Stephen Balaban

Stephen Balaban is co-founder and CTO of Lambda, an AI cloud company founded in 2012. He ran it as CEO for fourteen years before handing over the title, according to New Economies.

Running Lambda from a Chinatown Apartment

Lambda's early years were run out of a small apartment with his brother and co-founder, Michael. Since 2012 the company has gone through about half a dozen pivots: facial recognition software, a data-collection hardware product called Lambda Hat, an AI consulting idea no investor would fund, and Dreamscope, an app that became the largest generator of Deep Dream images on the internet.

Turning a $40,000 AWS Bill into a Business

At the peak of the Deep Dream craze, Lambda was paying $40,000 a month to AWS. Balaban has called that bill the best thing that happened to the company in its early days, because it pointed Lambda toward running its own GPUs. His rule for pivots, he said: try something, keep doing it if it works, and move on if it doesn't.