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Who needs VCs when you have friends like these?
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 back...
About This Episode
Who needs VCs when you have friends like these? is an episode from The Stack Overflow Podcast by Stack Overflow. Ryan welcomes RunPod co-founder and CEO Zhen Lu to discuss circumventing VC money by going straight to your community for fundi...
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This episode belongs to The Stack Overflow Podcast.
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Episode Details
Published Apr 14, 2026, 00:33:21 long, audio available.
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What is Who needs VCs when you have friends like these? about?
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 and California Privacy Notice at .
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Who needs VCs when you have friends like these? is an episode from The Stack Overflow Podcast by Stack Overflow.
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This episode is 00:33:21 long.
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This episode was published on Apr 14, 2026.
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Which podcast is this episode from?
Who needs VCs when you have friends like these? is from The Stack Overflow Podcast by Stack Overflow.
What are the episode details?
Published Apr 14, 2026 and 00:33:21 long