The Exchanges

Q What are the biggest questions, lessons, things that enterprises care about when they buy you?

A I think it's, there's a, maybe a handful of things. I think the first thing is a lot of enterprises and large companies, this is something that's not very obvious to folks outside looking in. They have a lot of Java developers, right? And for the Java developers, actually most, most large companies have a lot of code in Java. They use an IDE called IntelliJ as part of the JetBrains family. So this is like an interesting fact, even though we have the Windsurf editor, we still support plugins into all the JetBrains IDEs. And it has the same functionality as the Windsurf editor. The reason why we forked the VS code, uh, editor was because we didn't have enough flexibility to build out the UI that we wanted, uh, to give out the new agent experience, but we were able to give that out entirely in JetBrains in the plugins. And I'll give you an example. JP Morgan Chase, who is a customer of ours, over 50% of their developers are JetBrains users. Inside the company. And for those people, we're able to support all of their developers. We're not a product that's only for their VS code users, right? Uh, so they can move over to Windsor. So that's again, interesting fact that I think outside looking at people don't really understand that for the enterprise, there are lots of these IntelliJ users that we need to satisfy. And when we go into an enterprise, we don't want to tell them, Hey, onl…

AI assessment note: “for the enterprise, there are lots of these IntelliJ users that we need to satisfy”

Q people are in love with their thesis. That's why I hate thesis-driven investors, bluntly. But many people are in love with their ideas, and they're told that actually the true grit and persistence of an entrepreneur is what separates those that win versus those that don't. How do you think about that versus a brilliant statement, which I agree with? You said, never be too in love with your ideas.

A I think, I think this is the hardest part about starting a company or building a company in the first place, right? It requires these two almost counter beliefs in your head, right? Irrational optimism, because if you don't have any optimism at all, you won't do anything and you won't get out of bed, right? And uncompromising realism. Every single day you need to be asking your question, do we have a reason to exist, right? And if the answer is not really, you need to change your mind really fast and reorient the entire company. Really fast. One of the weird things about startups is that you don't win an award for doing the same wrong thing for longer. Like, it might feel better to tell your coworkers, tell your investors, tell your friends that, hey, I'm still doing the thing I did, but down the line when you fail, none of them will care.

AI assessment note: “It requires these two almost counter beliefs in your head, right? Irrational optimism... And uncompromising realism.”

Q When we think about these async remote agents that have to be incredibly responsive, that have to be correctable, what form factor do they take? We mentioned that earlier, like just pinging off a message. How do you envision the right form factor and what that will take?

A Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's not super clear, right? It's possible that the right form factor is you need to fire this off from your ID because people are, people are in their work state in their ID. Now the question is, How, how common is the use case that people want to fire things off from their mobile phone, right? And then if they do, is it fine for it to just be on Slack? Do people want to continuously talk to something on their mobile phone? I think the answer is maybe not, because if I get thousands of lines of chain code changes, I don't know how to review code very effectively on my phone. And then in which case, like, I don't want to interact with something on my phone back and forth. So maybe I'm, I'm game to do one and done interactions on my phone. And then it better be a hundred percent correct. And I'll go back to my laptop and be like, no, it's correct. And then stamp, stamp it, and then approve it and merge the code. So it's, there's a lot of trade-offs here.

AI assessment note: “It's possible that the right form factor is you need to fire this off from your ID”

Q people are in love with their thesis. That's why I hate thesis-driven investors, bluntly. But many people are in love with their ideas, and they're told that actually the true grit and persistence of an entrepreneur is what separates those that win versus those that don't. How do you think about that versus a brilliant statement, which I agree with? You said, never be too in love with your ideas.

A I think, I think this is the hardest part about starting a company or building a company in the first place, right? It requires these two almost counter beliefs in your head, right? Irrational optimism, because if you don't have any optimism at all, you won't do anything and you won't get out of bed, right? And uncompromising realism. Every single day you need to be asking your question, do we have a reason to exist, right? And if the answer is not really, you need to change your mind really fast and reorient the entire company. Really fast. One of the weird things about startups is that you don't win an award for doing the same wrong thing for longer. Like, it might feel better to tell your coworkers, tell your investors, tell your friends that, hey, I'm still doing the thing I did, but down the line when you fail, none of them will care.

