Apple

Lambda Co-Founder: How to Pivot and Scale to $3 Million in 1 Year

Aug 26, 2026 · 50:50

Lambda co-founder and CTO Stephen Balaban explains how a $40,000-a-month AWS bill forced a pivot into GPU infrastructure that produced $3 million in revenue in 2017. He details Lambda's six pivots from facial recognition to workstations and says V100 GPUs from 2017 still earn money in its cloud, rebutting short sellers' 'three-year usable life' claim. He stepped down as CEO after 14 years because he disliked the fundraising treadmill and wanted to focus on technology, handing the role to a telecom-industry outsider. He explains why Lambda avoided traditional VCs, argues GPUs are becoming an asset class like toll roads, credits NVIDIA and Jensen Huang for the partnership, and predicts multiple AI models will survive because the market lacks network effects.

The Unicorn Nobody Saw Coming | Ahmet Bahadir Ozdemir

Dec 7, 2025 · 56:43

Ahmet Bahadir Ozdemir, the accidental founder of Airalo, built the world's largest eSIM marketplace by pivoting from a ship-supply business after Apple's eSIM announcement in 2018. He started SIM4CREW for 1.7M seafarers, then killed it to launch Airalo, relying on luck and timing. First customers came from unscalable hacks—wearing Airalo shirts, fake elevator calls, and Twitter bots—until a $5,000 influencer investment cracked growth. COVID hit after raising a $5.4M Series A, but overspending forced an early raise that left enough cash to survive zero revenue, panic attacks, and a war on waste. Airalo's culture centers on empathy and individual stories, rejecting 'greater good' logic—every gigabyte used globally is the long-term goal, via a connectivity layer powering devices directly or through partners.