Edwin Chen
24 statements across 1 episodes · 8 bullish · 10 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jul 21, 2025 by Edwin Chen · said 9 times in 7 episodes since 2025 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Edwin Chen's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (6), Jason Lemkin (2), Brendan Foody (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 7 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Lovable CEO, Anton Osika: The State of Foundation Models, Grok vs OpenAI, and Replit vs Bolt · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Figma’s IPO: The Full Breakdown & Why Melio’s $2.5BN Acquisition is “Discouraging” · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mercor CEO & Co-Founder, Brendan Foody: How They Grew from $1M to $500M in 17 Months · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic Raises $13BN & OpenAI Buys Statsig for $1.1BN All Stock · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Windsurf x Google x Cognition: Full Breakdown: Who Made Money, Who Did Not · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
Everything said about Edwin Chen, oldest first
Jul 21, 2025
Chen: Truly important tech news reaches founders without daily Twitter monitoring
“So every now and then, if something is important enough, like maybe there's some big new product is actually really cool, or there's some really, really interesting new research paper. It'll be like big enough that even though I'm not monitoring Twitter every …”
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Edwin Chen: Big Tech employees prioritize internal promotions over customers
“At these bigger companies, a lot of your priorities, a lot of the things that you're building, they're simply, you're simply building them to impress someone. Like, hey, I need to impress my VP. I need to impress my manager. I need to impress my director so th…”
Jul 21, 2025
Edwin Chen admits he does not understand standard financial terms like EBITDA
“One area where I'm not great is I'm really bad at understanding financials. So sometimes people around the company, they'll try to tell me, Like, hey, do you, have you been paying attention to our revenue numbers? Have you been paying attention to our costs? H…”
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Edwin Chen: Single-person $1B companies will exist due to AI
“I mean, I absolutely believe that that company was this one day. Like you think about it, like I've always believed in 10 X engineers, even a hundred X engineers. And already you have a lot of these single person startups that are already doing ten million rev…”
Jul 21, 2025
Edwin Chen holds zero one-on-one meetings with direct reports at Surge
“So like I, for example, personally, I actually have no one-on-one meetings and it's kind of funny because oftentimes people will ask me, well, How often do you meet with your reports? How often do you set aside for, like, for these meetings? I just don't have …”
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Edwin Chen: 100x engineers exist through multiplicative compounding of small advantages
“Some people are simply two to three times better, like two to three times faster than anybody else, right? They just code faster. There are some people who simply have two to three times more better ideas. There are people who simply work two to three times as…”
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Edwin Chen: AI tools disproportionately benefit 10x engineers over average workers
“If you don't have to spend that time on the drudgery, but you just have like these endless ideas that are just bouncing around your head and AI just helps you put them to paper. Then I do think it kind of disproportionately favors people who are already like t…”
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Edwin Chen: Dismissing AI safety ignores current issues like benchmark hacking
“So I think a lot of people think AI safety is overblown, but I think they ignore the paperclip maximizer problem where you have AI models that are accidentally trained towards the wrong objectives, even though this is a big problem that all the models face tod…”
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Edwin Chen: 90% of startups should build an MVP before raising capital
“Yeah, for a 90% of companies, no. Like, sure, there are some companies where you actually do need a lot of capital in order to build hardware or, like, whatever it is for a couple years. Like you really need a lot of investment before, before you before you ca…”
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Jul 21, 2025 bullish
Chen predicts future will feature multiple competing frontier AGI companies
“How I see a world where there actually will be multiple, multiple, Frontier AI companies, Frontier AGIs, just because every one of them will be able to go in a different direction. Like, you see it already, you see it today playing out already with the differe…”
Jul 21, 2025 neutral
Chen: Built Surge AI V1 solo rather than fundraising $10M-$30M
“As opposed to feeling like I needed to go out and hire 10 engineers in order to build a product, instead of feeling like I needed to go out and fundraise, you know, 10, 20, thirty million dollars in order to hire, you know, more people. Again, I just wanted to…”
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Chen: Standing weekly one-on-one meetings are a negative management signal
“Like, it's almost like a negative sign if you're having a one-on-one weekly meeting, because it means that you just don't know what's going on with these people. You're not, you're like almost waiting for your weekly meeting to raise, raise interesting questio…”
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Jul 21, 2025
Chen: Differentiating doers from empire builders comes down to candidate interview questions
“I think a big part of it actually just boils down to the kinds of questions they ask me. Like some people, when I interview them, they will ask really interesting questions about our product. They will brainstorm about ideas to make our product even better. Th…”
Jul 21, 2025 negative
Chen: Competitors treat AI data purely as supply, ignoring technology
“There are some companies in this space who will simply think of it as a pure supply problem, and they don't give any consideration to the technology, like both the technology, the underlying technology, like, how do you identify these people? How do you make s…”
Jul 21, 2025
Edwin Chen: Number of hours worked should not be confused with progress
“I think a lot of people do confuse working hard with creating value. Like again, I mean, it's maybe a trope to say, but you have to work smart and not just hard. Like, if I think about a lot of what I'm doing, oftentimes the best ideas come to me when I'm just…”