AI assessment note: “It requires these two almost counter beliefs in your head: Irrational optimism and uncompromising realism.”

Q I, I spoke to Neil Mater about stuff that I had to ask you before, and he said you do have to ask him about how he builds product and his product building cycle. You mentioned that 50% fail, the internal cycle. Can you talk to me about some unconventional ways that you think about internal product building that you think are important?

A Yeah, I think there's conventional wisdom and, you know, from other people that a company with more engineers is just going to succeed, but that sort of kind of makes software engineering and just R&D feel like a factory building process. I think the right way to actually look at it is when a product or an idea has no legs and you're proving it out, you should actually have very few people working on, on an idea, right? Because actually like, this is a very common, everyone will understand this. Imagine having 10 people working on something that has not been proven out. Everyone has opinions. Everyone has ideas and nobody's ideas are wrong, right? Because no one has proven anything out. So it's very hard to get alignment. It's very hard for people to work in one direction without causing communication issues. Um, instead, what is actually really good is can you have a handful of people With an opinionated stance that can go out and prove out an idea. And then the question is, uh, with that, if you can, if you can go and get a nugget of value, and this is like a hard question for any product, how do you know when to stop working on it?

AI assessment note: “you should actually have very few people working on, on an idea”

Q What have you tried before that didn't work that the world doesn't know about?

A Yeah, so we, we shipped a beta version of this product, but we were dogfooding it for such a long time. I'll give you maybe a couple examples here. The first thing is we actually shipped a beta product for code review last year, and we actually tried out different ways of shipping a code review product. We had a Chrome extension. We did something internally where we built a parallel website, and we were able to try a bunch of things internally, and none of them felt quite right. And now, a couple weeks ago, we actually shipped a code review product, And it feels much better, and it's providing a lot more value, and we shipped it in the way we shipped it because of all the failed attempts that we made last year. I'll give you a second example here. For the code agent product that we launched with Windsurf, we actually had a first cut of that product in the beginning of last year, and it was not good. It was not good for a variety of reasons, and that enabled us to go back to the drawing board and fix up the different elements that would allow us to ship Windsurf, right, which was that we needed to get really Better at code-based understanding as well as the models needed to get better. But then once the, once the models had already gone better, our internal R and D on code-based understanding had gone good enough that we were ready to go and ship the product. So this is one of t…

AI assessment note: “we actually tried out different ways... and none of them felt quite right.”

Q Can you build a company today remote as efficiently as the in-person seven days a week Silicon Valley specialness That you're seeing return to the valley again?

A I think it's just, it might just be a little bit harder, right? I think you need to be a much more, I guess, principled company to start with. But I also think it's, it's, it's just an unfair advantage if a company is able to get, get their engineers kind of in the same room and on the same page. Like every five minutes if necessary, right? It's an unfair advantage on speed, uh, compared to a company where people are on different time zones. Like you don't know when you can reach out to someone right now. If, if, if it's two or three PM, everyone at the company Can be called, can be kind of like brought into a room at that very moment, right? So it just, it just makes your flexibility a lot faster. And in the early days, Harry, when I was talking about how, how obvious it is that your first idea or your ideas are not going to be accurate, um, you should be able to pivot extremely fast and kind of like marshal everyone at the company as quickly as possible.

AI assessment note: “I think it's just, it might just be a little bit harder, right?”

Q Do we have PMs? I'm, I'm always told that PMs are CEOs of the product, and many have said that actually, we're not going to have PMs anymore. 11 labs. I had that, yeah, head of growth on the show the other day. He was like, we don't have PMs. Do PMs have a role in five years?

