Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I'm worried that instead of building AI that will actually advance us as a species, curing cancer, solving poverty, understand the universe, we are optimizing for AI slop instead. But we're optimizing your models for the types of people who buy tabloids at a grocery store. We're basically teaching our models to chase dopamine instead of truth. Today, my guest is Edwin Chan, 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're 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 love this conversation and I learned a ton. I'm really excited for you to hear it. If you enjoy 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 Devin, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Wispr Flow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, Mobbin, PostHog, 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 tonight 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're 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 can 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, Vercel, Plad, and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, WorkOS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, Skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by big customers. WorkOS 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, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. o land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS 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 superfast. WorkOS 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. Edwin, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.…

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