Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO)

A lot of the bets we're making inside the company are for things that are not, you know, three, four weeks away. We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to twelve months. Every six to twelve months it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of our existing product look dumb. How do you know when it's time to hire someone? I want a the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity. Every hire is like a little bit of water and we only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated. skills you think people should be investing more in with the rise of AI building more and more of our products. The engineers are now able to produce the ROI of building technology has actually gone up. This actually means you hire more. The best thing to do is just get your hands dirty with all of these products. You could be a force multiplier to your organization in ways in which they never even anticipate. Today my guest is Varun Mohan. Varun is the co-founder and CO of WindServe.

Which has quickly become one of people's favorite AI coding tools, and is basically the main competitor to Cursor, with over 1 million users four months in. In our conversation, Maroon shares what makes Windsurf unique. Why they decided to invest heavily in enterprise sales very early in their history, why agency is gonna be the most important skill for engineers and product builders to build, also the story of how they started out as a GPU infrastructure company and realized there was a much bigger opportunity up the stack, and the two pivots that got them to where they are today. He also gives a live demo, advice for being successful with Windsurf, and so much more. There's so much to learn about where things are heading for engineers and product builders in general in this conversation. I'm really excited to bring it to you. Thank you to everyone on LinkedIn and Twitter and my newsletter community for suggesting great questions to dig into with Varun. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, You get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Notion Plus, Linear, Granola, and Superhuman. Check it out at Lenny's Newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Maroon Mohan. This episode is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack used by one in every three US venture-backed startups.

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