The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You guys hit a billion in revenue in less than four years with around 60 to 70 people. You were completely bootstrapped, haven't raised any VC money. I don't believe anyone has ever done this before.

**Edwin Chen** (0:10)
We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. That always sounds ridiculous. I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies, and I always felt that we could fire 90% of people and we would move faster because the best people would have all these instructions. So when we started Surge, we wanted to build it completely differently with a super small, super elite team.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
You guys are by far the most successful data company out there.

**Edwin Chen** (0:29)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:39)
To a regular person, it doesn't feel like these models are getting that much smarter constantly.

**Edwin Chen** (0:43)
Over the past year, I've realized that the values that the companies have will shape the models. I was asking Claude to help me drop an email the other day, and after 30 minutes, yeah, I think it really crafted me the perfect email and I sent it. But then I realized I spent 30 minutes doing something that didn't matter at all. If you could choose the perfect model behavior, which model would you want? Do you want a model that says, you're absolutely right, there are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email, and it continues for 50 more iterations? Or do you want a model that's optimizing for your time and productivity and just says, no, you need to stop, your email's great, just send it and move on?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:13)
You have this hot take that a lot of these labs are pushing AGI in the wrong direction.

**Edwin Chen** (1:18)
I'm worried that instead of building AI that will actually advance this as a species, curing cancer, solving poverty, understanding the universe, we are optimizing for AI slope instead. We're optimizing our models for the types of people who buy tablets at the grocery store. We're basically teaching our models to chase dopamine instead of truth.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:35)
Today my guest is Edwin Chen, founder and CEO of Surge AI. Edwin is an extraordinary CEO and Surge is an extraordinary company. They're the leading AI data company powering training at every frontier AI lab. They are also the fastest company to ever hit $1 billion in revenue in just four years after launch, with fewer than 100 people and also completely bootstrapped. They've never raised a dollar in VC money. They've also been profitable from day one. As you'll hear in this conversation, Edwin has a very different take on how to build an important company and how to build AI that is truly good and useful to humanity. I absolutely loved this conversation and I learned a ton. I am really excited for you to hear it. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a ton of incredible products for free for an entire year, including Devon, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Sharp Air, De-Mob, and Post Hog, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Edwin Chen after a short word from our sponsors. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft, and taste, and agency, and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2 That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you are a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's Trust Management Platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny. Here's a puzzle for you. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Versel, Plaid and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, Work OS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audited logs and other features required by big customers. Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Whether you're a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, Work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack support where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. Work OS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today.