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

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The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 |

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think a lot of the other companies in our space, they're just not technology companies at the end of day. They are either body shops or there are body shops masquerading as technology companies. One of the things that we simply tell everybody when we first join, quality is the most important thing. I definitely want to sell for $30 billion or even $100 billion. If you think about us as a company, I already have everything I want. Yeah, we're profitable. I have complete control of our destiny.
0:23.6	And so I'm really lucky to have all the resources I want to already do anything that I want.
0:27.6	This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today I feature probably one of the most impressive companies that I've ever featured on the show.
0:34.6	Founded in 2020.
0:36.6	Surge now does well north of a billion
0:40.2	dollars in revenue, and the crazy thing, they've never raised a dollar of outside funding.
0:46.6	Their founder, Edwin Chen, barely ever does an interview. He never talks publicly, and today
0:52.7	he agreed to sit down with us to break down the incredible
0:56.1	last five years and his biggest lessons. But before we dive into the show today, I love seeing
1:01.6	the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all
1:06.1	the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms,
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	...

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