Windsurf

“The really good coding IDE products, you know, the tool that you're kind of like sitting in and like using to look at the code itself versus the agent product, which is kind of that almost the engineer that you can delegate. You obviously want this to be very …”

“We got in touch with the Windsurf team that evening, so it was Friday evening, and then basically over the course of that weekend we, Worked out the entire acquisition together. So, by Monday morning, we had the announcement ready to go.”

“Cognition at the time was all of 35 or 40 people and we had a meaningful business with, you know, real traction. We were doing in the range of 70 or eighty million of revenue run rate at the time but it was a very small team. Windsurf, on the other hand becaus…”

“And this was the kind of major unlock for the company as well, is we had all this massive data. We were able to post train on all of that user signal and now beat the frontier.”

“Obviously the acquisition was for two billion dollars and went over to DeepBind, and then I decided to give up all the acquisition money to start trajectory.”

“I think when people think about, like, online learning, continual learning, they'll first think of, like, accept, reject, or thumbs up, thumbs down, like some of those, like, kind of binary signals. It turns out that that's actually, like, very noisy. You can …”

“Because six months in, companies that did structured rollouts were a lot more successful, and we ended up collecting a lot of data on this because it became part of how we sold. Then the companies that said, hey, I've got tool A, tool B, and tool C, we're gonn…”

“Great sales is like squeezing an orange or applying pressure from both sides. So on the one hand, do you want to go talk to engineers and like have a strong DevRel practice and really get in and like understand on the ground the way that people are working, th…”

“Because when I got into Windsurf, outside of hiring sellers and deployed engineers, the three things that I told our CEO that I wanted to go do was hire a world-class partner person, a world-class enablement person, and a data person.”

“Being able to go and build credibility and build belief in the big partners and systems integrators was something that we started doing probably forty million dollars in revenue before most companies.”

“The interesting thing is that where I have sat in AI, I feel like there's less of a build versus buy conversation. Like pretty quickly, people realized that they weren't going to build co-pilot or cursor or windsurf.”

“One of the things I used to say at Windsurf, and we haven't had to do this yet at Parallel, But I would say I don't ever want a debate or a conflict between my directs to come to me, because if it does, I will intentionally make a decision that's designed to a…”

“So like we made the decision to run a hundred percent of our revenue through partners.”

“We bought Windsurf, you know, seven, eight months ago at this point, but like, we don't have a distinction of like, oh, this person's an engineer working on Devon or this person's engineer working on Windsurf. Like a lot of the same people should be people who…”

“It was the most torrential growth I think I've ever seen in a KP company. It was insane.”

“They're the first company I've seen with like a real one floor of it is just dedicated to their video production. One floor of the sort of office down in Redwood city. And I've never seen that.”

“That's my main editor, and I actually don't use the agent functionality in Windsurf much anymore. I've kind of switched over to Claude code for that”

“The fact that it's open source and it's been able to be forked by, you know, Cursor and Windsurf and others to then layer on this functionality has just made it even more entrenched, I think.”

“They, of course Google did buy, you know, spend however many billions on, on acquiring the Windsurf IP, so not super surprising.”

“What I will say about Cursor versus Windsurf, there's a lot more tutorials on Cursor, so.”

“OpenAI, you know, almost bought Windsurf.”

“If you don't create enough of a deep expertise in a certain area, you know, ChatGPT, Anthropic, they are going to cut into you, which you are seeing probably with coding agents, you know, Windsurf and Cursor. Clearly they have grown very fast, but I expect Cha…”

“Open AI tried to buy Windsurf.”

“OpenAI famously tried to buy Windsurf and sort of enter coding more directly.”

“It's like, it's 20 bucks a month, it's 50 bucks a month, but we know that in 10 years from now, they'll probably be able to drive down their raw materials lower, but we won't be able to command lower prices for those things, because it's just like within a rea…”

“We actually, in both of those cases, that's a pure pretense to get the government off of us, right? Everyone knows both of these companies are toast because in the case of Scale AI, in theory, Meta owns 50% of it, and in theory, their business is selling to ev…”

“The original deal, which was like a successful, holy crap, that's a big number deal was three billion. The Google aqua hire is 2.4. That's ballpark same number. So like, you got screwed as if this was a soft landing for the founders, but it was a massive payda…”

“And together with that, we also created OpenVSX, which I think now powers all of the extensions that you see running in Cursor and also Windsurf, which is also open source under the Eclipse Foundation marketplace for VS Code.”

“We've been going for the last year and a half, and most recently just acquired Windsurf, and so, you know, Devon, the agent in Windsurf, the IDE, but at a high level, you know, we really want to build the future of software engineering.”

“With Windsurf, obviously, the team count has grown a lot, but actually, you know, with core engineering itself, it hasn't actually gotten all that much bigger. It's gone from 19 to something in the range of like 30 to 35.”

