From Violin Performance to Enterprise Software: How Moderne's Jonathan Schneider Built a Different Kind of Developer Tool

When a mathematics professor dropped a spiral-bound book on Jonathan Schneider's desk in college, he didn't realize it would shape his entire approach to building enterprise software. The book, as Jonathan recalls, was "a lie" – an elaborate setup to teach students that even the most basic assumptions can crumble.

This early lesson in questioning assumptions would later influence Jonathan's unconventional approach to building Moderne, an enterprise software company that's challenging traditional notions of developer tooling and go-to-market strategy.

In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Jonathan shared how Moderne emerged from his experiences at Netflix, where he encountered a fundamental problem with developer tools. "Back at Netflix, I had worked on engineering tools. They had that freedom and responsibility culture, so you couldn't impose any constraints of what product engineers did," he explains. The challenge? Getting developers to update their codebases and address vulnerabilities. Traditional reporting approaches fell flat: "People would just say, nah, you know, I'm not going to do it. Do it for me."

This pain point wasn't unique to Netflix. During his subsequent role at VMware, Jonathan kept hearing the same frustrations: "I'm getting stuck on old things, I'm spending a lot of time migrating things." This recurring theme led to Moderne's founding in 2020.

But the company's path wasn't straightforward, particularly when it came to positioning their go-to-market strategy. In 2020, enterprise sales was decidedly out of fashion. "Firms wanted to hear, bottoms up, plg. Bottoms up, plg. Bottoms up, plg. All day long and if you said enterprise sale, it really had a chilling effect," Jonathan recalls.

Rather than following the crowd, Moderne carved out a hybrid approach: leveraging open source for user adoption while maintaining enterprise sales for buyer relationships. "We have an open source product that we're PLG in the open source sense that the open source community helps us reach users, but then the enterprise sale is what we need to use to help us reach buyers."

This commitment to their strategy was tested early. Jonathan remembers receiving contradictory feedback during fundraising: "I had 230 minutes rejection calls... the first one I'm listening, and I don't remember even what the criticism was, but it was, you look like a square and you should look like a circle... And in the next call, it was like, you look like a circle, you should look like a square."

Moderne's distinctive approach extends to their marketing and branding. Before even securing their pre-seed funding, Jonathan invested $60,000 in developing a comprehensive brand system, paying the first half from his personal savings. The investment reflects his long-term vision: "If you're thinking from the beginning, you want this to be a lasting brand... establishing that identity early is really important because it takes a while for you to fit."

The company's messaging has evolved to focus directly on business outcomes. Jonathan explains, "When you think about mass refactoring, you could think, oh, this is a developer productivity story... but developer productivity is a bit indirect to the business outcome we're trying to achieve. So now we talk about something like tech stack liquidity, the ability to get off of old systems, to consolidate vendors."

Looking ahead, Jonathan envisions Moderne transforming how software evolves at scale: "I think about our society being built on this substrate of third party and open source software largely, and it's easy for that to get really kind of static and ossified over time. If we can mass fix the open source ecosystem upon which we rely, and we can mass fix the applications that depend on them, I think we can solve the technical engineering problems that confront our society more quickly."