Zhen Lu

Zhen Lu is co-founder and CEO of RunPod, a GPU cloud for AI developers. He started it with Pardeep Singh, his longtime colleague, on hardware the two had bought to mine Ethereum.

Mining Ethereum in New Jersey Basements

Lu and Singh worked together as corporate developers for Comcast, according to TechCrunch. Before RunPod they spent six years on the same software team, growing it from about eight people to almost 100, according to Time News. In late 2021 they had about $50,000 worth of GPU rigs in their New Jersey basements mining Ethereum, Lu wrote on the RunPod blog, and the hobby had stopped being fun.

Both had done machine learning on the side, so they converted the rigs into AI servers. The experience of developing software on GPUs was, in Lu's words, "hot garbage." The first setup was "homegrown, hacky": consumer machines zip-tied to racks and running on Comcast Xfinity home internet, according to Time News.

Launching RunPod with a Reddit Post

"As first-time founders, we didn't really know how to market or how to do anything," Lu told TechCrunch. So he posted in AI subreddits, offering free access in exchange for feedback. Those beta testers became the first paying customers, and within nine months RunPod had passed $1 million in revenue. The founders bootstrapped for almost two years and scaled beyond their basements through partnerships with data centers instead of raising money.

By May 2024 RunPod had grown to more than a million developers, and Radhika Malik of Dell Technologies Capital reached out after finding the company through those Reddit posts, Lu wrote. Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond messaged through the support chat asking to invest. RunPod raised $20 million from Dell and Intel, with Chaumond and Nat Friedman participating.