“We reached out to them cold that evening, and got to meet the new Windsurf leadership, you know, Jeff and Graham and David that evening.”

“There was a core kind of, like, research and product engineering team that went to Google, and the, all of the other functions were entirely intact, which includes enterprise engineering, infra, deployed engineering go to market, marketing, finance operations,…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think for us, it's you know, and most folks have been really excited to come in and do it, and only a small fraction have taken the buyout, but I think from our perspective we just want to make sure it's an opt-in, you know, situation for e…”

“Right now, Cloud Code is, is used by developers and loved by developers, and I think they're competing head-to-head with Cursor, Windsurf, and those kind of products.”

“I really don't think of Cursor as a competitor. I think of them as someone that, I mean, we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs into Cursor and Winsurf and all these other, and VS code, you know, all these great …”

“Google put a hundred million plus in the bank account of WindSurf where the intent was to dividend it out.”

“Cognition will find it challenging, I think, to integrate those 200 people, and it'll be also challenging for them to lay anybody off because they, you know, said, oh, we brought everybody on.”

“I mentioned companies like Cursor, JetBrains, Windsurf you know, Cognition and others that we work with who anecdotally are all you know, have all said that GPT-V now feels like the most capable coding model, whether that's in an interactive coding environment…”

“Well, I guess today, Cognition laid off 30% of the folks they bought, and they offered to buy out all the other 200 employees. They gave them a nine-month package. They told them they either had to work 80 hours a week, six days a week in the office, or they s…”

“I think Windsurf as a product is going to stick around, and people who really like Windsurf, I mean, I was a Windsurf user for a long time we are going to keep using it because it fills a need, and like, obviously, Cognition bought it for a reason.”

“Interpretability is still a nascent field and you could very easily see ways where You plug a model into a cursor or windsurf and you generate a piece of code. And then two years down the road, it turns out that code had a little if statement saying, if I'm ru…”

“Windsurf and Cursor and others, they're going after the professional engineers. They have a target on their back because they're competing with big tech. They're competing on the same technology on the same market. Whereas a lot of big tech kind of sees us mor…”

“Copilots are collaborative, but can only work on small scopes. Agents can do larger tasks, but are not collaborative. Both are very useful, but we realize that this real magic will happen when the AI has the ability to be both collaborative and independently p…”

“This allows Cascade to be independent, but Cascade takes it further than any other agentic system. By also generating commands to be run.”

“It is a fork of VS Code, and yes, We do know the memes. But there wasn't a need to rebuild everything from scratch.”

“We had the technology to go out and build these zero to one apps very quickly, and I think people are using Windsurf to actually do that, and it's like extremely impressive, but the real value, I think, is actually much deeper than that. It's actually that you…”

“If the agent there has to always get human involvement to keep on fixing itself, it's probably not ready to become a full end-to-end automated system, because then we're just going to turn into a linter where, like, it produces a bunch of things and no one loo…”

“The high level planning that is going on in the model is actually getting done with products like the cloud, but the extremely fast retrieval, as well as the ability to like take the high level plan and actually apply it to the code base is proprietary systems…”

“And so we just created a 10 dollar a month pro plan, mostly just to cover the cost. Like we're not really like operating, I think, on a much of a margin there either, but like, okay, like just to cover us there.”

“Vern's talked about not just suggesting the terminal command, but actually executing them. Like, I think that's gonna be a huge unlock.”

“We literally couldn't do that. In VS Code.”

“So in three months, we've been generating 4.5 billion lines of code.”

“We've had immense success getting people onto the platform, and we've been very fortunate to have the issue of being some of Anthropic and OpenAI's largest consumers.”

“So we very strongly believe in a future of no copy-paste. Right? You should never have a situation where you're in a terminal, or you're in a document, or even on a website, and you're copy-pasting text into an agent. That's just not how the way the world work…”

“In the future, we'll be looking not just one to five steps in the future, but 10, 20, 30 steps into the future. It'll be writing unit tests before you've even finished defining the function. It'll be performing code-based-wide refactors on multiple files based…”

“We strongly believe that having a rules file, you know, we do allow users to add a rules file, we strongly believe that a rules file is a crutch. You know, by the end of twenty-twenty-five, 99% of the things that you're gonna put in a rules file will be interp…”

“We only have an agent, and it's called Cascade inside of Windsurf. Chat is a legacy paradigm, and we completely replaced it, and as you can see here, users are enjoying it, or in fact, they might not even know the difference, but they're just enjoying the high…”

“All of our users, 90% of the code that they're writing is generated with Cascade. That's an astonishing number. Autocomplete was more in like the 20, 30%.”

“And today, timelines are 80 to 90% agent, 10 to 20% human. But we're trying to build towards a future that gets the 99% agent and one percent human. We only want to ask the user for final approval.”

“And we've been able to achieve near frontier model results at the fraction of the cost, and with a significantly smaller team.”