YC
Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding
@ Y Combinator
05/02/25
Takeaways
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
The notion of just a developer is going to broaden out to what's called a builder; I think everyone is going to be a builder, and software is going to be a very democratized thing.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
In the middle of 2022, we realized that the transformer models were going to fundamentally disrupt our GPU virtualization business, so we decided to pivot the company to focus on AI applications instead.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
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.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
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.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
We quickly improved our training infrastructure and trained our own models, which allowed us to pull ahead in terms of quality and capabilities compared to GitHub Copilot.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
We decided to expand Windsurf to support multiple IDEs because companies have developers writing in many languages, and we didn't want to turn away potential customers.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
Windsurf is empowering non-technical domain experts to build applications without needing to rely on engineers, which changes the traditional workflow in organizations.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
We believe that the software will get easier to build over time, and we invested in capabilities to deeply understand the codebase and the intent of developers.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
Every insight we have is a depreciating insight; if we don't continually have insights that we are executing on, we are just slowly dying.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
We are not anti-retrieval augmented generation (RAG); we see it as a tool in the toolkit, but ultimately users want great answers and great agents, which is our focus.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
The complexity of our AI systems is driven by the need for rigorous evaluation, which is critical for making informed investments in our technology.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
Our product is being used for real production large codebases, not just toy apps, and many users have never opened the code editor.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
If you don't provide enough intent, the AI tool can change way more of the code than necessary, which is a real problem we face.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
When interviewing candidates, we assess their problem-solving skills and how they think about trade-offs, rather than just their ability to write code.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
The mission of Windsurf is to reduce the time it takes to build technology and apps by 99%, which requires a lot of work.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
We need to focus on improving the development experience beyond just code writing, including design and debugging processes.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
As AI coding tools improve, the role of developers will broaden to include more builders who can decide how deep they want to go in building things.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
The future of software development will likely see a democratization of building technology, where everyone can create custom solutions tailored to their needs.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
The AI tools we build need to continuously deliver additional value as the baseline for foundation models improves.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
There's a significant opportunity in automating the resolution of alerts and bugs in software, which is a huge area of spending.
VM
Varun Mohan
05/02/25
@ Y Combinator
I need to change my mindset much faster than I believe is reasonable. It's easy to fall in love with your ideas, but you need to pivot quickly and treat pivots as a badge of honor.