milaworld•This week
[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup
forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2024/03/29/how-stability-ais-founder-tanked-his-billion-dollar-startup/
archive no paywall: https://archive.is/snbeV
How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup
Mar 29, 2024
Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque took the stage last week at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California to roaring applause and an introduction from an AI-generated Aristotle who announced him as “a modern Prometheus” with “the astuteness of Athena and the vision of Daedalus.”
“Under his stewardship, AI becomes the Herculean force poised to vanquish the twin serpents of illness and ailment and extend the olive branch of longevity,” the faux Aristotle proclaimed.
“I think that’s the best intro I’ve ever had,” Mostaque said.
But behind Mostaque's hagiographic introduction lay a grim and fast metastasizing truth. Stability, once one of AI’s buzziest startups, was floundering. It had been running out of money for months and Mostaque had been unable to secure enough additional funding. It had defaulted on payments to Amazon whose cloud service undergirded Stability’s core offerings. The star research team behind its flagship text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion had tendered their resignations just three days before — as Forbes would first report — and other senior leaders had issued him an ultimatum: resign, or we walk too.
Still, onstage before a massive audience of peers and acolytes, Mostaque talked a big game. “AI is jet planes for the mind,” he opined. “AI is our collective intelligence. It's the human Colossus.” He claimed a new, faster version of the Stable Diffusion image generator released earlier this month could generate “200 cats with hats per second.” But later, when he was asked about Stability’s financial model, Mostaque fumbled. “I can’t say that publicly,” he replied. “But it’s going well. We’re ahead of forecast.”
Four days later, Mostaque stepped down as CEO of Stability, as Forbes first reported. In a post to X, the service formerly known as Twitter, he claimed he’d voluntarily abdicated his role to decentralize “the concentration of power in AI.” But sources told Forbes that was hardly the case. Behind the scenes, Mostaque had fought to maintain his position and control despite mounting pressure externally and internally to step down. Company documents and interviews with 32 current and former employees, investors, collaborators and industry observers suggest his abrupt exit was the result of poor business judgment and wild overspending that undermined confidence in his vision and leadership, and ultimately kneecapped the company.
Mostaque, through his attorneys, declined to comment on record on a detailed list of questions about the reporting in this story. But in an email to Forbes earlier this week he broadly disputed the allegations. “Nobody tells you how hard it is to be a CEO and there are better CEOs than me to scale a business,” he said in a statement. “I am not sure anyone else would have been able to build and grow the research team to build the best and most widely used models out there and I’m very proud of the team there. I look forward to moving onto the next problem to handle and hopefully move the needle.”
In an emailed statement, Christian Laforte and Shan Shan Wong, the interim co-CEOs who replaced Mostaque, said, "the company remains focused on commercializing its world leading technology” and providing it “to partners across the creative industries."
After starting Stability in 2019, Mostaque built the company into an early AI juggernaut by seizing upon a promising research project that would become Stable Diffusion and funding it into a business reality. The ease with which the software generated detailed images from the simplest text prompts immediately captivated the public: 10 million people used it on any given day, the company told Forbes in early 2023. For some true believers, Mostaque was a crucial advocate for open-source AI development in a space dominated by the closed systems of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
But his startup’s rise to one of the buzziest in generative AI was in part built on a series of exaggerations and misleading claims, as Forbes first reported last year (Mostaque disputed some points at the time). And they continued after he raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation just days after launching Stable Diffusion in 2022. His failure to deliver on an array of grand promises, like building bespoke AI models for nation states, and his decision to pour tens of millions into research without a sustainable business plan, eroded Stability’s foundations and jeopardized its future.
"He was just giving shit away,” one former employee told Forbes. “That man legitimately wanted to transform the world. He actually wanted to train AI models for kids in Malawi. Was it practical? Absolutely not."
By October 2023, Stability would have less than $4 million left in the bank, according to an internal memo prepared for a board meeting and reviewed by Forbes. And mounting debt, including months of overdue Amazon Web Services payments, had already left it in the red. To avoid legal penalties for skipping Americans staff’s payroll, the document explained, the London-based startup was considering delaying tax payments to the U.K. government.
It was Stability’s armada of GPUs, the wildly powerful and equally expensive chips undergirding AI, that were so taxing the company’s finances. Hosted by AWS, they had long been one of Mostaque’s bragging points; he often touted them as one of the world’s 10 largest supercomputers. They were responsible for helping Stability’s researchers build and maintain one of the top AI image generators, as well as break important new ground on generative audio, video and 3D models. “Undeniably, Stability has continued to ship a lot of models,” said one former employee. “They may not have profited off of it, but the broader ecosystem benefitted in a huge, huge way.”
