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Very interesting details shared by Garry:
- Windsurf had ~250 employees
- ~55 eng, ~185 sales
- Hired ~150 ppl (mostly sales) the last 12 months (likely all enterprise sales)
- ~40 core engineers went to Google
Reads like Google only wanted (most of the) eng team, and no sales
21.7. klo 07.14
Varun Mohan and the team at Windsurf built something great.
What I heard is every founding engineer (over 40 of them) cleared 7 figures. The remaining org of 200 was only 15 engineers who had worked there less than a year, the rest were sales and ops, and even then they left more cash in the business that could have made everyone more than whole if the remaining team was willing to dividend it and shut down.
Varun preserved $2.3B in value for the investors and vested cap table and did his best under time pressure with the options he had.
He and his team don’t deserve to be dragged and I think in the long term their decision to sell will be vindicated.
It can be irresistible to fan the flames on Internet beef but in this case everyone should stand down given what really happened.
It’s easy to judge from the outside when we don’t know the details.
It does feel to me that Varun / Windsurf leadership did their best to make everyone happy best they could (investors, early employees, people Google didn’t want to take over) with the constraints they had (Google not wanting a full acquisition, not wanting sales ppl).
The outcome of Windsurf keeping its IP, cash in the company [a $100M amount was floating around and sounds true?] meant that Windsurf was in a VERY strong position to shop around!
Whoever acquired Windsurf either got a $100M cash injection, or could “pay out” $100M to Windsurf staff and “buy” the company for equity only!
Also a good reminder of what a successful B2B startup composition typically looks like:
- Eng-heavy until finding product market fit
- Enterpise-sales heavy after!
It’s the reality of B2B. Windsurf was always very good in this area - and it was the sensible strategy give how strong eg Cursor and GH is with B2C (selling directly to devs - ofc both have enterprise sales as well!)
@roguesherlock my interpretation is they probably bought the product that is 10x as popular with developers than their own
getting the sales team is a bonus. Devin has no traction with devs, Windsurf does:
16.7. klo 17.16
Why did Cognition buy Windsurf? One theory: Devin (their flagship product) is not popular with *experienced developers*, but Windsurf is.
Based on The Pragmatic Engineer Survey: 3,000 respondents, mostly experienced devs.
Note how other vibe-coding tools also not popular
@IntuitMachine They say one thing. I wonder if it's because of this:
(and that Windsurf comes with $100M in cash as well - meaning whatever Cognition offered, you can deduct $100M from it!)
16.7. klo 17.16
Why did Cognition buy Windsurf? One theory: Devin (their flagship product) is not popular with *experienced developers*, but Windsurf is.
Based on The Pragmatic Engineer Survey: 3,000 respondents, mostly experienced devs.
Note how other vibe-coding tools also not popular
Also consider the buyer: Congition built Devin, the "AI software engineer" which is a product positioned to *replace* software engineers.
So it is no surprise that Devin had little to no traction across experienced devs. But Windsurf did! Win-win?
16.7. klo 17.16
Why did Cognition buy Windsurf? One theory: Devin (their flagship product) is not popular with *experienced developers*, but Windsurf is.
Based on The Pragmatic Engineer Survey: 3,000 respondents, mostly experienced devs.
Note how other vibe-coding tools also not popular
@janaka_a no - I have zero interest interest in a company that
1. has a mission to replace engineers
2. refuses to correct a deliberately false statement (aka a lie) they used to launch
15.7. klo 04.04
To this date, Cognition has not corrected this lie on the launch post though.
We know that Devin did not "complete real jobs on Upwork." But it's good for marketing - so it stayed.
Just hard to trust a company that keeps false information up, even after caught red handed
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