Founder Series #1: The Runpod Origin Story

Let's get more personal and establish a baseline. For everyone that's been enjoying Runpod, thank you for spreading the word. I am Pardeep Singh (aka flash-singh), CTO at Runpod and one of the co-founders along with Zhen Lu.

What triggered me to share?

Of all things non-engineering, I tend to put them off until... I had a conversation with one of our investors, Daniel Docter, over tequila shots on why our content isn't hitting the mark. He was obviously not impressed, and I don't blame him. To lead by example, I am starting Founder Series to shed more light on Runpod: how we came to be, what architecture decisions we have made, and why. What is my take on humanity and AI?

To my earlier point, let's get personal.

I am an engineer, have been since before college. For much of my time, I like to be heads down coding or deep in my thoughts, moving around the puzzle pieces. Needless to say, I enjoy solving problems and love the focus on MVP. Deliver small, think big. It's essential to learning and adapting fast.

How did I get wrapped in a startup?

Since my late high school days, I have been fascinated with coding. I spent the majority of my time coding and playing WoW during college. I paid for my college with a free music app focused on creating YouTube playlists before it was a thing. My journey has always been focused on creating something that people can experience and enjoy.

There was a time when I listened to many audiobooks for motivation and inspiration. That was a time after college; life drastically changed, and looking forward to a 9 to 5 isn't an easy transition. One of the quotes I heard really stuck with me, and every time I run into a road bump, I am reminded of it.

The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream. - Les Brown

There are times when I imagine myself laying in my deathbed and regretting things I could have done or accomplished. That fear keeps me going, and the fear of failure doesn't faze me anymore. Talking about failures, let's jump to 2021, the year of my most failures.

What happened in 2021 other than COVID?

1. Built a free workout app (learned Flutter; it was a joy)
   1. As far as business goes, my heart wasn't in it, and the market is very saturated; it was a good pastime since my wife loves working out, and every time I would show her all the small improvements I made.
   2. Lesson Learned: Do something you desire and make sure it's challenging.
2. Started a jewelry business
   1. Thanks to my wife, who kept telling me it's easy, just buy from Alibaba and sell on Amazon; sunk $4k in.
   2. As a last resort, I went to a local flea market to sell and came home disappointed with 0 sales. Still have boxes of jewelry sitting in my basement.
   3. Lesson Learned: Be an engineer; fail fast.
3. Zhen reached out wanting to mine crypto; sure, why not!
   1. Within a month, I scoured the depths of PA / NYC to scrape up any GPU I could find. Easily sunk $15k in; my wife was not happy about the time I spent running around more than the actual cost of it.
   2. ETH mining was coming to an end in early 2022 due to POS, and I started researching AI. Poured another $10k into hardware to upgrade my rigs to AI servers. For those not aware, mining rigs are built MVP-style with shortcuts to ROI ASAP.
   3. After a couple of months of experimenting with AI servers and dedicating my compute on various sites, I concluded the experience was mediocre. There was a 100% chance I could do it better, 0% chance I knew how to market it.
   4. Lesson Learned: Find opportunities in failures; explore the unknown.
4. YOLO! Journey to GPU Cloud.
   1. First, I had to pitch the idea to my wife and make sure she was onboard. Of course, I wouldn't spend weekends working on this project.
   2. Then setup multiple date-nights with Zhen and his wife, he wasn't buying it at first but I was obsessed with the idea.
   3. On our way to the bank, he shared his interest in wanting to be the CEO. I didn't give it a second thought; for the most part I was never fond of bureaucracy and the politics of being a CEO.
   4. The months and years that followed changed our lives drastically.

The start of the Runpod journey.

Talk is cheap. We spent the next 3 months developing Runpod with the direction of a simple and fast GPU Cloud experience. By this point, I was already a Golang fan and that made things easier.

Challenge #1: How to connect distributed compute and isolate them from one another?

Challenge #2: How to securely connect services running in containers to users outside the local network? Another caveat was that none of these servers had static public IPs.

Tune in next time for more details on the Runpod MVP journey.

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