
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
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