But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.)
With an additional $54 million allocated to wages and operating expenses, Stability’s total projected costs for 2023 were $153 million. But according to its October financial report, its projected revenue for the calendar year was just $11 million. Stability was on track to lose more money per month than it made in an entire year.
The company’s dire financial position had thoroughly soured Stability’s current investors, including Coatue, which had invested tens of millions in the company during its $101 million funding round in 2022. In the middle of 2023, Mostaque agreed to an independent audit after Coatue raised a series of concerns, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The outcome of the investigation is unclear. Coatue declined to comment.
Within a week of an early October board meeting where Mostaque shared that financial forecast, Lightspeed Venture Partners, another major investor, sent a letter to the board urging them to sell the company. The distressing numbers had “severely undermined” the firm’s confidence in Mostaque’s ability to lead the company.
“In particular, we are surprised and deeply concerned by a cash position just now disclosed to us that is inconsistent with prior discussions on this topic,” Lightspeed’s general counsel Brett Nissenberg wrote in the letter, a copy of which was viewed by Forbes. “Lightspeed believes that the company is not likely financeable on terms that would assure the company’s long term sound financial position.” (Lightspeed declined a request for comment.)
The calls for a sale led Stability to quietly begin looking for a buyer. Bloomberg reported in November that Stability approached AI startups Cohere and Jasper to gauge their interest. Stability denied this, and Jasper CEO Timothy Young did the same when reached for comment by Forbes. A Cohere representative declined to comment.
But one prominent AI company confirmed that Mostaque’s representatives had reached out to them to test the waters. Those talks did not advance because “the numbers didn’t add up,” this person, who declined to be named due to the confidential nature of the talks, told Forbes. Stability also tried to court Samsung as a buyer, going so far as to redecorate its office in advance of a planned meeting with the Korean electronics giant. (Samsung said that it invested in Stability in 2023 and that it does not comment on M&A discussions.)
Coatue had been calling for Mostaque’s resignation for months, according to a source with direct knowledge. But it and other investors were unable to oust him because he was the company’s majority shareholder. When they tried a different tact by rallying other investors to offer him a juicy equity package to resign, Mostaque refused, said two sources. By October, Coatue and Lightspeed had had enough. Coatue left the board and Lightspeed resigned its observer seat.
“Emad infuriated our initial investors so much it’s just making it impossible for us to raise more money under acceptable terms,” one current Stability executive told Forbes.
The early months of 2024 saw Stability’s already precarious position eroding further still. Employees were quietly laid off. Three people in a position to know estimated that at least 10% of staff were cut. And cash reserves continued to dwindle. Mostaque mentioned a lifeline at the October board meeting: $95 million in tentative funding from new investors, pending due diligence. But in the end, only a fraction of it was wired, two sources say, much of it from Intel, which Forbes has learned invested $20 million, a fraction of what was reported. (Intel did not return a request for comment by publication time.)
Two hours after Forbes broke the news of Mostaque’s plans to step down as CEO, Stability issued a press release confirming his resignation. Chief operating officer Wong and chief technology officer Laforte have taken over in the interim. Mostaque, who said on X that he still owns a majority of the company, also stepped down from the board, which has now initiated a search for a permanent CEO. There is a lot of work to be done to turn things around, and very little time in which to do it. Said the current Stability executive, “There’s still a possibility of a turnaround story, but the odds drop by the day.”
In July of 2023, Mostaque still thought he could pull it off. Halfway through the month, he shared a fundraising plan with his lieutenants. It was wildly optimistic, detailing the raise of $500 million in cash and another $750 million in computing facilities from marquee investors like Nvidia, Google, Intel and the World Bank (Nvidia and Google declined comment. Intel did not respond. The World Bank said it did not invest in Stability). In a Slack message reviewed by Forbes, Mostaque said Google was “willing to move fast” and the round was “likely to be oversubscribed.”
It wasn’t. Three people with direct knowledge of these fundraising efforts told Forbes that while there was some interest in Stability, talks often stalled when it came time to disclose financials. Two of them noted that earlier in the year, Mostaque had simply stopped engaging with VCs who asked for numbers. Only one firm invested around that time: actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, which invested $35 million in the form of a convertible SAFE note during the second quarter, according to an internal document. (Sound Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.)
And though he’d managed to score a meeting with Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang, it ended in disaster, according to two sources. “Under Jensen's microscopic questions, Emad just fell apart,” a source in position to know told Forbes. Huang quickly concluded Stability wasn’t ready for an investment from Nvidia, the sources said. Mostaque told Forbes in an email that he had not met with Huang since 2022, except to say “hello and what’s up a few times after.” His July 2023 message references a plan to raise $150 million from Nvidia. (Nvidia declined to comment.)
