The Power of Quality Human Data with SurgeAI Founder and CEO Edwin Chen

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, Elad and I are here with Edwin Chen, the founder and CEO of Surge, the bootstrapped human data startup that surpassed a billion in revenue last year and serves top tier clients like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We talk about what high quality human data means, the role of humans as models become superhuman, benchmark hacking, why he believes in a diversity of frontier models, the scale meta not M&A deal, and why there's no ceiling on environment quality for RL, or the simulated worlds that labs want to train agents in. Edwin, thanks for joining us.

**Edwin Chen** (0:38)
Great. Great. See you guys today.

**Sarah Guo** (0:40)
Surge has been really under the radar until just about now. Can you give us a little bit of color on scale of the company and what the original founding thesis was?

**Edwin Chen** (0:51)
So we hit over a billion in revenue last year. We are kind of like the biggest human data player in this space. And we're about a hundred, a little over a hundred people. And our original thesis was, we just really believed in the power of human data to advance AI. And we just had this really big focus from the start of making sure that we had the highest quality data possible.

**Elad Gil** (1:14)
Can you give people context for how long you've been around, how you got going, etc.? I think, again, you all have accomplished an enormous amount in a short period of time. And I think you've been very quiet about some of the things you've been doing. So we're going to just get a little bit of history and when you started, how you got started and how long you've been around.

**Edwin Chen** (1:30)
Oh, yeah. So we've been around for five years. I think we just hit our five year anniversary. So we started in 2020 So before that, so I can give some of the context. So before that, I used to work at Google, Facebook and Twitter. And one of the like basically the reason we started Surge was I just used to work on ML at a bunch of these big companies. And just the problem I kept running into over and over again was that it really was impossible getting the data that we needed to train our models. So it was just this big blocker that we faced over and over again. And there was just like so much more that we wanted to do. Like even just the basic things that we want to do, we struggled so hard to get the data. It was really just the big blocker. But then simultaneously, there were all these more futuristic things that we wanted to build. Like if we thought of the next generation AI systems, if we could barely get the data that we needed at the time to solve, like just building a centripetal center, no, it's the classifier, if we could barely do that, then how would we ever advance beyond that? So that really was the biggest problem. I can go into more of that, but that was what we faced.

**Elad Gil** (2:28)
You guys are also known for having bootstrapped the company versus raising a lot of external venture money or things like that. Do you want to talk about that choice in terms of going profitable early and then scaling off of that?

**Edwin Chen** (2:37)
In terms of why we didn't raise, so I think I'd be proud of it was obviously that we didn't need a money. I think we're very, very lucky to be profitable from the start.
So we didn't need a money. It always felt weird to give up control. And one of the things I've always hated about Silicon Valley is that you see so many people raising for the sake of raising. I think one of the things that I often see is that a lot of founders that I know, they don't have some big dream of building a product that solves some idea that they really believe in. If you talk to a bunch of YC founders or whoever it is, what is their goal? It really is to tell all their friends that they raised $10 million and show their parents that they got a headline in TechCrunch. That is their goal. I think of my friends at Google. They often tell me, oh yeah, I've been at Google or Facebook for 10 years, and I want to start a company. I'm like, okay, so what problem do you want to solve? They don't know. They're like, yeah, I just want to start something new. I'm bored. And it's weird because they can pay their own salaries for a couple of months. Again, they've been at Google and Facebook for 10 years. They're not just fresh out of school. They can pay their own salaries, but the first thing they think about is just going out and raising money. And I've always thought it weird because they might try talking to some users and they might try being an MVP. But they kind of just do it in this throwaway manner, where the only reason they do it is to check off a box on a startup accelerated application and then they'll just pay around these random product ideas and know they happen to get a little bit of traction so that the VC DMs them. And so they spend all their time tweeting and they go to these VC dinners and it's all just so that they can show the world that they raise a big amount of money. And so I think raising immediately always felt silly to me. Like everybody's default is to just immediately raise. But if you were to think about it from first principles, like if you didn't know how Silicon Valley worked, if you didn't know that raising was a thing, like why would you do that? Like what is money really going to solve for 90% of these startups where the founders are lucky to have some savings? I really think that your first instinct should be to go out and build whatever you're dreaming of. And sure, if you ever run into financial problems, then sure, think about raising money then. But don't waste all this effort and time from when you don't even know what you do with it.