A I think the expectation for PMs is not going to be down the line. It's not going to be, I tell someone to go and build something. It's going to be, you should go out and build it too, right? Uh, there will be, need to be a lot more agency on their side. But the benefit is these AI tools are going to give them that capability, right? Let's say you do have a technical PM that is, that undersends code and that can write code. They are even more deadly now than they were in the past. You don't need to give them a team of 10 people to prove out their idea, right? And one of the things that I kind of don't like about PMs probably in, in, uh, nowadays in a lot of cases is they spend so much time writing docs to try to convince the organization to do what they, what needs to be done. But instead they should just go and build a version of what they want to get done and then prove to the organization that that's what needs to get done. Why do you need to spend so much time babying your organization Playing a playing a Game of Thrones, right? It doesn't really make a ton of sense in the future.

AI assessment note: “I think the expectation for PMs is not going to be down the line.”

Q down because I wanted to make sure that I got it right because I didn't want to misquote Satya. But he essentially said that obviously apps will collapse into agents and become just databases with business logics. Do you agree with him in that respect? Salesforce becomes a database that agents just crawl all over, a HubSpot the same, and you basically have that utility value reduced to just databases.

A Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm trying to think about why I think that's, that is not exactly true, but you're totally right that, I mean, you know, for any company, their entire state could, could be distilled down to a database, right? Uh, for, for any company. I don't know if I completely buy that in the short term, these complex applications like Salesforce and Workday completely get replaced by another company that just builds a database and an agent operating on top of it. I think a lot of complex workflow has been built around the idea of using Salesforce. So I'll give you an example. When we built Our sales team. Everyone already knows how to use Salesforce down the line. And now we built custom workflows inside Salesforce. And you're right. Those are all database transitions, but they affect the way humans operate with software. It's very unlikely to me that what's going to happen is Salesforce will get dethroned by a company that is just a database with an agent operating on top of it. It just, there's too much inertia for the company, uh, building out these complex workflows. And maybe here's the final piece. And maybe why I believe that. I don't think agents are good enough today. That you can kind of just let them operate on top of, on top of a database and write to the database, automatically write to the database without human supervision for some arbitrary workflow, righ…

AI assessment note: “I don't know if I completely buy that in the short term”

Q Can I ask you, you know, you've been across multiple different cycles of the business, ups and downs. When did you question your love for it most? I think we often say like, oh, I'm always inspired. I'm not inspired every day to do what I do. Some days I am. Was there a period where you were not? And how did you get through that period?

A I think every time, basically every time we've needed to make a strategic pivot, like actually it's before the pivot that, that it's, it's probably the, the most anxiety inducing because you feel like something could be much better than it is, but you are not acting on it. And I think that is potentially the, the part that is, that is the most, uh, kind of gut wrenching. Um, you know, it's actually an interesting point when we pivoted from exit function to Codium. I actually think post pivot was, was the freest I've ever felt because I'd written off in my head, uh, both me and my co-founder that we're likely going to fail, but at least we're likely going to fail in something that we believe in. In the past, yeah, we were making a couple million in revenue, but I know what it means to be like a very large successful company. You need to be able to make billions in revenue, right? Uh, so we were so far away from that outcome that it was almost like, yeah, this, this feels very hard to do. But after pivoting, we had a new lease on life. And I actually feel like for us and for me, the part that is the most anxiety inducing is when we believe we could be doing much better, but there's random inertia and friction that is preventing us from doing the right thing. And even if doing the, doing the right thing has a low probability of success, actually starting to work on it is, is the m…

AI assessment note: “every time we've needed to make a strategic pivot, like actually it's before the pivot”

Q Will you converge over time? Will Cursor and you converge to eat the lovables and bolts, and will the lovables and bolts converge to try and eat you?

A You know, I think once, once, and this is, uh, this is, I think a really common question we get, which is that I think those tools that are very focused on, like the lovable is the bolts that are very focused on the non-developer. I think with time, they're going to need to build out more and more tunables, more and more ways to configure the product with time. Um, but I think, I think for us, if we can deeply understand code, like large code bases, it'll naturally follow that with very little effort, Non-technical people can build apps. But maybe my point is, if we build for that use case right now, it's, it's, we're, we're gonna be kind of forgoing the ability to help developers, but I think it will converge. It will converge with time, ah, between both of these categories. Like, a company that deeply understands your codebase will be able to, with very little natural language, build an entire app that is consistent with existing codebases inside the company.

