YouSaid · the spoken record

Varun Mohan

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-04-20
most recent: 2025-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“When you think about the people, at least that I don't know, Lenny, who you respect the most, they're the people that somehow, despite their title, their level of agency and just output, just to all the way down to the weeds, to the highest level strategy is just perfection, right? They know when to go all the way down. And I think, you know, sometimes you see people that talk about roles and the irrationally feel like, oh, because I'm this role, I'm not allowed to touch this. Well, now everything's open season, right? And I think this is an opportunity to almost go all the way down to the weeds and all the way up to the top, right? And just be effective on every level.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, build ops. Start using it for maybe even making mocks, modifying your existing code base. There's probably ways in which you could be a force multiplier to your organization and ways in which they never even anticipated. Imagine if you were a product manager that could actually very quickly make edits to the code base and just start pushing changes yourself. You probably get a tremendous amount of respect from your own engineering peers. You could probably get way more done because of that. It's just, I feel like there's no sort of ceiling at that point.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be honest, I could give predictions about the space. Probably most of them are going to be wrong. I think the best thing to do is just get your hands dirty with all of these products. And I think one of the most obvious things that's going to happen is in the next year, there will be a tremendous amount of alpha for anyone that is able to take maximum advantage of these tools. Just imagine how many of your coworkers just don't even know the existence of these tools, don't know what they can do, and how much less productive they will be. And just I would just say get your hands as dirty as possible, as quickly as possible.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think part of that is I waxed poetically about, oh, you need to be irrationally sort of optimistic and uncompromisingly realistic. But it's very hard to do this in practice, right? Because you drink your own Kool-Aid too. It's very, because if you're not drinking your own Kool-Aid, you won't get up out of bed. The answer is already solved. It's not actually any of these startups. The answer is Microsoft is going to be the winner in any software category, right? Isn't that the answer? Just because of distribution resources and capital, right? They're going to commoditize every space. So I think in some ways this amount of just understanding that, hey, like reevaluate your hypotheses and get into an uncomfortable space way more frequently is something I need to remind myself even to this day and probably something that I didn't know coming in and starting the company, right? We started the company at the peak zerp time at that time. Everything seemed like it was.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I wish I had maybe humility is like the wrong term, but this idea of just being okay with being wrong faster. I always think about things on like when we make decisions, me and my co-founder, we always talk about it. We're almost like, hey, I wish we had made the decision to do this a couple months earlier. We always talk about this. And the weird thing is outside looking at everyone's like, wow, like actually, you know, the decision was made at the right time. But in my head, I'm always banging my head being like, what if we had made it a couple months earlier?”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like that's almost table sticks. Yeah, we'll decide to do some of these. We might not decide to do a lot of these things, but it's like it's these longer term efforts inside the company that almost disrupt the existing product that are ultimately the reason why we're going to succeed. And it's this weird tension that you need to have in your head of you can't also not listen to your users at all because they're they're the reason you exist”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every six to 12 months it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of our existing product look dumb. So there's this weird tension where you want to have a product and market and you want to incrementally iterate and listen to users and keep making it better and better. But I would say we were the first Adentic IDE product out there. That's what we landed with. And I think the value of that is going to depreciate very quickly unless we continue to reprove ourselves. And we will need to reprove ourselves in ways in which our users are not even asking. So there's this tension here where incremental feels”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the weird things is online, everyone is very excited about the short term wins that we're making, right? Like what we're putting out maybe weekly. We do these waves every couple weeks. But actually, a lot of the bets we're making inside the company are for things that are not three, four weeks, maybe three, six months, nine months away. That's what we're working on internally. Because I think this is kind of like Lenny, what I was mentioning to you before. One of the goals that I tell everyone at our company is we should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ROI of building technology has actually gone up. So the opportunity cost of not investing more into technology has gone up, which means that you should just invest even more. And maybe in the short term, you have even more engineers. Now, that's not true across the board. There are some companies that are happy with the amount of technology they're building, and there's a ceiling on the amount of technology they want to build. But for companies that actually have a very high technology ceiling, this doesn't mean you stop. This actually means you hire more.