Erik Bernhardsson
CEO at Modal
New York, New York
Overview
Work Experience
Chief Executive Officer
2021 - Current
I'm working on a set of amazing tools and infra for data teams. The team is currently 35 incredibly smart people mostly based in NYC but with some in Stockholm and SF too.
Modal develops machine learning software to help run code in the cloud.
Raised $23,000,000.00 from Neha Narkhede, Definition, Essence Fund, Elad Gil, Creandum, Lux Capital, Lindsay M. Pettingill, Christopher Ré, Allison Pickens and Quiet Capital.
Chief Technology Officer
2015 - 2021
I ran the technology team. Some things I did: - Grew the tech team from 1 to 300 - Interviewed 2,000+ candidates - Promoted a number of engineers to managers and directors - Set up a career ladder, salary review system, onboarding checklist, and a ton of other similar things - Was a part of raising money, presenting to investors and board members - Ran the product team for a while and hired 10 product managers - Contributed a significant amount to the technology, especially on the data/ML side. Better was a roller coaster with lots of ups and downs. Recent interest rate hikes have been rough for Better, but they went public in August 2023, and I'm long-term bullish.
Better.com is a homeownership journey platform that utilizes technology to change the way people buy and own a home.
Raised $1,470,000,000.00 from SoftBank.
Engineering Manager
2011 - 2015
Built up the Discovery team at Spotify. I built a music recommender system from scratch using large scale machine learning algorithms and then built up a team of about 20 people to help me launch a number of features leveraging it, including data engineering, machine learning, backend, and frontend (iOS/JS). I ended up releasing a couple of open source projects at Spotify, including Luigi, a workflow management tool (used by Bitly, Foursquare, Capital One, etc), as well as Annoy, a library for high dimensional nearest neighbor search used by many companies (Instacart etc).
Associate, High Frequency Trading
2011 - 2011
Wrote mainly C++ for high frequency trading.
Graham Capital Management is designing to produce attractive absolute and risk-adjusted returns while maintaining low correlation.
Engineering Manager
2009 - 2011
Inofficially: I skunkworked on the music recommendation system (a continuation of my internship) My day job: I proposed and built up the Analytics team in the Stockholm office, responsible for collecting, aggregating and making sense out of all the data at Spotify. Everything from ad-hoc insights to A/B testing, visualization, ad optimization, etc. Also made a bunch of slides for investors!
Software Engineer Intern
2008 - 2008
During 2008 I wrote my master's thesis on systems for doing automatic music recommendation, later awarded master's thesis of the year (by Naturvetarna - a Swedish trade union).
Intern Developer
2007 - 2007
Working on parallelizing pricing of financial instruments.
D. E. Shaw & Co. is a global investment and technology development firm.
Intern Software Engineer
2006 - 2007
Writing embedded code for Google's hardware infrastructure.
Google is a multinational corporation that specializes in Internet-related services and organizes the world’s information.
Raised $26,100,000.00 from Angel Investors LP, Kleiner Perkins, Signatures Capital, Sequoia Capital, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Shaquille O'Neal, Henry Kissinger, Google and Tiger Woods.
Developer
2005 - 2006
Working on data collection from network equipment.
Education
M. Sc.
2003 - 2008
Secondary School
2000 - 2003