AI assessment note: “I think it will converge. It will converge with time, ah, between both of these categories.”

Q When we think about these async remote agents that have to be incredibly responsive, that have to be correctable, what form factor do they take? We mentioned that earlier, like just pinging off a message. How do you envision the right form factor and what that will take?

A Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's not super clear, right? It's possible that the right form factor is you need to fire this off from your ID because people are, people are in their work state in their ID. Now the question is, How, how common is the use case that people want to fire things off from their mobile phone, right? And then if they do, is it fine for it to just be on Slack? Do people want to continuously talk to something on their mobile phone? I think the answer is maybe not, because if I get thousands of lines of chain code changes, I don't know how to review code very effectively on my phone. And then in which case, like, I don't want to interact with something on my phone back and forth. So maybe I'm, I'm game to do one and done interactions on my phone. And then it better be a hundred percent correct. And I'll go back to my laptop and be like, no, it's correct. And then stamp, stamp it, and then approve it and merge the code. So it's, there's a lot of trade-offs here.

AI assessment note: “It's possible that the right form factor is you need to fire this off from your ID”

Q young person, I could read Elad Gill's High Growth Handbook, and I know how to manage people, and it's bullshit. The wisdom and experience this guy brought from 1520 years leading teams is so nuanced and granular. I learn so much from him about management every day now. You can't learn it in a book. I've changed my mind on that. What would your change of mind be on management?

A Maybe the biggest change of mind I, I did have was, was what you originally said, which is how large your team is, is not a function of like output, um, output and actually ruthless focus is the only thing that matters, right? So you can have a lot of people, but the answer is if those people are not ruthlessly focused on one thing, uh, you are going to be very, very not successful. Like it is, it is much easier to run a company. That is focused. That has only one thing that matters than it is to run a company with the same amount of revenue with five things that matters that with five different priorities. And I think in retrospect, that always feels that, that feels obvious, but at a startup like ours, where there's so many things we can do, there's always a couple of shiny things. You can always open Twitter and it's like X is solved. Y is solved. Z is solved. But actually I think being able to say no to things And to focus on, on the hand, like, the one thing that matters with many people and ruthlessly optimize, optimize that, um, it's very hard, uh, but when you can actually get that right, you can, you can make magic happen.

AI assessment note: “Maybe the biggest change of mind I, I did have was”

Q What have you tried before that didn't work that the world doesn't know about?

A Yeah, so we, we shipped a beta version of this product, but we were dogfooding it for such a long time. I'll give you maybe a couple examples here. The first thing is we actually shipped a beta product for code review last year, and we actually tried out different ways of shipping a code review product. We had a Chrome extension. We did something internally where we built a parallel website, and we were able to try a bunch of things internally, and none of them felt quite right. And now, a couple weeks ago, we actually shipped a code review product, And it feels much better, and it's providing a lot more value, and we shipped it in the way we shipped it because of all the failed attempts that we made last year. I'll give you a second example here. For the code agent product that we launched with Windsurf, we actually had a first cut of that product in the beginning of last year, and it was not good. It was not good for a variety of reasons, and that enabled us to go back to the drawing board and fix up the different elements that would allow us to ship Windsurf, right, which was that we needed to get really Better at code-based understanding as well as the models needed to get better. But then once the, once the models had already gone better, our internal R and D on code-based understanding had gone good enough that we were ready to go and ship the product. So this is one of t…

AI assessment note: “we actually tried out different ways of shipping a code review product”

Q I, I spoke to Neil Mater about stuff that I had to ask you before, and he said you do have to ask him about how he builds product and his product building cycle. You mentioned that 50% fail, the internal cycle. Can you talk to me about some unconventional ways that you think about internal product building that you think are important?

