Lenny Rachitsky: You guys hit a billion in revenue in less than four years with around 60 to 70 people. You're completely bootstrapped, haven't raised any VC money. I don't believe anyone has ever done this before. Edwin Chen: We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. I always thought it was ridiculous. I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies and I always felt that we could fire 90% of the people and we would move faster because the best people wouldn't have all these distractions. So when we start Surge, we wanted to build it completely differently with a super small, super elite team. Lenny Rachitsky: You guys are by far the most successful data company out there. Edwin Chen: We essentially teach AI models what's good and what's bad. People don't understand what quality even means in this space. They think you could just throw bodies at a problem and get good data, that's completely wrong.
Edwin Chen: We essentially teach AI models what's good and what's bad.