Building with Conviction: The MVP Approach

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. 

Agenda:

00:00 — “Everyone Else Is Just a Body Shop” — Edwin Calls Out the Whole Industry

01:05 — Why 90% of Big Tech Is Wasting Time on Useless Problems

03:45 — “I Don’t Do 1-on-1s” — How Surge Kills Meetings and Still Moves 10x Faster

05:55 — Will a Single Person Build a $1B Company? 

08:10 — 100x Engineers Are Real — Here’s How to Spot Them

12:10 — Why Most PhDs Are Useless in AI Training

14:20 — Built to a Billion With Zero VC — Edwin Explains How and Why

17:00 — “No Sales Team, No PR, No BS” — Why Surge Stays in the Shadows

21:15 — The Real Reason AGI Might Take Until 2040

24:45 — Will Synthetic Data Kill Human Labelling? 

29:00 — “Academic Benchmarks Are a Scam” 

31:05 — Why the Real Bottleneck in AI Isn’t Compute or Models — It’s THIS

33:00 — What Every AI Company Should Be Asking (But Isn’t)

35:15 — “No, I Wouldn’t Sell Surge for $100B” 

39:00 — Is the Application Layer Doomed? Edwin Predicts the Future of AI Startups

46:30 — Have the Leading Foundation Models Already Been Founded? 

48:10 — AGI Could Be Dangerous — And Most People Are Ignoring Why

20VC: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with No Funding: Surge AI | The Most Insane Scaling Story in Tech |