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Varun Mohan

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81
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2025-04-20
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2025-04-20
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  1. “People's value to the company does not have anything to do with the size of their team. There are projects inside the company that are directly responsible individuals for these projects inside the company. And if we feel like one project is very important, then people can move from one project to the next, right? There's no notion of someone owning people at the company. That is a very bad and gnarly idea, right? In fact, the person that is the most valuable at the company is the person that can do”

    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

  2. “Decision actually, oh wow, that's great. Maybe we actually should deprioritize why because this is actually also another thing that's very hard even for people like me and my co-founder. It's that we also want to do a lot of things, right? There's an urge to do a lot of things. But if we are forced to make a decision constantly on like we cannot do X, it's very clarifying. It's very clarifying because our engineering interview process is also like extremely low acceptance rate. So it's not very easy for us to very quickly spin up people and have them join the company really, really quickly either. So I think it's clarifying for everyone. It's clarifying for the person that wants more people. We can just tell them, hey, like, look, we don't believe you should be doing this other thing. And it's also clarifying for us because we can also get on the same page with them. And sometimes we just kind of agree, hey, like our teams are very flexible that, hey, actually, we do need to get something done. And one of the things that we've kind of tried to make sure is true on our engineering team 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

  3. “I think it's basically along those lines. It's that, hey, there's some pressure to get something done in a short period of time. By the way, one of the things that we do believe, though, for software, if you want to do great things, it's not possible to just say, hey, I want to get it done in one month. If it is like, because you have to think about it from this perspective, if a software project could get built in two to three weeks, what does that really mean about the true complexity and differentiation of what you built? It's probably not very high unless you believe you are way smarter than everyone else. But I think that's hubris, right? I think we actually have a very exceptional engineering team, but also at the same time, I don't think our engineering team is so exceptional that we can do things in three weeks that the rest of the world can't do in like six to nine months. That's kind of stupid to believe that. So I think basically it comes down to that person coming out and being like, hey, look, I don't have enough time to do X us having a conversation to be like, okay, what can you do then? And if the answer is, I can only do less than that, then maybe we make a difference.”

    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

  4. “Means you just deprioritize things that don't matter. That actually forces this organizational prioritization that is just really, really good. And Douglas and I, Douglas being my co-founder, we can tell the company these are the two things that are the most important. But if we go out and tell these are the two things that are the most important to the company, and then we put the company has 20% more people than necessary, what's going to ultimately happen? It's almost a forcing function for ruthless prioritization to have fewer people or people that just that are just underwater internally at 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

  5. “Know what I actually think, Lenny? It's really good for a handful of reasons, which is that a lot of the people we respect and trust the people that work at the company. So this forces ruthless prioritization. You know, you have a team that's going out and doing something. They will never ask to work on something that's not important. In fact, if there are two things that they're working on, they're just going to just tell me, hey, there are two things on my plate. I just don't have the ability to do two. I can only do one, and they will pick the one that's most important. And this actually goes back to one thing that I think is true about startups and just companies in general. You don't win by doing 10 things kind of well. You win by doing one thing really well, and maybe you fail nine things. This is the thing that I've told the company. This is very different than school, right? In school, you optimize for your total GPA. But for companies, I just need to get an A plus on the one class that matters. And then I can get an F in all the other classes. And an F in all the other classes doesn't mean just doing illegal things that basically”

    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

  6. “One of the analogies I like to give is I want the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity and every hire is like a little bit of water and we only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated.”

    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

  7. “That's the dream, right? That's the dream. In terms of hiring philosophy, the way we sort of think about things is we only hire for a role if we're actually underwater for that function. So let's say we're going out and building inference technology. Unless we're underwater there, we will not go out and hire someone to go out and work for that. And the reason for that is I actually think this is a feature. When you hire for a role and you already have enough people there, you get a lot of weird politics that ultimately ends up happening. And it's not because people are bad people. I think most people are really well intentioned. But what happens when you have people that join a company? And in reality, you didn't really need them. They will go out and manufacture some other thing that they should go work on. They will go out and figure out something else to work on. And realistically, it's not that important, but they will go out and try to convince the rest of the organization that it is important, right? And I just think as a startup, we don't have the bandwidth to go out and deal with that, right? For me, I would like to see everyone just almost like be like raising their hands up being like, I'm dying. We need one more person. And that's when we go out and hire someone.”