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And only 30 units of time is being spent writing software. And I took the 30 and made it three. I only took the 100 and made it 73. It's only a 27% improvement, right? In the grand scheme of things. So I think, look, we're definitely seeing over 30, maybe close to 40% productivity improvements. But I think for the vision that we're solving for, I think, even if I were to say the company in the long tail had 200 engineers, probably be too low still at that point. So the question is like, how much more productivity do you get per person? You know, actually, maybe just to even say one other thing for some of these large companies, let's say you took the CIO of a company like JP Morganchase, right? Her budget on software every year is $17 billion. And there's over 50,000 engineers inside the company, right? And you told her, hey, like each of these engineers are now able to produce more technology. That's effectively what you've done, right? The right calculus that JP Morgan Chase or any of these companies will make is”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it really comes down to do you get incremental value by adding more engineers internally? I'm going to take, first of all, maybe just to set the record straight, if AI is writing over 90% of the code that doesn't mean engineers are 10x as productive engineers spend more time than just writing code, they review code, test code, debug code, design code, deploy code, right, navigate code. There's probably like a lot of different things that engineers do. There's this one famous law in parallel computing. It's called Amdal's law. I don't know if you've heard about it, but it basically says if you have a graph of tasks and you have this critical path and you take any one task and parallelize it a ton, which is make it almost take zero amount of time, there's still a limit of the amount of how much faster it made the whole process go. So maybe put simply, let's say you have 100 units of time.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. And then obviously we have functions like recruiting parts of GNA like finance. We have marketing at the company. So some other functions internally as well.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's like maybe one other decision we made. And then teams are very, very flexible. So if we decide something is a new priority, we're very quick to kind of like change the way a team looks. And it's very centrally planned in this regard”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And tell us we have people that kind of like flex in this product strategy world that understand kind of what the customer wants and understands the technical capabilities that we have to best kind of build a product that would sort of help them at scale. So I think we have an interesting organization in this regard, but mostly I would say because we are a developer-based product, right? I would say that's true. And then also kind of like what you said for the engineering team itself, we are the team structure is fairly flat. We try to go with two pizza teams, teams that are fairly small just because I think the problem is when a team gets too big, the person leading the team is no longer able to get in the weeds of the technology itself. And I think in a space that's moving this quickly, I think it's dangerous to have leaders that don't understand the technology deeply and are like not building. It's like very, very dangerous because there's too much armchair quarterbacking.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One interesting decision that we kind of have for core engineering is that we don't have pure product managers for the core engineering side of the company. And by the way, that's purely because we build for developers and our product is built by developers. So I think the intuition from our own developers is hopefully valuable. If not, we might be hiring the wrong type of people. So I think our developers are in some sense flexing to be like more product conventional product managers. Now, on the other hand, if we were building something that looked more like Uber or the persona was very different and we didn't ourselves understand it, I think we would not be, the organization wouldn't look the way it looks. For the enterprise side of the company, because we do work with a lot of large enterprises where the requirements are not something that our engineers would automatically understand, right? I don't think our engineers wake up and they're like, we need FedREMP, right? Like, this is probably something that a lot of customers come to us.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's important. I think we believe a lot of people sort of build software in what are called code spaces and things in a remote machine. I just think it's that a lot of developers like building locally for what you said. Like if you're doing things that are more than just full stack applications, you might have dependencies on your machine that are just system dependencies that are just gnarly to install. Let's imagine you're building a GPU-based application and the NVIDIA drivers are necessary. You just want to give people the flexibility to build where they can build. And I think the IDE at building locally has been a thing that people have done for decades. So probably it's not going to go away in the next couple of years.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on how you do it, but maybe if I was to say this, if the inputs you're consuming are just web elements, extremely high level web elements, then the interface might be high level enough that it's hard to maybe get better than maybe what the frontier models are doing just across the board. You are just better off just plugging in it for everything.