After a June Forbes investigation citing more than 30 sources revealed Mostaque’s history of misleading claims, Mostaque struggled to raise funding, a Stability investor told Forbes. (Mostaque disputed the story at the time and called it "coordinated lies" in his email this week to Forbes). Increasingly, investors scrutinized his assertions and pressed for data. And Young, now the CEO of Jasper, turned down a verbal offer to be Stability’s president after reading the article, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The collapse of the talks aggravated the board and other executives, who had hoped Young would compensate for the sales and business management skills that Mostaque lacked, according to four people in a position to know. (Young declined to comment.)
When Stability’s senior leadership convened in London for the CogX conference in September, the financing had still not closed. There, a group of executives confronted Mostaque asking questions about the company’s cash position and runway, according to three people with direct knowledge of the incident. They did not get the clarity they’d hoped for.
By October, Mostaque had reduced his fundraising target by more than 80%.
The months that followed saw a steady drumbeat of departures — general counsel Adam Avrunin, vice presidents Mike Melnicki, Ed Newton-Rex and Joe Penna, chief people officer Ozden Onder — culminating in the demoralizing March exit of Stable Diffusion’s primary developers Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz. Rombach, who led the team, had been angling to leave for months, two sources said, first threatening to resign last summer because of the fundraising failures. Others left over concerns about cash flow, as well as liabilities — including what four people described as Mostaque’s lax approach to ensuring that Stability products could not be used to produce child sexual abuse imagery.
“Stability AI is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and prohibits the use of our image models and services for unlawful activity, including attempts to edit or create CSAM,” Ella Irwin, senior vice president of integrity, said in a statement.
Newton-Rex told Forbes he resigned because he disagreed with Stability’s position that training AI on copyrighted work without consent is fair use. Melnicki and Penna declined to comment. Avrunin and Onder could not be reached for comment. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment.
The Stable Diffusion researchers’ departure as a cohort says a lot about the state of Stability AI. The company’s researchers were widely viewed as its crown jewels, their work subsidized with a firehose of pricey compute power that was even extended to people outside the company. Martino Russi, an artificial intelligence researcher, told Forbes that though he was never formally employed by Stability, the company provided him a “staggering” amount of compute between January and April 2023 to play around with developing an AI video generator that Stability might someday use. “It was Candy Land or Coney Island,” said Russi, who estimates that his experiment, which was ultimately shelved, cost the company $2.5 million.
Stable Diffusion was simultaneously Stability’s marquee product and its existential cash crisis. One current employee described it to Forbes as “a giant vacuum that absorbed everything: money, compute, people.” While the software was widely used, with Mostaque claiming downloads reaching into the hundreds of millions, Stability struggled to translate that wild success into revenue. Mostaque knew it could be done — peers at Databricks, Elastic and MongoDB had all turned a free product into a lucrative business — he just couldn’t figure out how.
His first attempt was Stability’s API, which allowed paying customers to integrate Stable Diffusion into their own products. In early 2023, a handful of small companies, like art generator app NightCafe and presentation software startup Tome, signed on, according to four people with knowledge of the deals. But Stability’s poor account management services soured many, and in a matter of months NightCafe and Tome canceled their contracts, three people said. NightCafe founder Angus Russell told Forbes that his company switched to a competitor which “offered much cheaper inference costs and a broader service.” Tome did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Mostaque’s efforts to court larger companies like Samsung and Snapchat were failing, according to five people familiar with the effort. Canva, which was already one of the heaviest users of open-sourced Stable Diffusion, had multiple discussions with Stability, which was angling for a contract it hoped would generate several millions in annual revenue. But the deal never materialized, four sources said.
“These three companies wanted and needed us,” one former employee told Forbes. “They would have been the perfect customers.” (Samsung, Snap and Canva declined to comment.)
“It’s not that there was not an appetite to pay Stability — there were tons of companies that would have that wanted to,” the former employee said. “There was a huge opportunity and demand, but just a resistance to execution.”
Mostaque’s other big idea was to provide governments with bespoke national AI models that would invigorate their economies and citizenry. “Emad envisions a world where AI through 100 national models serves not as a tool of the few, but as a benefactor to all promising to confront great adversaries, cancer, autism, and the sands of time itself,” the AI avatar of Aristotle said in his intro at the conference.
