The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with No Funding: Surge AI | The Most Insane Scaling Story in Tech |
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.
Show Notes
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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:
— "Everyone Else Is Just a Body Shop" — Edwin Calls Out the Whole Industry
— Why 90% of Big Tech Is Wasting Time on Useless Problems
— "I Don't Do 1-on-1s" — How Surge Kills Meetings and Still Moves 10x Faster
— Will a Single Person Build a $1B Company?
— 100x Engineers Are Real — Here's How to Spot Them
— Why Most PhDs Are Useless in AI Training
— Built to a Billion With Zero VC — Edwin Explains How and Why
— "No Sales Team, No PR, No BS" — Why Surge Stays in the Shadows
— The Real Reason AGI Might Take Until 2040
— Will Synthetic Data Kill Human Labelling?
— "Academic Benchmarks Are a Scam"
— Why the Real Bottleneck in AI Isn't Compute or Models — It's THIS
— What Every AI Company Should Be Asking (But Isn't)
— "No, I Wouldn't Sell Surge for $100B"
— Is the Application Layer Doomed? Edwin Predicts the Future of AI Startups
— Have the Leading Foundation Models Already Been Founded?
— 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 |
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