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A company, it feels like it might get competitive in a way that it's not clear where you would continue to differentiate over and over with time.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is sort of why maybe at a high level, we like the zero to one upbuilding product space. I think it's really a good product space. But ultimately, I think it needs to boil down to you understanding the code because otherwise you're living at too high a plane where it's not clear why you would be able to be the best at that compared to everyone else. It's not really clear.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out and train models on all the preferences that we have. The same is kind of true on retrieval, right? There's a way to find out are we retrieving the right data? Did the user accept the code chains after that? Was the retrieval actually a good retrieval a signal that we can get? So basically, the way we like to look at it is if something is just purely code planning, there's not a great reason why we would be the best at that. I think that would not be, I can't come up with a coherent argument for that. But for something that looks more along the lines of, hey, here's an intermediate code base that is very gnarly. And here are some changes that need to get made. And we know the evolution of the code, or we've seen the evolution of code across millions of users. We feel like we can do a great job with that.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one of the interesting things that we have from our users, and this is like where we try to think, like why would we be any better? It's that actually every hour we get probably tens of millions of pieces of feedback from our users. We get a lot of feedback on what they like and what they don't like. For something like Autocomplete, we get a lot of preference data, a lot of preference data. And the preference data is weird. It doesn't look like data that you find on the internet. It's like data as the user is typing, right? Imagine you're typing typing some code in a code base. The code is going to be incomplete as you're typing it, right? It's not going to be in a full-fledged form. It's not like it is on GitHub. But we have a lot of data that looks like this. So we are uniquely well positioned to actually build a good model that can complete code even when it's in an incomplete state, when the models that are out there, the frontier models have consume very little code that looks like this. So for that case, we're like, hey, we can go out and do a much better job potentially.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interestingly, the one that does retrieval is actually completely pre trained in house that actually does that. But yeah, for a lot of different pieces, it's based on open source. Interestingly, for the one that does the edits and autocomplete, that is also in-house. As you're typing, we actually do some autocomplete related stuff. I'm happy to show that. But I think a lot of users are familiar with that capability. So I think the way we like to look at it is like, what could we be best at? And we will go ahead and train. But if we're not going to be best at it, we should not just for the sake of ego go out and trade something.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second piece that you saw was the model is able to very quickly make edits to the software as well. We have custom models that we built that are post-crained on top of popular open source models that can make these edits really, really quickly to the code base. And the reason why you would want to do that is it's A faster and B also that model can actually have more of the code base in context too. So it can be better at applying changes than even Anthropics model too. So I think the way we like to think about it is our only goal is how do we build the best product possible? How do we build the best product possible and how do we make the ceiling as high as possible? And we will go out and build models and train models wherever necessary. But if we're not going to be good at a task and we think the open source is better or entropic is better, we'll go ahead and just use the open source or entropy.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So just to break down how it ultimately works, we have a model that does planning. And I would say right now Sonnet is a really, really good planning model. I think OpenAI's GPT 40 is also good. But the crazy thing is what we try to do is we try to make the anthropic-based model or Sonnet model, try to do as much of the high level planning as possible. And then what we try to do internally is run all the models necessary to do high quality retrieval for the agent. As you can see, the agent needed to understand what the rest of the code base ultimately did. We actually make sure we run models to actually chunk up the entire code base and understand the code base so that obviously it would not be a good idea if we had a hundred million line code base to send that entire code base to Anthropic. First of all, you couldn't do that. That's over 1.5 billion tokens of code, right? So obviously that would be three orders, three or four orders of my actually larger than the largest context lengths right now. But you also wouldn't want to do that from like a cost and latency standpoint too. So that's like one.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shows that agency is what matters. If you have a product manager that has an idea, there's no reason for why that idea cannot be more well fleshed out, right? Like how many times do you have a product manager that just continualize ideas, but it just feels like they are extremely unsure on how to execute on it? They just want to save things for the sake of saying things. But for the people that have ideas and a lot of, I guess, agency, they can go out and like prove out what they want without any sort of external resources.