A Yeah, I think there's conventional wisdom and, you know, from other people that a company with more engineers is just going to succeed, but that sort of kind of makes software engineering and just R&D feel like a factory building process. I think the right way to actually look at it is when a product or an idea has no legs and you're proving it out, you should actually have very few people working on, on an idea, right? Because actually like, this is a very common, everyone will understand this. Imagine having 10 people working on something that has not been proven out. Everyone has opinions. Everyone has ideas and nobody's ideas are wrong, right? Because no one has proven anything out. So it's very hard to get alignment. It's very hard for people to work in one direction without causing communication issues. Um, instead, what is actually really good is can you have a handful of people With an opinionated stance that can go out and prove out an idea. And then the question is, uh, with that, if you can, if you can go and get a nugget of value, and this is like a hard question for any product, how do you know when to stop working on it?

AI assessment note: “you should actually have very few people working on, on an idea”

Q Budget wise and time wise. Do you set that? Do they set that? How does that work?

A I don't think we actually think about that. And I think that's, that's partially because we're in an unconstrained market right now, right? The value of great technology that could accelerate software development is so valuable to our customers that, um, for us, like, I guess we largely speaking, don't think about it from like a perspective of what is the budget of a particular project. Now, what we do look at inside the company is what are the, what is the progress we're unlocking in a project over time and whether or not we should decide to move on and work on something else, like table something and work on it later. Like, that is something that we decide, and that's not a democratic process inside the company. It is, it is like a little bit of a top-down process inside the company.

AI assessment note: “I don't think we actually think about that. And I think that's, that's partially because we're in an unconstrained market”

Q Do we have PMs? I'm, I'm always told that PMs are CEOs of the product, and many have said that actually, we're not going to have PMs anymore. 11 labs. I had that, yeah, head of growth on the show the other day. He was like, we don't have PMs. Do PMs have a role in five years?

A I think the expectation for PMs is not going to be down the line. It's not going to be, I tell someone to go and build something. It's going to be, you should go out and build it too, right? Uh, there will be, need to be a lot more agency on their side. But the benefit is these AI tools are going to give them that capability, right? Let's say you do have a technical PM that is, that undersends code and that can write code. They are even more deadly now than they were in the past. You don't need to give them a team of 10 people to prove out their idea, right? And one of the things that I kind of don't like about PMs probably in, in, uh, nowadays in a lot of cases is they spend so much time writing docs to try to convince the organization to do what they, what needs to be done. But instead they should just go and build a version of what they want to get done and then prove to the organization that that's what needs to get done. Why do you need to spend so much time babying your organization Playing a playing a Game of Thrones, right? It doesn't really make a ton of sense in the future.

AI assessment note: “I think the expectation for PMs is not going to be down the line.”

Q What do you mean by that? It wasn't where you placed importance in terms of that initial UI, UX being seamless?

A Yeah, I think for us to go out and build Windsurf, we actually felt that we needed a massive, like, technical breakthrough of, like, actually a new product experience, and I think that was the only reason why we actually decided to go out and build Like actually have our own ID. I like, if we didn't do that, I think we're the type of company that would not just go out and build UI UX just for the, like, you know, for a much better experience by default, unless we had great technology. I like to think of ourselves as like, we're a technology company and I think we ship product to maximize the amount of technology that our users can consume productively.

AI assessment note: “we're the type of company that would not just go out and build UI UX”

Q Can I ask you, you know, you've been across multiple different cycles of the business, ups and downs. When did you question your love for it most? I think we often say like, oh, I'm always inspired. I'm not inspired every day to do what I do. Some days I am. Was there a period where you were not? And how did you get through that period?

