The Power of Quality Human Data with SurgeAI Founder and CEO Edwin Chen
episode
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
32 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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Who is Edwin Chen and what is the founding story of SurgeAI?
Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, Alad and I are here with Edwin Chent, 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 MA 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.
Great, great. Seeing you guys today.
Surge has been really under the radar until just about now. Um, can you give us a little bit of uh color on sort of scale of the company and what the original founding thesis was?
So we Hit over a billion written 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 c we had the highest quality data possible.
Can you give people context for how long you've been around, how you got going, et cetera? I think I again you all have accomplished an enormous amount. In a short period of time. And I think, you know, you've been very quiet about some of the things we've been doing. So it'd be great to just get a little bit of history and You know, when you started, how you got started and how long you've been around.
Uh 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 someone a 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's just this big blocker that we face. 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 wanted 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 simple center, analysis classifier. We if we could barely do that, then like how would we ever? advance advanced beyond that. So that that really was the the biggest problem. I I can go into more of that, but that that that was something what we faced.
And then you guys are also known for having bootstrap 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?
In terms of why we didn't raise, so I think uh I mean a big part of it was obviously just that we didn't need a money. I think we were very, very lucky to be profitable from from the start. So we didn't need a money. It always felt weird to give up control. And uh like one of the things I've always hated about Silicon Valley is that you so see so many people raising for the sake of raising. Like I think one of the things that I can see is that A lot of founders that I know, they don't they don't have some big dream of building a product that solves some idea that they really believe in. Like if you talk to a bunch of YC founders or whoever it is, like what what is their goal? It really is to tell all their friends that they've raised $10 million and to show their parents they got a headline on tech crunch.
Like that is their goal. Like I I I think of like my friends at Google. They they often tell me, Oh yeah, I've you know, I've been at Google or Facebook for 10 years and I want to start a company.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who is Edwin Chen and what is the founding story of SurgeAI?
0:05–9:13
2
Why did SurgeAI choose to bootstrap instead of raising venture capital?
9:13–19:51
3
How does SurgeAI’s product differentiate itself from competitors?
19:51–30:39
4
What methods does SurgeAI use to measure and ensure data quality?
30:39–32:55
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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