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gets five minutes and maybe even more custom to your system, right? Like, how many times have you bought a piece of bought a software and you're almost like, why is there no integration to X? And I actually use X.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Main specialists now have access to build the tools that they ultimately wanted, which is actually crazy. If you think about why were these software companies able to exist, these vertical software companies, the reason is because they had many features. The kitchen sink of features worked for a lot of companies, but each individual company only wanted 10% of the features. But the problem is each individual company was not capable of maintaining a piece of software or building the custom piece of software for 10% of the features. But that has now changed entirely. Now they can.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think maybe my viewpoint are these very, very verticalized niche products, I think are going to get competed down a ton. And I think sales products are an example of one of these things, right? And maybe this is, I don't want to be like very negative, but it's very hard inside a company like ours to task our best engineers to build a best-in-class sales product. There's not enough interest to do that or to build a best-in-class legal software product or finance software product. It's very, very hard for us to, right? And actually, that's a very big moat for these companies that built these products that they were able to come out, have an opinionated stance on how to do this, hire good enough engineers to go out and build the software. And our company is unwilling to do that. So previously, we would go out and buy the technology, right? Because there would be no alternative. But now one of the crazy things is that the domain”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To deploy these apps easily in a secure way. And we're actually now building very, very custom software for our company to operate more efficiently, which is, I would not have expected this probably six months ago.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lenny, the interesting thing is the base app that you saw for this was also generated by Windsurf. The reason why we sort of didn't generate it is installing all the dependencies takes like three or four minutes. And for the demo, I didn't want to wait, but totally, actually, most of the users of the product probably zero to one build these apps. And if I can say one interesting thing is when we launched Windsurf, actually we tasked everyone under a company to go out and build an app with Windsurf that included our go-to-market team and our sales team. And there was a crazy stat that I think people would find surprising, but we've saved over half a million dollars of SaaS products we were going to buy because our go-to-market team has now built apps instead of buying them. Like our head of partnerships, instead of buying a partner portal product, has actually built his own partner portal, right? And that was that, you know, he had never built software in the past. And we've actually come up with ways inside the company.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And because it deeply understands the code base, it should go out and find all the corresponding places to go out and make the change. And obviously now when I reload my app, there's no bug in the app, right? It still loads properly. I can obviously tell it to do even cooler things, like make the app retro. I don't know what that means, but I guess I can do that. And it should go out and make the change correspondingly for me. But yeah, that's maybe the high-level sort of parts there where the AI is not only kind of able to operate entirely in app space, but also on the code space of the user is going out and modifying code and to bridge the gap between the two. So it should add leverage not only non-developers that are just purely building apps, but also developers that are just hands-on keyboard too.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Title string, right? Instead, like this. And if I wanted to go out and make that change and make the change to go out and say title string, right? And that's what I'm going to do, I'm just going to tell the ad to continue. And the cool part about this is Windserf not only kind of knows about what the agent has done, it also knows everything that the user has done. Like our goal here is to have this almost flow-like state where everything the user has done, the AI also knows. And it's able to predict the intent. And as you can see, it said, I noticed that the interface property title was changed to title string. And then it now has gone out and modified all the locations within the app from title to title string. And now it no longer says that. This is where even if I'm writing software and I want to go and make point changes, the AI can go out and quickly make these changes for on the user's behalf. Imagine doing a refactor or migration and you just change one part of the code, you can just tell the AI to continue the rest.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when there's nowhere designed, maybe the answer is when you ask me what should people be doing, they should study great taste, having great taste, because I think taste is also a very, very hard, right? But maybe the other key piece, Lenny, that I wanted to showcase here is like, obviously you could keep going here. I could take different components and kind of change them. We have a lot of plans here that are beyond just point and click changing components. But one of the cool pieces is the AI. There's like an AI review flow as well, right? Which is kind of like what I was saying. The goal of AI is now changed a lot in that it is now modifying large chunks of code for you. And the job of a developer now is to actually review a lot of the code that the AI has generated. And Reddit right now during this podcast, I'm not going to review all the code that's getting generated. But let's say I want to go out and modify some of this code, right? And this is where if you're an actual developer that actually wants to go modify, maybe I don't like my variable name being called title. I want it to be...”