Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding

Windsurf initially operated as ExoFunction, a GPU virtualization company. The founders, however, believed that deep learning would revolutionize numerous industries. They decided to pivot after realizing their initial model wasn't scalable and lacked company-wide excitement. This pivot, made within a weekend, was a significant risk, considered a "bet the company moment." The decision to pivot was driven by the need to choose something that would energize the entire team. Would you like to explore the new business model Windsurf adopted after the pivot? When you assign s1 to s2 without cloning, attempting to print s1 afterwards results in a compile-time error: borrow of moved value: 's1' . This is because Rust's ownership system prevents data races and memory corruption. When you assign s1 to s2 , ownership of the String data is transferred to s2 . s1 no longer owns the data, and therefore, accessing it (like trying to print it) leads to the error. The compiler prevents this because using s1 after the move would be accessing invalid memory. , , up making it much easier to make this transition.. how about the transition from Kodium to winsurf? at the time we, you know,, now now we're probably going to middle of 2023. we start working with some very large enterprises. within the next year, like the business has gotten well over sort of eight figures in in in revenue um, just from these enterprises using the product and we have this like free individual product. but I think one of the things about this industry that we all kind of know is the space moves really really fast and uh, we basically are always making bets on things that are not working right Actually most of the bets we make in the company don't work and I'm excited uh when I'm like happy when we are when we're let's say only 50% of the things we're doing are actually working because I think when if a 100% of the things we're doing uh are working um I think like it's a very bad sign for us because it's probably like one of one of maybe three things. um the first thing it it it is is like hey we're not trying hard enough. uh right that's that's probably what it means. the second thing is we somehow have a lot of hubris right and the hubris is like we believe everything we do is right even despite the facts that are that are sort of on the ground. and then um the the sort of third key piece is here is we're not actually testing our hypotheses in a way that like tells us where the future is going. we're not actually at the frontier of what the capabilities and technology um ultimately is. we believed actually in the very beginning of last year that