Mostaque told several prospective customers that he could deliver such models within 60 days — an untenable timeline, according to two people in position to know. Stability attempted to develop a model for the Singaporean government over the protestation of employees who questioned its technical feasibility, three sources familiar with the effort told Forbes. But it couldn’t pull it off and Singapore never became a customer. (The government of Singapore confirmed it did not enter into a deal with Stability, but declined to answer additional questions.)
As Stability careened from one new business idea to another, resources were abruptly reallocated and researchers reassigned. The whiplash shifts in a largely siloed organization demoralized and infuriated employees. “There were ‘urgent’ things, ‘urgent urgent’ things and ‘most urgent,’” one former employee complained. “None of these things seem important if everything is important.”
Another former Stability executive was far more pointed in their assessment. “Emad is the most disorganized leader I have ever worked with in my career,” this person told Forbes. “He has no vision, and changes directions every week, often based on what he sees on Twitter.”
In a video interview posted shortly before this story was published, Mostaque explained his leadership style: “I'm particularly great at taking creatives, developers, researchers, others, and achieving their full potential in designing systems. But I should not be dealing with, you know, HR and operations and business development and other elements. There are far better people than me to do that.”
By December 2023, Stability had partially abandoned its open-source roots and announced that any commercial use of Stable Diffusion would cost customers at least $20 per month (non-commercial and research use of Stable Diffusion would remain free).
But privately, Stability was considering a potentially more lucrative source of revenue: reselling the compute it was leasing from providers like AWS, according to six people familiar with the effort. Though it was essentially GPU arbitrage, Stability framed the strategy to investors as a “managed services” offering. Its damning October financial report projected optimistically that such an offering would bring in $139 million in 2024 — 98% of its revenue. Multiple employees at the time told Forbes they feared reselling compute, even if the company called it “managed services,” would violate the terms of Stability’s contract with AWS. Amazon declined to comment. “The line internally was that we are not reselling compute,” one former employee said. “This was some of the dirtiest feeling stuff.”
Stability also discussed reselling a cluster of Nvidia A100 chips, leased via CoreWeave, to the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, three sources said. “It was under the guise of managed services, but there wasn’t any management happening,” one of these people told Forbes. Andreessen Horowitz and CoreWeave declined to comment.
Stability did not respond to questions about if it plans to continue this strategy now that Mostaque is out of the picture. Regardless, interim co-CEOs Wong and Laforte are on a tight timeline to clean up his mess. Board chairman Jim O’Shaughnessy said in a statement that he was confident the pair “will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products.” But burn continues to far outpace revenue. The Financial Times reported Friday that the company made $5.4 million of revenue in February, against $8 million in costs. Several sources said there are ongoing concerns about making payroll for the roughly 150 remaining employees. Leadership roles have gone vacant for months amid the disarray, leaving the company increasingly directionless.
Meanwhile, a potentially catastrophic legal threat looms over the company: A trio of copyright infringement lawsuits brought by Getty Images and a group of artists in the U.S. and U.K., who claim Stability illegally used their art and photography to train the AI models powering Stable Diffusion. A London-based court has already rejected the company’s bid to throw out one of the lawsuits on the basis that none of its researchers were based in the U.K. And Stability’s claim that Getty’s Delaware lawsuit should be blocked because it's a U.K.-based company was rejected. (Stability did not respond to questions about the litigation.)
AI-related copyright litigation “could go on for years,” according to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. He told Forbes that though plaintiffs suing AI firms face an uphill battle overcoming the existing legal precedent on copyright infringement, the quantity of arguments available to make are virtually inexhaustible. “Like in military theory, if there’s a gap in your lines, that’s where the enemy pours through — if any one of those arguments succeeds, it could completely change the generative AI environment,” he said. “In some sense, generative AI as an industry has to win everything.”
Stability, which had more than $100 million in the bank just a year and a half ago, is in a deep hole. Not only does it need more funding, it needs a viable business model — or a buyer with the vision and chops to make it successful in a fast-moving and highly competitive sector.
At an all hands meeting this past Monday, Stability’s new leaders detailed a path forward. One point of emphasis: a plan to better manage resources and expenses, according to one person in attendance. It’s a start, but Mostaque’s meddling has left them with little runway to execute. His resignation, though, has given some employees hope. “A few people are 100% going to reconsider leaving after today,” said one current employee. “And the weird gloomy aura of hearing Emad talking nonsense for an hour is gone.”
Shortly before Mostaque resigned, one current Stability executive told Forbes that they were optimistic his departure could make Stability appealing enough to receive a small investment or sale to a friendly party.
“There are companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that have much less intrinsic value than Stability,” the person said. “A white knight may still appear.”
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