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice dug app. And one of the cool parts is that we've also done beyond just modifying code is actually being able to point to different pieces. And I guess If I took this element. Make this background red. And just take a particular element and just change it and make it red. And it should go out and be able to go out and do this. The preview aspect of the product of being able to showcase the app while it's getting built helps in that now actually you can live entirely an app world, right? You don't even maybe even need to look at the code. Granted, this looks hideous, but in some ways, if I wanted to, I could go out and do that, right?”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Annoying is actually because you've actually learned that, hey, 70% of the time, I don't need to accept this. And the times that I do, I know how to get value from it, right? And you also know beforehand, if a sort of command that you write is very complex, you just expect, hey, like the autocomplete is not going to work for it. So I think it's almost like understand what the hills and valleys of the product are. The crazy thing is every three months that kind of gets changed and reevaluated. It almost becomes the case that it becomes materially better than it was in the past. So I think maybe patience and being explicit are maybe two important key pieces that I would tell users.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tip number one is just be a little bit patient. And both patient and explicit, right? When you ask the application to go out and make some changes, it could actually go out and make many irrelevant changes. And one of the things that I think prevents this the most is just be really, really explicit or as explicit as possible. And one of the things I sort of ask people to do is in the beginning, start by making smaller changes. If there's a very large directory, don't go out and make it refactor the entire directory, right? Because then if it's wrong, it's going to basically destroy 20 files. And I think from there, one of the key pieces I think that comes from the users that use the product is they sort of learn what the hills and values of the product are. And the analogy I like to give are kind of similar to autocomplete, right? When you use a product like autocomplete, you would think a product that is suggesting things but only getting accepted 30% of the time would be really, really annoying. But the reason why it's not very”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is all you need. This is all you need. So basically, what we're going to do is we're going to say, hey, one of the cool parts about Windsur is it can actually work in an existing project already, right? So I can basically say, hey, change this React app. To show an Airbnb for Dog's website based on this image and preview it. So now it'll just go out and start executing code reading through the repository. Obviously doesn't know what the current code base actually looks like and it'll go out and analyze the code base to actually find out the set of changes necessary. So we'll go out and wait and see what it's going to do. But while we're doing that, let's continue the conversation.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. So, in some context, this is a very basic React project. There's nothing in it right now. So if you were to open any sort of file, it's the default React app project. And I have this basic image here. You can pass Windsurf images of what you'd like the project to kind of look like of what I would like an Airbnb for dogs website to kind of look like.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very large, large product. And by the way, that company itself is a privately held company that makes many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. So it's a very, very large company. So for us, that's another key piece. We actually want to meet developers sort of where they are and if they use a different platform, we'll work on that too. The third key piece, and this probably sounds another key piece for enterprises, is we work in a lot of very secure environments. We have FedRAM compliance, right? Which means we can sell to very large government entities. We have a hybrid mode of actually using the product, which means that all the code that lives, that is indexed actually lives on the tenant of the user, right? Code is one of the most important pieces of IP for the company. So I think just if you were to look at it from like a big company perspective, there are many reasons why like over the years of just building an enterprise product, we've handled a lot of complexities that large companies want to see. But that's part of it is because of the history of how we got.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The S code is not very extensible. So I think for us, our goal here is not only just to satisfy a subset of users that can actually switch onto our ID, but we want to give this agentic sort of experience to every sort of developer out there. And if that means they're Java developers that write in JetBrains, that's fine. We work with a lot of large enterprises that have 10 plus 1000 developers where over 50% of the developers are on JetBrands.