The Story of Moderne: Building the Future of Software Evolution

Sometimes the biggest innovations come from experiencing a problem firsthand. For Jonathan Schneider, that moment came during his time at Netflix, where the company’s famous “freedom and responsibility” culture created an unexpected challenge in developer tooling.

“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,” Jonathan explained in a recent Category Visionaries episode. The problem? Getting developers to update their codebases and address vulnerabilities. Traditional approaches fell flat: “People would just say, nah, you know, I’m not going to do it. Do it for me.”

This frustration didn’t fade when Jonathan moved to VMware. Instead, it amplified as he encountered enterprise customers facing the same challenges: “I’m getting stuck on old things, I’m spending a lot of time migrating things.” The recurring theme was clear – there needed to be a better way to handle large-scale code transformations.

In 2020, Jonathan took the technology he’d developed at Netflix off the shelf and founded Moderne. But the timing presented its own challenges. The market was obsessed with product-led growth, making enterprise sales pitches an uphill battle. “Back in 2020, that was not popular. 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,” he recalls.

Rather than conform to market expectations, Moderne carved out its own path, combining open source community building with enterprise sales. The first year was spent building trust – when you’re asking companies to hand over their source code, technical credibility is paramount. “This is an enterprise product. When we’re dealing with source code, we’re asking basically a customer to give us either in whole or in part their intellectual property,” Jonathan notes.

The company’s first customer breakthrough came through a VMware reference, but with an unexpected twist. Jonathan remembers, “When we met them, they had a deck internally of the product that they wanted… they pitched us their deck instead. And it just kind of matched our vision.” The meeting had its humorous moments – the potential customer had forgotten to replace another founder’s name in their deck. But the alignment was clear.

As Moderne has grown, its messaging has evolved from technical features to business outcomes. Instead of focusing on developer productivity, they now emphasize “tech stack liquidity” – helping companies move off legacy systems and consolidate vendors. This shift reflects a deeper understanding of enterprise priorities and buying decisions.

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.”

This vision – of making software more adaptable and maintainable at scale – drives Moderne’s mission. In a world where technical debt and legacy systems increasingly burden innovation, Moderne is building the tools to help companies evolve their software infrastructure more efficiently and securely.