A I think every time, basically every time we've needed to make a strategic pivot, like actually it's before the pivot that, that it's, it's probably the, the most anxiety inducing because you feel like something could be much better than it is, but you are not acting on it. And I think that is potentially the, the part that is, that is the most, uh, kind of gut wrenching. Um, you know, it's actually an interesting point when we pivoted from exit function to Codium. I actually think post pivot was, was the freest I've ever felt because I'd written off in my head, uh, both me and my co-founder that we're likely going to fail, but at least we're likely going to fail in something that we believe in. In the past, yeah, we were making a couple million in revenue, but I know what it means to be like a very large successful company. You need to be able to make billions in revenue, right? Uh, so we were so far away from that outcome that it was almost like, yeah, this, this feels very hard to do. But after pivoting, we had a new lease on life. And I actually feel like for us and for me, the part that is the most anxiety inducing is when we believe we could be doing much better, but there's random inertia and friction that is preventing us from doing the right thing. And even if doing the, doing the right thing has a low probability of success, actually starting to work on it is, is the m…

AI assessment note: “basically every time we've needed to make a strategic pivot”

Q What are the biggest questions, lessons, things that enterprises care about when they buy you?

A I think it's, there's a, maybe a handful of things. I think the first thing is a lot of enterprises and large companies, this is something that's not very obvious to folks outside looking in. They have a lot of Java developers, right? And for the Java developers, actually most, most large companies have a lot of code in Java. They use an IDE called IntelliJ as part of the JetBrains family. So this is like an interesting fact, even though we have the Windsurf editor, we still support plugins into all the JetBrains IDEs. And it has the same functionality as the Windsurf editor. The reason why we forked the VS code, uh, editor was because we didn't have enough flexibility to build out the UI that we wanted, uh, to give out the new agent experience, but we were able to give that out entirely in JetBrains in the plugins. And I'll give you an example. JP Morgan Chase, who is a customer of ours, over 50% of their developers are JetBrains users. Inside the company. And for those people, we're able to support all of their developers. We're not a product that's only for their VS code users, right? Uh, so they can move over to Windsor. So that's again, interesting fact that I think outside looking at people don't really understand that for the enterprise, there are lots of these IntelliJ users that we need to satisfy. And when we go into an enterprise, we don't want to tell them, Hey, onl…

AI assessment note: “for the enterprise, there are lots of these IntelliJ users that we need to satisfy.”

Q What do you think in 12 months will be crazy that we don't have today? Like you said there about kind of the transition and models bluntly improving so fast in such short time frames. If you think about what we do today that we would consider crazy that will be a reality in 12 months, what do you think it would be?

A I think a lot of things that maybe I understand the software development, uh, landscape a lot better, um, is The way, how Ntend these tools are going to be is going to be, I think, shocking to people. I think right now, if I was to say one of the biggest problems of these tools is mostly they help in the code writing experience. They're not helping in a lot of different aspects of the, of the software development lifecycle, which is software developers design, design software, right? They deploy software, review software, right? Uh, build, navigate. They do a lot of debug tests. They do a lot of different things. And I think the reason why it's mostly been kind of siloed to one or two areas is Actually, when, when you look at a software engineer and their job at a company, they look at a lot of distinct data sources. They look at like a logging system. They might look at a database. They might do all these other things. And I think these agents are going to get access to all of this data and all of this data, your browser data, all of this stuff. And I think what's going to be possible is debugging very complex tasks. Designing systems is going to be something that these agents are going to give much more leverage for than they are today. And I think this idea that software engineering, there's like a part of software engineering that AI is not going to touch because it's too h…

AI assessment note: “every aspect is going to become 10 times more effective.”

Q What do you think in 12 months will be crazy that we don't have today? Like you said there about kind of the transition and models bluntly improving so fast in such short time frames. If you think about what we do today that we would consider crazy that will be a reality in 12 months, what do you think it would be?

A I think a lot of things that maybe I understand the software development, uh, landscape a lot better, um, is The way, how Ntend these tools are going to be is going to be, I think, shocking to people. I think right now, if I was to say one of the biggest problems of these tools is mostly they help in the code writing experience. They're not helping in a lot of different aspects of the, of the software development lifecycle, which is software developers design, design software, right? They deploy software, review software, right? Uh, build, navigate. They do a lot of debug tests. They do a lot of different things. And I think the reason why it's mostly been kind of siloed to one or two areas is Actually, when, when you look at a software engineer and their job at a company, they look at a lot of distinct data sources. They look at like a logging system. They might look at a database. They might do all these other things. And I think these agents are going to get access to all of this data and all of this data, your browser data, all of this stuff. And I think what's going to be possible is debugging very complex tasks. Designing systems is going to be something that these agents are going to give much more leverage for than they are today. And I think this idea that software engineering, there's like a part of software engineering that AI is not going to touch because it's too h…

AI assessment note: “how Ntend these tools are going to be is going to be, I think, shocking”

Q What, what do people who believe this to be true get wrong? What are they fundamentally mistaking?

