Lambda Labs names Michel Combes as CEO as co-founder Stephen Balaban transitions to CTO

what's going on just in time. So you have to be able to understand you have to create an ability to understand code uh which people used to do with uh language specific version specific as we've invented a language agnostic version agnostic way to understand code.

Well congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress.

Yeah great to meet you.

Keep on blitzing.

Sounds good guys. Great to meet you. Have a good one. Cheers.

Goodbye. Up next, we have Steven Balaban from Lambda, co-founder, uh, and the new CEO Michelle from Lambda in the waiting room. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing? Look at this set up in this setup.

Suited up.

Suited up. Okay, reintroduce yourself, Stephen. Introduce yourself. Michelle, Michelle, because we're very excited for today.

John and Jordy, so good to be back. Thank you so much. And congratulations. It's been a while since uh we've seen each other and so much has happened in your world too.

Um so uh I'm Steven Balaban. I'm the co-founder and founding CEO but now

chief technology officer CTO

and we've welcomed on Michelle Combmes as our new chief executive officer

and I'm passing the baton after 14 years.

This really feels like we're putting a new quarterback in. This feels like proper TVPN Sports Center. I love it.

And and and this it was such an awesome opportunity to like this is the first thing that we're doing right after announcing it to the company and to the world. And I think that one thing you guys are going to really like here. So Michelle has obviously a very very long history in telecommunication infrastructure whether it's being the former CEO of Sprint, former CEO of SoftBank International,

associated with and uh you know on the the you know with the McLaren team also on the board

of Philip Morris. No we oversaw the acquisition of Swedish match. I understand that I have some competitors online. So maybe we should speak about side of it.

Yeah, we should.

So it's not Zen. What is it? I don't know what you

This is the company I started before the show.

Oh, I know. I know. That's what I the the the uh the uh the the the tagline we have now is

look there's telecommunication infrastructure.

Yeah. racing infrastructure,

nicotine infrastructure, and AI infrastructure.

Together, it all makes sense to go

to a flourishing civilization.

And uh you know, we're really excited to have Michelle on board and um

just it's it's a it's a it's an honor to be able to do this as a founder to be able to bring on uh somebody with such experience.

Yeah, I'm very

very excited to be there. I guess I would never have been invited without uh you Stephen. So thanks to you I am a cool guy. I am on this nice show. So I am I really love it. So we just announced it to our employees a little a little while ago. Very very excited. fascinating industry, amazing company, amazing founder that I have discovered in the past two months and I guess that we're going to have a lot of fun in order to build the next step of this company and continue our leadership in this industry. So I love it and that's really exciting.

Huge industry, huge growth rates, hugely successful company thus far. What is the what is the major goal? What are the KPIs? How do you manage a company like this over the next year, over the next decade

when the GPUs are on fire?

Well, I guess that the name of the game is scale.

Scale it's what matters. So, uh Steven and team have built an amazing platform in the past few years and we can really start from this foundation and chob the growth. So, I am really coming in order to help Steve to unlock the growth of this company. Sky has no limit. So we know that. So it's just about scale. Scale in terms of capital formation. So that's something and you you will have seen that we are strengthening the team also in this side on this dimension in order to be able to raise the right level of capital whether it's equity whether it's debt whatever is needed in order to accelerate our growth and scale also in terms of operations. So it's about let's say finding the right sites, finding of course the right GPUs and just making sure that we can assemble all of that in order to have the best service, the best quality, the best quantity of compute and the most efficient computing power for our customers. So that's really about executing in fact the dream of uh uh Steven which has started the dream which had put all the ingredients together and my role is just to accelerate that with uh my partner in crime uh Steve. So which I I love the idea to partner with a with a founder. As you can see, I'm a little bit older than the founder. I have an experience which is a little bit outside of the founding place. I'm serial executive, but I have worked with many founders in my previous lives. For example, at Soft Bank and so I really enjoy I really like to team with a founder and especially a founder like uh Steven. So that's already very fun. Look this look how he's dressed. He's dressed like a French guy.

He's dressed No, no, already a tie. You guys appreciate this. I got a a Char tie I picked up in Paris. And you know that's a good premonition for uh

Steven We sorry for the French guy. We should just look at his shoes. So he made a mistake there. He made sneakers with his suit. So now we can take it from there. But I just wanted to show you that there was an issue there.

Wouldn't be with with like proper dress shoes on. Made in America, New Balance.

There we go. There we go.

Stephen, where do you you're where do you want to like obviously you're you're going to be focused on uh technical responsibilities now. Where do you want to focus? Where do you see the opportunity for you to have the highest impact?

Yeah. So, I'm going to be continuing to lead product vision, technology direction, and working on just really high impact, high velocity products at the company. I mean, one of the things that I've done uh historically, even just in the past couple of months, is really, you know, spit up a ton of agents, really show how software engineering is supposed to work in the new world. And on top of that, um I'm just still deeply involved in standing up new infrastructure. So whether that's like uh hiring and recruiting really great amazing technical data center experts um you know uh assisting with the strategy around how do we go from leasing data center space to owning and operating data center space. I'm just going to be involved in wherever is like the highest impact for me. Um, you know, when I was thinking about these roles, I I I kind of looked at the people who I really looked up to in business and, you know, the CTO role is the one that's kind of styled after somebody who I really look up to, which is Larry Ellison. And, you know, when he uh when he transitioned to uh the he transitioned to a full-time CTO position and when Staff Cats and Mark Herd came became co-CEOs of Oracle. Yeah. And so, I figured that was an appropo title given that I look up to him so much. That's amazing. How are you thinking about focus right now? Uh people know Lambda is a way to, you know, lease compute on a shortterm basis. We've seen other companies expand into everything from buying land and building supercomputers to training their own foundation models and offering APIs. Uh, it feels like there's always a question of do you want to do more, but if the current thing is working, do you stay focused? How are you thinking about these trade-offs? Michelle and I are exactly on the same page, which is focus, focus, focus, focus. We are building a generational company that is going to last for a hundred years. And we're going to do that by having the most compute at the lowest cost basis. offer those at the lowest prices and the most flexible terms so that we can delight both the largest most important model builders in the world like open AI and the developer you can't forget the developer who have built the entire industry and ecosystem that is surrounds this company I mean lambda is really the developers cloud you know it's founded by a software engineer it's built for people like me and so we're going to have the combination of both of those and focus on that.

Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait