Edwin Chen: prediction

Transcript context

…I want to start with just how absurd what you've achieved is. A lot of people and a lot of companies talk about scaling massive businesses with very few people as a result of AI, and you guys have done this in a way that is unprecedented. You guys hit a billion in revenue in less than four years with less than 60, 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, so you guys are actually achieving the dream of what people are describing will happen with AI. I'm curious just, do you think this will happen more and more as a result of AI? And also just where has AI most helped you find leverage to be able to do this? Yeah, so we hit over a billion of revenue last year with under 100 people. And I think we're going to see companies with even crazier ratios, like 100 billion per employee in the next few years. AI is just going to get better and better and make things more efficient so that ratio just becomes inevitable. 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 wouldn't have all these distractions. And so when we started Surge, we wanted to build it completely differently with a super small, super elite team, and yeah, what's crazy is that we actually succeeded. And so I think two things are colliding. One is that people are realizing that you don't have to build giant organizations in order to win. And two, yeah, all these efficiencies from AI. And they're just going to lead to a really amazing time in company building. The thing I'm excited about is that the types of companies are going to change too. It won't just be that they're smaller, we're going to see fundamentally different companies emerging. If you think about it, fewer employees means less capital. Less capital means you don't need a raise. So instead of companies started by founders who are great at pitching and great at hyping, you'll get founders who are really great at technology and product. And instead of products optimized for revenue and what VCs want to see, you'll get more interesting ones built by these tiny obsessed teams. So people building things they actually care about, real technology and real innovation. So I'm actually really hoping that the slick on [inaudible 00:07:06], it'll go back to being updates for hackers again. You guys have done a lot of things in a very contrarian way, and one was actually just not being on LinkedIn, posting viral posts, not on Twitter, constantly promoting Surge. I think most people hadn't heard of Surge until just recently, and then you just came out, and like, okay, the fastest growing company at a billion dollars. Why would you do that? I imagine that was very intentional.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.