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah. So, we that's like a big thing that we spent a lot of time on, which is just understanding sort of what the code base is doing. And actually, like one of the other things is what are all the user interactions with respect to the code base? I'm happy to show that also, you know, in a bit here. Awesome. The second key piece probably is we're not only tied to Windsurf, actually. This is probably like a weird statement given we are talking about Windsurf, which is that actually we're pretty focused on supporting IDEs like JetBrinks, right? You know, JetBrings or IntelliJ has over 70 to 80% of all Java developers code in JetRain based IDs, right? The reason why we don't feel ads big a need to almost build a competing project to Jeffrey's is Jeff Brains is actually a very sort of extensible product in a way that VS Code is not.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think maybe a handful of things that I could share. So, on the product side, I think we've invested a lot in making sure code bit.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the one who was selling the product. So ultimately speaking, if it was hard for me to sell the product incrementally, I didn't know how we could make that into a process that we could then go and scale. If I can do one, like I didn't know how we could take the revenue of the business from a couple million to hundreds of millions, and let alone even tents. So if I didn't know how to do that, how could I go out and hire someone and make them scale it out? On the other hand, for codium, very quickly, a lot of large enterprises sort of reached out to us. And from that alone, in the middle of sort of 2023, we started, I guess, me and a handful of other folks at the company started selling the product and we were doing tens of pilots concurrently with large enterprises. And we were very quickly able to understand that there was a large enterprise motion that needed to be built in this space. So by the end of 2023, we actually hired our VP of sales and very quickly after that scaled sales team. And yeah, I mean.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's not that black and white. Like, I think enterprise sales is really valuable. But maybe when we were GPU virtualization company and we were an infrastructure company, the reason why we never hired a salesperson is I didn't know how to scale the function.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we actually made this decision pretty early in the company's history, I would say. We hired a VP of sales over a year ago, actually. And the go-to-market team has now over 80 people inside the company. So it's a pretty sizable function inside the company. Yeah, maybe a little bit of a backstory here. So when we started the company, actually, we had a handful of angels that actually were operators, go-to-market operators. So an example of one was Carlos Delatore, who used to be the CRO of MongoDB. And I think for us, we never viewed enterprise sales and sales as like a very negative thing. I think this is like an interesting thing that technical founders sometimes don't really like. They think sales is like a very negative sort of part of the process. Everything should be product-led growth.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're okay with people using the tools because I think one of the worst things is like if someone comes here and doesn't like using these tools we believe they're massive productivity improvements. We do bring people into the company like on site so we can actually see how they think through problems on a whiteboard and all these other pieces. So we do want to see how they think on their feet and hopefully they're not just like taking what we're saying, putting it in a voice translator and sticking it into chat and getting the answer out. So there is a way to do this. My viewpoint on this is the tools are really, really important. But I do think we still look for some problem solving ability, right? Like if the only way you can solve a hard problem is like put it into chat GPT. I think that's like a concern to us.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's probably post a take home, it's probably that, actually. So the take home itself filters probably another 10, 15x on top of that.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So for us, I think that's what we more care about, right? We have a culture where it's very collaborative. It's not an individual sport, but people feel like they can rely on other people to get complex sort of tasks done.”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not pulling their weight. That's bad. It's not the productivity, right? At some point when the company becomes many hundreds of engineers, I'm not going to be thinking about the one engineer that's not blowing their weight. It's the team of people they work with that are almost basically saying, is this the bar internally at the company? Is this the expectation? And I guess, Lenny, if I told you you have a team of five people and the four other people you're working with just don't care, how much are you going to feel like you should care?”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the key pieces that we look for, we have a very high technical bar. So assuming that they actually meet the technical bar, I think we sort of look for people that are really, really passionate about the mission of what we're actually trying to solve and people that are willing to work very hard. I think one of the things that we don't try to do is convince people, hey, look, we're a very chill company and it's great to work here. I think, no, this is a very exciting space. It's very competitive. You should expect us to lose if the people at the company are not kind of working very hard. And I think one of the biggest dog whistles I sort of hear is when I ask people how hard are you willing to work? Some people actually ultimately say, hey, I work very smart and I basically ask them a question if we have many smart people at our company that also work hard, what's the differentiate or going to be? Are you just going to pull them down? Because I think one of the things that's true about companies is it's like this massive group project. And I think the thing about a person that is”
2025-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source