Who needs VCs when you have friends like these?

Who needs VCs when you have friends like these?

From The Stack Overflow Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast

April 14, 2026 · 33 min · Episode 936

About this episode

Ryan discusses with Zhen Lu how to circumvent VC funding by leveraging community support for projects.

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 zhenlu@runpod.io .  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 .

People in this episode

Host: Ryan

Guest: Zhen Lu

Topics covered

  • VC funding
  • community support
  • AI cloud
  • founder intuition
  • user feedback
  • infrastructure partnerships

Keywords

  • VC funding
  • community funding
  • AI cloud
  • RunPod
  • founder intuition
  • user feedback
  • infrastructure

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: RunPod, Stack Overflow

More episodes of The Stack Overflow Podcast

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Stack Overflow Podcast podcast page.