    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

  8. “To satisfy our ambitions, right? That's what the goal is. And maybe Lenny, the way I would sort of put that out there is if I told you, hey, I'm going to build an autonomous vehicle and I said our team is 10 people, you should rightfully say, hey, Varun, you're not serious. And you'd be right. I'm not serious. At that point. So I think the answer is, what is the minimum number of people to go out and build the crazy ambition project that you have? And I think the project we are trying to go out and do, which is completely transformed the way software gets built, we've mentioned this inside the company. Our goal is to reduce the time it takes to build apps and technology by 99%. It is a tremendously sort of ambitious goal. It's not possible for us to be a 10, 20, 30, 40 person engineering team in the long term and actually satisfy that goal. We think there's a very, very high ceiling. So that's maybe the first key piece there. It's like actually, you know, if we can crack actually being a fairly sizable company, but still operate as if we're a startup.”

    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

  9. “I love the idea of being a lean company, but I don't idolize it in the way that, hey, it is a dream to be a 10% or 20% company that's making 50, 100, 200 million in revenue. That's not, I think, what we idolize inside the company. I think what we idolize is be the smallest company we can 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

  10. “To die. So we just look for this, right? But I would say for most software engineering jobs, that's probably not the case. Just think about big company X and what they're hiring for on the average software engineer interview. It probably doesn't look like 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

  11. “Think one of the things that's maybe a little bit undervalued is this kind of agency piece. And I think about this a lot, which is You have a lot of people that could go through college and go through school, and they're basically told exactly what to do on a P set, and they're given these very, very, I would say, well-defined pods that they need to take. And I think maybe in society and just school, we don't prioritize how do you make sure you get people with real agency that want to build something, right? Like their goal is not just to maybe graduate from college and then get a job at a big tech company where they're told exactly what to do or where to put the pixel on this one website. And I think that's maybe a skill set that is undervalued just right now, probably in the last maybe 10, 10 years or so. And I think that's going to be really, really important. You know, a skill for us, for a startup, obviously these are skills that we just look for. We look for people that are really high agency because we just recognize that by default, if we don't innovate and do crazy things, we're going to die. The company's just going to.”

    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

  12. “And based on that, you can make some trade offs and solve a problem. So, I don't know if I would say that you shouldn't go get a computer science degree. I think computer science is almost synonymous with problem solving. In that case, I think it's pretty valuable. Is everything you learn in your computer science degree useful? I'd say a lot of things that I learned in my computer science degree are not useful. I'll give you an example. I took a parallel computing class in Julia, and I don't think Julia is a very popular programming language anymore. Am I very sad that I took the class? The principles of parallel computing are still very useful, I would say, today.”

    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

  13. “I think maybe I think back a little bit. So I went to MIT. A lot of us at the company went to MIT together on the engineering team. And I think when I think about what we learned the most for engineering or computer science, it was not exactly like how do you write code? That's maybe that is almost a given that you can kind of write code after going to college. It's more like the principles of how you think about a problem and how you break it down, right? And how you solve it in an interesting way, right? So an example of a class that I really enjoyed was our distributed systems class. And there you're kind of reading through literature and understanding how some design decisions were kind of made. And I think it's more like a problem solving kind of course, right? And a major. It's a major of how you solve problems given some constraints of how computers today function, right? Like here's the speed at which memory sort of operates. Here's the speed at which here's how much computation you can do in one cycle or one second.”

    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

  14. “Actually, going and making the right technical decisions to go out and doing it. And I think that's where engineering is probably heading towards. Now, does that mean that no one needs a CS degree? I think that's maybe a little bit overplayed, a little bit just because maybe here's maybe my argument for that. A lot of developers nowadays that build full stack applications at least until like a handful of years ago, they probably went to college and took an operating system course. And in theory, they're not really playing around with the operating system, like the kernel scheduler very frequently. But do those principles help them in understanding why their applications are slow? Do they help them in understanding why some design decisions are better than the other? Yeah, that makes them a much better engineer than another engineer. And I think that idea and the understanding of what's going on at the bottom will make a good engineer even better, right? But also at the same time, it empowers a bunch of people that never understood all of those things how to actually build as well, which is an”

    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

  15. “Think when we think about what an engineer actually doing, it probably falls into three buckets, right? What should I solve for? How should I solve it? And then solving it. And I guess everyone who's working in this space is probably increasingly convinced that solving it, which is just the pure, I know how I'm going to do it and just going and doing it. AI is going to handle vast majority, if not all of it, right? In fact, it probably actually, with some of the work that we've done in terms of deeply understanding code bases, how should I solve it is also when you get closer and closer to getting done, right? If you deeply understand the environment inside an organization, if you deeply understand the code base, how you should solve it given best practices when the company also gets solved. So I think what engineering kind of goes to is actually what you wanted engineers to do in the first place, which is what are the most important business problems that we do need to solve? What are the most important capabilities that we need our application or product to have? And actually going and prioritizing those.”

