Surge CEO & Co-Founder, Edwin Chen: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with NO Funding

Edwin Chen is the Founder and CEO of Surge. Founded in 2020, Surge has scaled to $1BN+ in revenue with zero external funding. At the same time, their competitor, Scale.ai raised over $1.3BN to reach $850M ARR. Today, Surge have the world’s largest model providers as customers and have just 120 employees. ----------------------------------------------- In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:05 Why 90% of Big Tech Is Wasting Time on Useless Problems 05:58 How Surge Kills Meetings and Still Moves 10x Faster 08:05 100x Engineers Are Real 13:51 Founding Surge AI 26:29 “No Sales Team, No PR, No BS” 38:54 The Real Reason AGI Might Take Until 2040 43:58 Why the Real Bottleneck in AI Isn’t Compute or Models 49:58 Will Synthetic Data Kill Human Labelling? 56:15 The Price of a $10B Company? 58:43 Quick-Fire Round ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on X: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #edwinchen #ai #surgeai #twitter #google #elon #founder #ceo