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 |
