20VC: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with No Funding: Surge AI | The Most Insane Scaling Story in Tech |
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 |
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman.
If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.
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