Edwin Chen built Surge AI, a data-labeling marketplace, without any outside funding after leaving Facebook. His platform of 100,000 labelers tags training data for AI companies like OpenAI, generating about $1 billion in revenue annually. At 37, Chen owns 100% of what's valued at $30 billion.
This guy is worth something like $30 billion. Is this the guy who's doing Surge? He worked at Facebook. He had a list of 50,000 vendors and he needed to figure out which of those was a restaurant and which a grocery store. So he went and hired a firm to like parse it out and it's like manual. And he was like, it took us 4 months, which basically just meant we had to sit and wait. Edwin had this idea of, I'm going to create this massive workforce who can go through and label all of these answers as good or bad. Started in 2020. Now he has 100,000 people who are in the marketplace working for him as these data labelers. So if you go to Surge AI, it's a landing page with one paragraph, and a company like OpenAI is going to pay Surge millions and millions of dollars. It was leaked that they did $1 billion in revenue in the last 12 months. This guy, Edwin Chen, he's only 37 years old and he owns 100% of the company. They have not taken any outside funding.