    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

  16. “So maybe a handful, we launched the product a bit over four months ago. And in that period of time, over a million developers have tried the product. And obviously we have many hundreds of thousands of monthly active users right now.”

    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

  17. “Yeah, no, of course. And one of the key pieces that I just maybe Lenny that would be important to share is a lot of our developers do use Visual Studio Code, but there are lots of people that write in languages like Java sort of C++ and so on and so forth, and they might use the Jepprains family of IDEs that are like IntelliJ. And for us, we're actually still committed to building on those platforms, right? We just felt though that one of the dominant IDs, which was Visual Studio Code, was limiting the sort of user interface that we could give to our actual customers”

    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

  18. “Basically, it shows you refactors as well. And these refactors are almost in line refactors. And we were able to build a custom UI for that in Windsurf. But in VS Code, we needed to, because of the access to the APIs, we needed to dynamically generate images right alongside the user's cursor because we just didn't have access to the capabilities to showcase and edit properly. And what we realized is immediately by porting over to Windsurf, our acceptance rate tripled. Same ML models, it just tripled. So what that I just gave us confidence in is, yeah, like you could argue technology is very important. And I think technology is very important.”

    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

  19. “It could actually go out and modify large chunks of code. And one of the key pieces that we recognized was with this new paradigm with AI, AI was probably going to write well over 90% of the software, in which case the role of a developer and what they're doing in the ID is maybe reviewing code. Maybe it's actually a little bit different than what it is in the past, and we'll see this very soon with Windsurf. Maybe when you're using the product, actually, a good chunk of the user's time is actually reviewing what the AI is outputting. So we needed to build custom review flows into the IDE to actually make it so that it was easier to actually go out and do that, right? Because the developer is not spending all their time writing code. And this is the fundamental premise on why we built the product. We thought we were going to get limited a ton if we had very, very basic UI out there. And I'll give you even a simple example here. We have this autocomplete product, right, that completes a handful of lines of code. Now we've actually launched this offering called Windsurf tab 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

  20. “So Windsurf is an ID, right? It's an application to go out and build software and build applications. The crazy thing is a lot of people who use the product don't even probably know what an ID is, which is crazy. And we'll get into that in a second. But why did we go out and build Windsurf? And what is Windsurf? Maybe? Why couldn't we have just done this on top of conventional IDs like Visual Studio Coding? So maybe just to get into this a little bit, As we saw that AI was getting more and more powerful, the way people go out and build technology, we thought the interface for that was going to change remarkably. It was not going to be a conventional pure text editor where the user is writing a handful of lines of code or most of the code and the IDE provides maybe some basic feedback on what the user is doing right or wrong. And the basic feedback could be, hey, there's a bug in your software, a compiler error in your software. It could do much 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

  21. “Awesome when you have a great idea, but you should never be too in love with your ideas, and you have an organization that is very truth seeking. I think a lot of people at the company have had their ideas tested over and over again. Even just building Windsurf, that is not a complete company pivot, but that's a big decision that we made at the company. You kind of need to make some bets. And sometimes you're wrong and sometimes you're right. But if you have an organization that comes out and you feel like morale is not going to be low if you made the wrong decision, that's the best, right? That means you have optionality for the rest of time. And Lenny, one thing that I try to tell the company about this is this year, the total amount of engineering output we will have is much larger than the engineering output we had since the beginning of the company's creation till now. So that almost means every year is a new lease on life for us, right? It's almost a new way for us to test out an entirely new set of hypotheses. And maybe we were wrong about it.”

    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

  22. “I think the way we sort of think about this is even when we're working right now, we just accept that we're going to get a lot of things wrong. We're just going to get a lot of things wrong. Obviously, that's a very big moment because that was a bet the company moment in the sense that we basically said told our investors, hey, we're making money on this. We had already raised $28 million of capital and we were just like, hey, we're just going to pivot entirely from this. And we did that overnight, right? This wasn't this thing where we just said, hey, maybe a quarter, one or two quarters, because one of the things we knew that's very important for startups is focus. And if you're trying to do another thing that you think is big and you're focused on something that you don't believe is valuable, you're guaranteed going to fail of the thing you think is going to be big. So that's like that's a very obvious thing there. But I think once you go in with the assumption that a lot of your hypotheses are going to be wrong, but you will do the most concentrated work possible to go out and validate these hypotheses. And you won't be in love with your ideas. Like, I think ideas, it's...”

