We built Windsurf because we recognized that AI was going to write over 90% of the software, changing the role of developers to primarily reviewing code.

Windsurf can modify existing codebases, allowing product managers to make changes directly without needing extensive coding knowledge.

We focus on supporting IDEs like JetBrains because they are highly extensible, unlike VS Code, which is less flexible.

We provided our product entirely for free across all IDEs, which allowed us to optimize workloads significantly and attract a large user base.

Our earliest version of Windsurf was materially worse than GitHub Copilot, but we offered it for free, which attracted a lot of developers to use it.

Windsurf is empowering non-technical domain experts to build applications without needing to rely on engineers, which changes the traditional workflow in organizations.

We made the decision to pivot to building Windsurf within a weekend, as we felt we needed to change things really fast to scale the company.

Many founders are now using AI tools like Cursor and Wind Surf, with Wind Surf gaining popularity for its ability to index entire codebases, making it easier to work with large projects.

At the time of my 'developers' speech, we were facing competition from Linux and needed to reinforce our platform with third-party support.