How this 100-person company became essential to Anthropic, Google and frontier AI labs

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The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)

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The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)

Lenny Rachitsky

Dec 07, 2025

∙ Paid

Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge AI, the company that teaches AI what’s good and bad, powering frontier labs with elite data, environments, and evaluations. Surge surpassed $1 billion in revenue with under 100 employees last year, completely bootstrapped—the fastest company in history to reach this milestone. Before founding Surge, Edwin was a research scientist at Google, Facebook, and Twitter and studied mathematics, computer science, and linguistics at MIT.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts

We discuss:

How Surge reached over $1 billion in revenue with fewer than 100 people by obsessing over quality
The story behind how Claude Code got so good at coding and writing
The problems with AI benchmarks and why they’re pushing AI in the wrong direction
How RL environments are the next frontier in AI training
Why Edwin believes we’re still a decade away from AGI
Why taste and human judgment shape which AI models become industry leaders
His contrarian approach to company building that rejects Silicon Valley’s “pivot and blitzscale” playbook
How AI models will become increasingly differentiated based on the values of the companies building them

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Where to find Edwin Chen:

• X: https://x.com/echen

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinzchen

• Surge’s blog: https://surgehq.ai/blog

Referenced:

• Surge: https://surgehq.ai

• Surge’s product page: https://surgehq.ai/products

• Claude Code: https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code

• Gemini 3: https://aistudio.google.com/models/gemini-3

• Sora: https://openai.com/sora

• Terrence Rohan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrencerohan

• Richard Sutton—Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/richard-sutton

• The Bitter Lesson: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

• Reinforcement learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning

• Grok: https://grok.com

• Warren Buffett on X: https://x.com/WarrenBuffett

• OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/kevin-weil-open-ai

• Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-cpo-heres-what-comes-next

• Brian Armstrong on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barmstrong

• Interstellar on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Interstellar-Matthew-McConaughey/dp/B00TU9UFTS

• Arrival on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Arrival-Amy-Adams/dp/B01M2C4NP8

• Travelers on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80105699

• Waymo: https://waymo.com

• Soda versus pop: https://flowingdata.com/2012/07/09/soda-versus-pop-on-twitter