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

In this episode of Twenty VC, Harry Stebbings interviews Edwin Chen, the founder of Surge, a company generating over a billion dollars in revenue without any outside funding. Chen discusses his experiences at Google, Facebook, and Twitter, where he observed inefficiencies and a focus on internal company machinery rather than customer needs. He emphasizes the importance of small, efficient teams, prioritizing data quality, and building technology to measure and improve it. Chen shares his journey of founding Surge to solve the problem of obtaining high-quality data for machine learning models, his decision to bootstrap the company, and his focus on building a product-driven organization rather than a sales-driven one. He also touches on the future of AI, the role of synthetic data, and his perspective on the qualities of successful teams. Chen expresses his passion for contributing to the advancement of AGI and his commitment to maintaining the company's independence.