Windsurf’s CEO and cofounder, Varun Mohan, believes in making bold moves as part of the company’s culture. In an interview on “Lenny’s Podcast,” Mohan revealed that Windsurf aims to rebuild its AI products every six to 12 months. The Silicon Valley-based startup, founded in 2021, has raised over $200 million in venture capital funding and was valued at $1.25 billion in a recent deal.
Windsurf specializes in AI tools that enable developers to write code using natural language prompts, embracing what OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy calls “vibe coding.” Mohan thinks that continuously disrupting their existing products is crucial for success. “We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months,” he said. “It should almost make the form factor of the existing product look dumb.”
The company’s history reflects this approach. Windsurf started by building graphics processing unit virtualization infrastructure, then shifted to an integrated development environment plugin, and eventually launched its own IDE. Each transition came with significant risk, but Mohan believes that getting things wrong is part of the process. “Every year is a new lease on life for us,” he explained. “It’s almost a new way for us to test out an entirely new set of hypotheses.”
Mohan’s strategy contrasts with other companies that fine-tune existing products based on user feedback. He believes the value of such an approach “is going to depreciate very quickly.” Instead, Windsurf focuses on longer-term efforts that often disrupt their current products, which Mohan sees as the key to their success.
