peywalt
My Modal journey started in SF 4.5 years ago as an intern. Since then I've learnt so much from my mentor @akshat_b and our two desks in a shared WeWork have become hundreds in a new SF office.
What compels me about Modal's growth is not the number but the mindset. You can hire to grow 2x per year, but any more and you damage culture.
How do you scale growth past 2x? Grow the people.
This is most important thing Modal has done -- it's figure out how to find people with high potential, and grow them 4-5x per year. It creates a happy culture, and the company grows way faster than you can hire.
Come to mentor, and come to grow. modal.jobs
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Alec Powell retweeted
6 months ago @charles_irl called me and said "things are working, we've got a clear path to 10x growth". Prescient.
Today, @charles_irl would tell you the same thing.
I see a clear 10x ahead of us. Then a hard but possible 100x. And we're hiring modal.com/jobs.
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My Modal journey started in SF 4.5 years ago as an intern. Since then I've learnt so much from my mentor @akshat_b and our two desks in a shared WeWork have become hundreds in a new SF office.
What compels me about Modal's growth is not the number but the mindset. You can hire to grow 2x per year, but any more and you damage culture.
How do you scale growth past 2x? Grow the people.
This is most important thing Modal has done -- it's figure out how to find people with high potential, and grow them 4-5x per year. It creates a happy culture, and the company grows way faster than you can hire.
Come to mentor, and come to grow. modal.jobs
Today we're announcing that Modal has crossed $1B in annualized run rate, as well as raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by @Accel.
Since our Series C, usage has tripled and we’ve grown more than 15x year-over-year.
We are deeply grateful to the developers and companies building on Modal. There's still so much more to build, and we can't think of a better time to be building software.
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Alec Powell retweeted
exactly! we're more of an "inference provider provider"
Amazing progress and thrilled to be more than doubling down in this round! @modal often gets confused as “just an inference provider.” The reality, as @bernhardsson covers, is they reinvented the infra stack for AI workloads.
Love this… “So many incredible applications exist now that couldn’t have been built before. The old stack doesn’t quite fit them”
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Alec Powell retweeted
Modal is a case study in delayed gratification and building hard things.
Building hard things takes time. There is no $Xm in 6 months. That is by design.
But once you do it, you reap the benefits. I believe some call this a "moat".
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Alec Powell retweeted
Right product, team, market, and time.
Today we're announcing that Modal has crossed $1B in annualized run rate, as well as raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by @Accel.
Since our Series C, usage has tripled and we’ve grown more than 15x year-over-year.
We are deeply grateful to the developers and companies building on Modal. There's still so much more to build, and we can't think of a better time to be building software.
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Alec Powell retweeted
In early 2022, the first “real” @modal user was using us for processing large scale weather data. We were anxious about going up to them and asking them to pay ~$500 for continuing to run these jobs. (We thought it was a lot!)
Obviously the numbers are much bigger now.
But we’ve also built so much more since then, and our velocity and ambition are growing even faster. This year, we figured out how to scale to millions of concurrent sandboxes, launch RDMA clusters securely and elastically for distributed training, train state of the art speculators for inference, build a whole new sandbox runtime, and more. So many great rabbit holes, and we’re going deeper down all of them.
If this sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring! modal.jobs
Today we're announcing that Modal has crossed $1B in annualized run rate, as well as raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by @Accel.
Since our Series C, usage has tripled and we’ve grown more than 15x year-over-year.
We are deeply grateful to the developers and companies building on Modal. There's still so much more to build, and we can't think of a better time to be building software.
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Alec Powell retweeted
we have a lot of work to do.
Today we're announcing that Modal has crossed $1B in annualized run rate, as well as raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by @Accel.
Since our Series C, usage has tripled and we’ve grown more than 15x year-over-year.
We are deeply grateful to the developers and companies building on Modal. There's still so much more to build, and we can't think of a better time to be building software.
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Everybody buying compute for RL needs to stop immediately and think about this result.
Big homogenous clusters are a sledgehammer for what is essentially an inference-shaped nail.
Fantastic work from @nanjiangwill.
Training large models with RL typically runs on a fixed homogeneous cluster of the latest accelerators for numerical stability and faster throughput. This throws away inference optimization work done for other vendors and generations, limits the capacity you can utilize, and is unnecessarily expensive.
So we trained a model on agentic coding tasks using fully asynchronous RL and mixed-precision, mixed-accelerator samplers. With off-policy correction, training stayed stable through convergence, on par with homogeneous samplers, at a lower cost.
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i cannot believe teslas are so popular when it’s so horrible to sit in the backseat and feel every bump on every road ever
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regret posting this tweet bc I must have manifested a mechanical issue which caused a diversion in the middle of our redeye, bad karma
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Alec Powell retweeted
Even in moments of stress, it’s so wonderful to work with the @modal team. They respond quickly, do what they say they’re going to do, and it feels like you’re talking to a real engineer rather than a support person.
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Alec Powell retweeted
All 1.02M boxes http hello’d to the viz server for counting. We filled the cube at 10k/s and it looked too easy, but offstage the dashboard was huffing and puffing.
lol @bernhardsson on stage at @modal runtime just kicked of a live script that launched a million sandboxes as he speaks.
Flex.
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Alec Powell retweeted
live from @modal runtime 🎥💥
incredible to see the community modal has built over last 5 years, just getting started
Kudos esp @teenychairs on insane product taste & conf design
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I don’t hate it
It's like Coachella but with better programming.
Sign up now at modal.com/runtime.
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