Chen: Differentiating doers from empire builders comes down to candidate interview questions
Edwin Chen · Surge CEO & Co-Founder, Edwin Chen: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with NO Funding · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 21, 2025 · at 5:16
Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge. He discusses his framework for interviewing job candidates to identify doers who execute versus managers focused on personal status and team size.
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“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. They'll be like, okay, yeah, like I went to your webpage. Why don't you improve these things? I tried signing up as a worker. Like, why don't like, why did these things happen in the flow? I tried working on this project. Like, what if you guys did this instead? And other people are like, If I join in a year, will I be able to be a manager of a company? If I join, will you be able to hire, like, will I be able to hire 20 more people to support me? And so it kind of just boils down, I think, a lot of times to the kinds of questions that people even have at the forefront of their minds.”
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