A I, I actually, I never understood this idea of like a single person is going to be able to build a billion dollar company. I've never kind of understood it. I mean, because what is a company? A company is the sum of the discounted cash flows over time. And, uh, and like down, down the line, like you're going to need people probably, or if the AI is so good that you don't need people, like at some point, I would just wonder like, if like, what are you really contributing? And is the AI building the whole thing? In which case, like, I don't know, like actually that would reduce the That would increase competitive pressure because everyone else will have access to the AI too.

AI assessment note: “That would increase competitive pressure because everyone else will have access to the AI too.”

Q Will you converge over time? Will Cursor and you converge to eat the lovables and bolts, and will the lovables and bolts converge to try and eat you?

A You know, I think once, once, and this is, uh, this is, I think a really common question we get, which is that I think those tools that are very focused on, like the lovable is the bolts that are very focused on the non-developer. I think with time, they're going to need to build out more and more tunables, more and more ways to configure the product with time. Um, but I think, I think for us, if we can deeply understand code, like large code bases, it'll naturally follow that with very little effort, Non-technical people can build apps. But maybe my point is, if we build for that use case right now, it's, it's, we're, we're gonna be kind of forgoing the ability to help developers, but I think it will converge. It will converge with time, ah, between both of these categories. Like, a company that deeply understands your codebase will be able to, with very little natural language, build an entire app that is consistent with existing codebases inside the company.

AI assessment note: “I think it will converge. It will converge with time, ah, between both of these categories.”

Q Budget wise and time wise. Do you set that? Do they set that? How does that work?

A I don't think we actually think about that. And I think that's, that's partially because we're in an unconstrained market right now, right? The value of great technology that could accelerate software development is so valuable to our customers that, um, for us, like, I guess we largely speaking, don't think about it from like a perspective of what is the budget of a particular project. Now, what we do look at inside the company is what are the, what is the progress we're unlocking in a project over time and whether or not we should decide to move on and work on something else, like table something and work on it later. Like, that is something that we decide, and that's not a democratic process inside the company. It is, it is like a little bit of a top-down process inside the company.

AI assessment note: “It is like a little bit of a top-down process inside the company.”

Q To what extent is the quality of your customer experience defined by the software that you create, the UI, the UX versus the model progression that lies beneath it being open AI anthropic?

A Yeah, I think, I think you can't downplay the fact that, that the latter is very helpful, right? The frontier model is getting, getting more and more capable. Every new capability unlocks maybe a new type of product experience that wasn't capable in the past, but I think it's a little bit of both, right? Um, maybe, maybe to put it, put it kind of, uh, kind of only like we were the first agentic IDE experience, right? Uh, for when we launched Windsurf, uh, we were, we were the very first ones. Obviously now that idea is not very, it's not non-consensus. Like it was the obvious thing to do, but these models like Sonnet had existed for quite a while, but it actually took us some work to actually put together Uh, like using these models, but also using our own models internally to make this a usable experience with the UI us to be able to review all the software very quickly before people actually this, the product experience kind of took off. So I think it's a, it's maybe a little bit of both, but I don't want to underplay how much the models actually affect, you know, the value people get from these experiences.

AI assessment note: “I think it's a little bit of both, right?”

Q Is there anything that you can structurally do to increase the response time of an organization to move faster post pivot?

