Sentry Startup Spotlight with Ben Vinegar Founder of Modem
Every voice is named by two or more agreeing sources.
“i’m not really good at working on things that i don’t believe in”
Ben believes he works best on projects he truly believes in.
“the capabilities of llms are not quite as good but now that we have these sort of you know llms are really good at summarization and tool calling”
Ben notes that modern LLMs excel at summarization and tool‑calling, enabling new product features.
“you just could complete autonomy and authority to do whatever you want however stupid it may sound”
Ben advises having full autonomy and authority when founding a startup, even if ideas seem silly.
“give or take six to eight people you know we've got like maybe six full‑time contractor”
Modem currently has a very small team of roughly six to eight people.
“there was a whole conversation about malware that was taking place on discord that was not appearing no idea no one had no idea and modem alerted them to the fact that conversation was happening”
Modem discovered a hidden Discord discussion about malware and alerted the company.
“it alerted them via email within like five minutes right versus coming to it maybe in the afternoon”
Modem can send alerts within five minutes, far faster than manual detection.
“by large i mean let's say probably like 100 plus people is enough”
Modem targets companies with roughly 100 or more employees.
“because I'm like more in the tasteful software camp.”
Ben prefers a selective, quality‑focused approach to software development.
“We see a future where companies are really going to have like vertical off the shelf agents in a workplace serving different roles.”
Ben predicts companies will deploy specialized, off‑the‑shelf agents for various workplace roles.
“It's a terminal diff tool, so it's a little strange. But the cool thing about it is that it's basically you can use like your mouse, like you can use it like a desktop GUI, but it's actually on the terminal, which means that it's like very portable.”
Ben recommends the Hunk terminal diff tool for its mouse‑enabled, portable GUI experience inside a terminal.
“And so that's why we built these hooks and UI to help the agent not just write code for you, but to communicate what the hell it did to you and to help you understand.”
Ben describes building hooks and UI so agents can explain their actions to users.