Edwin Chen: preference

Transcript context

…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. We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. And like I always thought it was ridiculous. What did you dream of doing when you were a kid? Was it building a company from scratch yourself and getting in the weeds of your code and your product every day? Or was it explaining all your decisions to VCs and getting on this giant PR and fundraising hamster wheel? And it definitely made things more difficult for us, because yeah, when you fundraise, you just naturally get part of this kind of Silicon Valley industrial complex where people will, your VCs will tweet about you. You'll get the tech runs outlines, you'll get announced in all of the newspapers because you raised at this massive valuation. And so it made things more difficult us because the only way we were going to succeed was by building a 10 times better product and getting word of mouth from researchers. But I think it also meant that our customers were people who really understood data and really cared about it. I always thought it was really important for us to have early customers who were really aligned with what we were building, and who really cared about having really high quality data, and really understood how that data would make their AI models so much better because they were the ones helping us. They were the ones giving us feedback on what we're producing. And so just having that kind of very close mission alignment with our customers actually helped us early on. So these are people who basically just buying our product because they knew how different it was and because it was helping them rather than because they saw something in that current [inaudible 00:08:52]. So it made things harder for us, but I think in a really good way. It's such an empowering story to hear this journey for founders that they don't need to be on Twitter all day promoting what they're doing. They don't have to raise money. They can just kind of go heads down and build, so I love so much about the story of Surge. For people that don't know what Surge does, just to give us a quick explanation of what Surge is.…

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