The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:17:55 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:17:55] S1: Earlier, you said about building capacity with GPUs. Yep. What's it like doing that today? Is it as crazy as reports suggest? So it is pretty crazy. [00:18:04] S0: I spent some time in March at GTC NVIDIA's big conference in San Jose. I would describe that as like an open air drug market, but GPUs instead of drugs. You're running around, you know, talking to 500 different cloud vendors. You're like, do you have GPUs? Like, please get... And And like, know, in the end, you come out, like you do a lot of deals, and that's something we've had to develop the muscle. I think part of the value prop of Modal is like, our customers don't have to think about that. We do the dirty work of doing all the GPU deals under the hood. We work with 25 different NeoClouds. Or, you know, right now we control like, you know, 0.1% or whatever, I don't even know the number, of like the world's compute. But like, my like crazy, like, you know, how I think about the long term goal is like, as we control more and more of the world's compute, you and aggregate demand on the other side, and manage that capacity and demand extremely efficiently. So that to me is like something we actually think we can do, we can fill a big gap. [00:18:55] S1: What does that allow you to do, being that aggregation layer?
00:18:58 · Erik Bernhardsson
[00:18:58] S0: Well, so we built a lot of our infrastructure ourselves. We don't use Kubernetes and Docker and things like that. We built our own file system, we built our own container runtime, we built our own scheduler, we built our own, basically how we manage the capacity. And that enables us to basically treat like all of the world's compute as one big pool of capacity. And so if you think about the fact that there's... We already have many thousand paying customers, and over time it just grows and grows. Each of those customers have like very sort of variable requirements, like their workloads kind of vary over the day, and they have maybe bursts, and each individually, they're like very sort of unpredictable. But if you pull all of those customers together, you end up with a very sort of smooth overall demand. And that is something we can manage extremely efficiently. And so one of the valid props of Modal besides, like, we we can scale up with you is also, you don't even have to do capacity planning. Just come to us, we'll give you 100 GPUs. I think it's so amazing going back to TypeSay, for instance, like they, we had talked to them, I think a long time ago before they launched, but they launched overnight on Modal and we weren't even aware of it to just like scale up. And we gave them a ton of GPUs and it just happened automatically. So that magic, I think, is something that is people really value with Modal is like we can give them a lot of GPUs on very short notice. And we can handle that sort of variable. Like if you go to us, you don't have to lock up, you know, like a rectangular block of GPUs over three years, you and have to know the exact number. It's pay as you go. You scale up and down. You pay per GPU second.
00:20:19 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:20:19] S1: How do you do GPU buying in terms of forecasting then? Because you don't wanna have an insane excess of supply just sitting on your books. [00:20:27] S0: Totally. The GPU lead times right now is about three to four months. So we basically do a straight line or exponential line extrapolation, and we look at an aggregate across all our customers. We have a very diversified set of customers. You can actually look at the demand in aggregate pretty well and predict based on monthly growth rates, which have been about 30, 40% month to month for the last twelve months. And you just project that, you know, three to four months into the future, you end up with like two to 3x. You go out and, you know, buy that capacity and make sure to ramp up, and sometimes [00:20:54] S1: But can you just buy that capacity? [00:20:55] S0: You can. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a little bit of, like, a misconception that, we're out of capacity. I mean, NVIDIA is, like, shipping, like, an insane amount of GPUs, like, every month. I don't know how many 100,000 black holes are getting installed. Prices are up for sure. You have to pay more to get the same amount of GPUs. And I don't wanna say it's like an efficient market, but if you're willing to pay more than other people, you can get a lot of GPUs. [00:21:15] S1: Is there a price at which it doesn't make sense for you? Of course there is, but at what point
00:21:15 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:21:15] S1: Is there a price at which it doesn't make sense for you? Of course there is, but at what point [00:21:20] S0: I don't think so. I think, in fact, like, we're actually more long than we're short GPUs because we we can charge a higher price to our customers. Like, there's effectively a market price, and it's, like, different dynamics because we lock up longer term reservations and and rent them out on a slightly shorter duration. But, you know, if if the underlying price goes up, people are also willing to pay more. [00:21:36] S1: What happens to the price over time? H100s were meant to depreciate and Yeah, go I [00:21:41] S0: have no idea. Actually, it's funny. Well, dude, if [00:21:45] S1: you have no idea, what am I meant to have? [00:21:48] S0: Did you see Jensen yesterday? He was in London, actually. Asked him this question. He's like, well, obviously, like, supply is gonna catch up with demand eventually, and then we'll see what happens with pricing. It might happen in a year. It might happen within five years. He said exactly the same thing I always tell people. Like, gravity. Hardware prices always go down in the very long run. Right now, we're in a very... You know, there... There's a supply shortage, and, you know, that means that the prices have gone up. They may continue to go up for another year, two years, five years. I don't know. But eventually, they will come down.
00:21:48 · Erik Bernhardsson, Harry Stebbings
[00:21:48] S0: Did you see Jensen yesterday? He was in London, actually. Asked him this question. He's like, well, obviously, like, supply is gonna catch up with demand eventually, and then we'll see what happens with pricing. It might happen in a year. It might happen within five years. He said exactly the same thing I always tell people. Like, gravity. Hardware prices always go down in the very long run. Right now, we're in a very... You know, there... There's a supply shortage, and, you know, that means that the prices have gone up. They may continue to go up for another year, two years, five years. I don't know. But eventually, they will come down. [00:22:15] S1: How early are we? Because I, you know, I run Instinct for everything. I have over a 100 automations on Instinct doing things that are just absolutely wild, from buying concert tickets to planning shows to helping with medication for my mother. The amount of compute I am using is Jevons paradox times a 100. Yeah. If that is equivalent for actually many people in society Yeah. Because it's accessible within WhatsApp and what... How early are we there?
00:22:15 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:22:15] S1: How early are we? Because I, you know, I run Instinct for everything. I have over a 100 automations on Instinct doing things that are just absolutely wild, from buying concert tickets to planning shows to helping with medication for my mother. The amount of compute I am using is Jevons paradox times a 100. Yeah. If that is equivalent for actually many people in society Yeah. Because it's accessible within WhatsApp and what... How early are we there? [00:22:41] S0: I think we're very early. It's... I think you're saying the same thing. I mean, yeah, Jevons power, whatever. Like, I think there's just so much latent demand for these things. And, you know, I I think, you know, eventually we're gonna start to run up against these capital constraints. Right? Like, there's rates that are going up. Like, we just can't build data centers fast enough. Maybe that's good. I don't Like I think in a way, like, you know, it's a guarantee against like overbuild, which... But I also don't know if we can overbuild these things. There's just so much demand for it. [00:23:06] S1: I don't think you can overbuild in the next five years. Probably not.