Who needs VCs when you have friends like these? episode artwork

EPISODE · Apr 14, 2026 · 33 MIN

Who needs VCs when you have friends like these?

from The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan welcomes RunPod co-founder and CEO Zhen Lu to discuss circumventing VC money by going straight to your community for funding, how Zhen balances founder intuition with user feedback when the community is the one backing the project, and RunPod’s journey from basement servers to global infrastructure partnerships with a software-layer approach and data-first paradigm. Episode notes: RunPod is an end-to-end AI cloud that provides developers with GPUs so they can build and run custom AI systems that scale.Connect with Zhen on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected]. Today’s shoutout goes to Famous Question badge winner cigol on, who won the badge for getting 10,000+ views on their question Using JavaScript, is it possible to capture the body payload from an outgoing fetch request?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes RunPod co-founder and CEO Zhen Lu to discuss circumventing VC money by going straight to your community for funding, how Zhen balances founder intuition with user feedback when the community is the one backing the project, and RunPod’s journey from basement servers to global infrastructure partnerships with a software-layer approach and data-first paradigm. Episode notes: RunPod is an end-to-end AI cloud that provides developers with GPUs so they can build and run custom AI systems that scale.Connect with Zhen on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected]. Today’s shoutout goes to Famous Question badge winner cigol on, who won the badge for getting 10,000+ views on their question Using JavaScript, is it possible to capture the body payload from an outgoing fetch request?.TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Who needs VCs when you have friends like these?

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This episode was published on April 14, 2026.

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Ryan welcomes RunPod co-founder and CEO Zhen Lu to discuss circumventing VC money by going straight to your community for funding, how Zhen balances founder intuition with user feedback when the community is the one backing the project, and RunPod’s...

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