A Yeah, I think, I think the answer is for a startup, one of my true beliefs is that companies don't succeed because they do many things well. They succeed because they do maybe one thing really well. Like, it's kind of like what I said, I think having one good idea already is like a miracle for most startups, right? And when you think about it from that perspective, when you think about a company, um, think about two companies, you know, any product has some sort of exponential curve at which it's able to grow, right? There's some R value attached to a product. Uh, the right thing for a startup to do is always focus on the product with a higher R value. It never makes sense to be diverting your resources to work on two different products that have different exponential growth curves, right? If they're completely disjoint. So when you do a pivot, I think the right answer is you should just give up what you were doing in the past, because the thing you were doing in the past probably will have no sort of relevance to your business going forward, right? The revenue multiple on that business is not going to look at all like the revenue multiple of the other business. And I think if you can go cold turkey and actually go and Make your organization completely work on the new thing. You're more likely to succeed, but that's scary, right? You need to tell people, tell your investors, te…

AI assessment note: “go cold turkey and actually go and Make your organization completely work on the new thing”

Q listening to some of your shows before, and there are a couple of segments where I was like, damn, I wish we'd double clicked on that. And there was one that I thought I wanted to start with. You said it's very rare that the first thing you believe will be the right thing. How have you changed your mind on what a truly great idea is versus what's not?

A I think there's a lot That's right about the Peter Thielism of you want to pick something that seems a little bit not obvious to start with, right? Um, for, for whatever company you're starting. And the problem is most ideas that are not obvious are just bad ideas. Like most ideas that are non-conventional, just because you are non-conventional doesn't mean you're going to pick a good idea. Um, and I think people sometimes forget that, but I think at a high level though, Like if you pick an idea that is like obvious to everyone, there's probably no alpha, right? A big company is going to go out and already beat you to the market, right? Because they have more distribution resources and capital than you. So startups usually win by picking non-conventional ideas to the public, but you kind of need to go in and be humble enough to understand that probably there's a good chance that your weird idea is not actually a good idea.

AI assessment note: “most ideas that are not obvious are just bad ideas”

Q an interesting statement. You said you wait until you're drowning in a role before you hire for it. And I just thought it was really interesting because I was always brought up on the value of board members being they highlight hires that you need to make six months ahead so you don't have a bottleneck in six months time. How do you think about those two seemingly opposing ideas?

A We've had cases where I would say it's a little bit of a, of an anti-pattern on that one. Like for instance, when we, before we hired our VP of sales, um, who was, was really awesome. Um, we, we actually closed some very large enterprises inside the company without any salespeople, some very large enterprise. But because we were able to do that inside the company, we were able to feel the pain of what Enterprise sales would look like inside the company. And also, it proved to the person we were going to hire, Graham, that we were an awesome company to potentially work at, right? So I think it's, it's an interesting trade-off where maybe there's a belief that I have that domain experts are awesome, but if inside the company you're not able to get Get an outcome that is one percent, 10% as good inside the company. It's probably not the right time to go out and make the hire. Like, maybe let me put it this way. This is maybe the, the, the concise way to actually answer this. Startups don't fail because they look like messes inside. Startups fail because they don't do the right thing. Uh, well enough. That is the reason why they fail. And I think people love to say, Hey, like, I don't have this role and that's why I'm not working. And it's like, actually, when you look at the most successful companies, they look like train wrecks inside.

AI assessment note: “It's probably not the right time to go out and make the hire.”

Q Do you think in your category brand power is important? People associate with being a windsurf user or a cursor user. Do you think brand has that same power that it does in other categories?

A You know, I, I would, I would like to, obviously, I think having a large brand is just helpful. It enables you as you ship more and more new products for more and more people to be able to use it and not have to build that, build the user base up from, from scratch. But if I just was to remind everyone, you know, kind of like a year or two ago, probably in Silicon Valley, GitHub Copilot was the product that everyone, everyone was talking about, right? Uh, at that time. And if I was to talk about it a year ago, right, actually a bit over a year ago was the Devon launch. And I think for three to six months, I was not hearing anything but Devon, uh, from, from everyone.

AI assessment note: “I think having a large brand is just helpful. It enables you as you ship”