ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Stephen Balaban is co-founder and, as of a recent leadership change, CTO of Lambda, the AI cloud infrastructure company he and his twin brother started in 2012. It took five pivots — augmented reality, a facial-recognition contact book, a camera embedded in a baseball cap, the AI image app Dreamscope, then finally workstations and servers — before Lambda found a business that made money in 2017. Along the way, Stephen kept the company alive by consulting on the side, including projects with Airbus and the creators of South Park.
What you'll learn:
- Why it took five pivots and 14 years for Lambda to find product-market fit
- How side consulting work — for Airbus and even South Park's creators — funded the company through its leanest years
- Why mainline Silicon Valley VCs kept passing on Lambda even while it was profitable, and why that didn't change after ChatGPT
- How a Series D round pulled largely from Taiwanese manufacturers and family offices instead of traditional venture capital
- What pushed Stephen to step down as CEO and bring in Michel Combes, a former CEO of Sprint and SoftBank International
- Why Stephen thinks the disinformation around data centers — noise, water use — doesn't hold up
Chapters:
(01:10) Meet Stephen Balaban, co-founder and CTO of Lambda
(02:40) Palo Alto in 2012 and Lambda's earliest days
(03:42) Building Heads Up, a facial-recognition contact book for iOS
(05:06) The ImageNet moment and training neural nets on NVIDIA GPUs
(06:14) Five pivots: from augmented reality to Dreamscope
(08:55) Funding the company through consulting, including work with Airbus and South Park's creators
(12:13) Writing down the goal to IPO back in a 2012 notebook
(14:28) Raising a first $600K, including Austin Russell's $20K check at a $400K valuation
(24:29) Lambda's climb from $3M in revenue to a $1B run rate
(26:57) Why Silicon Valley VCs kept saying no — even after ChatGPT
(34:04) A Series D built largely on Taiwanese manufacturers and family offices
(37:13) Immad on Mercury Books, Mercury's new bookkeeping product
(44:12) Stepping down from CEO to CTO and bringing in Michel Combes
(52:34) Debunking data center disinformation, from water use to noise
