Jaden Schaefer

Ethereum's network upgrade was about to happen, if anyone remembers the merge.

So that was about to happen.

Anyways, they said that they got kind of bored of the project.

Between them, they'd convinced their wives to let them buy about $50,000 worth of hardware.

And so if they wanted to keep their wives happy, apparently they had to find a better use for the GPUs.

So because of that...

They both kind of worked on machine learning projects and they decided to turn their mining rig into AI servers.

It was like way before Chachapati and even before DALI too.

So when they were rebuilding the system, they ran into a big problem and they said, quote, we were seeing just how awful the software stack was for working with GPUs.

And so they decided that this is what they wanted to go and fix.

And so that's kind of when they built RunPod.

That's when it kind of came together.

Lou, the co-founder said, quote, the experience of developing software for top GPUs was just hot garbage.

So then by 2022, they were ready to launch it.

They kind of positioned themselves as a fast developer focused AI app.

They were a hosting platform.

They had kind of configurable hardware.

They also had a serverless option and then a bunch of like APIs and integrations, all that kind of stuff.

At the time, though, he said that the integrations were really minimal and it was quite challenging for them to actually go find users.

So they said, as first time founders, we had no idea how to market.