    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

  23. “Model architectures were going to be really, really heterogeneous. Working from an autonomous vehicle background, there were many different types of model architectures out there that were convolutional neural networks, graph neural networks, recurrent neural networks, LSTMs, sort of lighter neural nets with Frustrum point networks, right? And there were maybe like tens of architectures we were dealing with. And at that point, we were like, the complexity of this is so high that it's very clear if someone offloaded the complexity, there would be a lot of value. Fast forward to the middle of 2023, everything looks like it's going to be a transformer. So now our hypotheses are just wrong. So at this point then, most of the value is probably not going to accrue at purely, at least this is our belief, at the infrastructure layer, it's going to accrue somewhere else. Where is the layer that you can actually differentiate on? And we believe the application layer is a very, very deep layer to go out and differentiate on. What are the number of ways we can build better user experiences, better workflows for developers? We think there's effectively no ceiling on 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

  24. “Maybe I can start by just saying one thing about startups that I think are really true it's very unlikely the first thing that you believe you should go work on is going to be the right thing which is like a very hard thing to kind of wrangle with being a startup founder right you need to kind of be irrationally optimistic that what you're going to do is going to be differentially important because otherwise why would you go out and do what you're doing and if it's if it's if it's obvious then a bigger company would have already done it right but then you also need to be really really realistic because most ideas that are that are i guess uh non-conventional are usually bad ideas right uh so so it's it's this weird kind of tightrope you need to you need to kind of uh you know kind of balance on top of where you're kind of pushing for a future that you believe is true but all the while you're getting new information you need to kind of kill the beliefs that you had and if i were to start with the infrastructure piece we first went in with the assumption 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

  25. “Autocomplete code, or could we chat with the code base? It was could you offer us a secure offering that was also personalized to all the private data inside the company? So we took our infrastructure and made it so that we invested a ton in making sure that we deeply understood these large companies' code bases. And that's what we were working on until six months ago. And it's not that we've stopped working on that. But basically what we realized six months ago was we were getting limited by the IDEs that we were already working in. So VS Code, which is a very popular ID, had a ceiling for the AI capabilities we could showcase our users. And because of that, we decided to go out and fork VS Code and build our own ID with some of these new Agenta capabilities and over time in the last couple years, the model capabilities have also been growing exponentially year over year.”

    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

  26. “Build codium at the time. And at that time, we were early adopters of GitHub Copilot, and we thought the coding space was going to get tremendously disrupted in the next coming years. So we actually took our infrastructure. We ran our own models at massive scale. We even trained our own models in the very beginning. It was very, very simple. It was purely an autocomplete sort of model, right? Which basically means that as the user was typing, we'd complete the next one or two or three or four lines of code. But we provided the product entirely for free in all the IDEs that developers code in, right? That meant VS code, Jepbrains, Eclipse, Visual Studio, Vim, Emacs. And the reason why we were able to build it for free was because of our infrastructure background. We were able to optimize these workloads a ton. And I guess very quickly after that, some large businesses also wanted to work with us and we built out this enterprise motion to work with these large companies like Dell, JP Morgan Chase. And for them, the bigger thing wasn't just, hey, could we?”

    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

  27. “Of 10,000 sort of GPUs, we had eight people at the time. We were free cash flow positive. But I think what we felt was once these generative models started to get very good, we sort of felt a lot of what we built was not as valuable. And this was like a very, very hard moment for us at the company. We were only eight people at the time, but we felt, hey, would people be training these very bespoke sentiment classifier models anymore that were like very, very custom models, or would they just ask GPTN, is this a positive or a negative sentiment? Probably is going to be the latter, right? And in a world in which everyone was going to run generative AI models, why would an infrastructure company be a differentiator? Because everyone is going to run the same kind of infrastructure down the line. So instead, what we decided to do was we believe generative AI was almost going to be like the next internet. And in that case, what we should go out and do is build the next great apps like Google, like Amazon. And we vertically integrated and actually took our infrastructure, our inference infrastructure to go out and”

    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

  28. “Yeah, so the company was actually started close to four years ago. As you know, AI coding was not a thing four years ago. ChatGPT was not out four years ago. At the time, we actually started out building GPU virtualization and compiler software. Before this, I worked in autonomous vehicles. My co-founder, who had known since middle school, worked on ARVR at Meta. And for us, we believe deep learning would touch many, many industries, right? It wouldn't just touch sort of autonomous vehicles. It would touch financial services, defense, healthcare. And we believe these applications were hard to build, these deep learning applications. So we made it possible for you to effectively run these complex applications on computers without GPUs, and we would handle all the complexity of being able to actually run the workload on the GPUs for you. And we were able to optimize these workloads a ton. And then the middle of 2022 rolled around, and we had a couple million in revenue, and we were managing up.”

    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

  29. “Engineers are now able to produce more technology. 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 anticipated.”

    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

  30. “I wanted 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.”

    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

  31. “Lot of the bets we're making inside the company are for things that are not three, four weeks away. We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months. 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 dump.”

    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