Why Surge AI is entirely bootstrapped

We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. 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 in your product every day? Or was it explaining all your decisions to VCs and getting on this giant PR and fundraising hamster wheel? It definitely made things more difficult for us because when you fundraise, you just naturally get part of this kind of Silicon Valley industrial complex where your VCs will tweet about you, you'll get the tech, run chat lines. The only way we were going to succeed was by building a 10 times better product and getting word of mouth from researchers. So yeah, I wish I know that you don't need to spend all your time fundraising. You don't need to constantly generate hype. You don't need to become someone you're not. You can actually build a successful company by simply building something so good that it cut through all that noise.