Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO)

**Varun Mohan** (0:00)
A lot of the bets we're making inside the company are for things that are not three, four weeks away. We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months. Every six to 12 months, it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of our existing product look dumb.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:13)
How do you know when it's time to hire someone?

**Varun Mohan** (0:16)
I want the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity. Every hire is like a little bit of water, and we only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
Any other skills you think people should be investing more in with the rise of AI building more and more of our products?

**Varun Mohan** (0:29)
Engineers are now able to produce more technology. The ROI of building technology has actually gone up. This actually means you hire more. The best thing to do is just get your hands dirty with all of these products. You could be a force multiplier to your organization in ways in which they never even anticipated.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:46)
Today, my guest is Varun Mohan. Varun is the co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, which has quickly become one of people's favorite AI coding tools, and is basically the main competitor to Cursor, with over one million users four months in. In our conversation, Varun shares what makes Windsurf unique, why they decided to invest heavily in enterprise sales very early in their history, why agency is going to be the most important skill for engineers and product builders to build, also the story of how they started out as a GPU infrastructure company and realized there was a much bigger opportunity of the stack and the two pivots that got them to where they are today. He also gives a live demo, advice for being successful with Windsurf, and so much more. There's so much to learn about where things are heading for engineers and product builders in general. In this conversation, I'm really excited to bring it to you. Thank you to everyone on LinkedIn and Twitter and my newsletter community for suggesting great questions to dig into with Varun. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Notion Plus, Linear, Granola and Superhuman. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Varun Mohan. This episode is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack used by one in every three US venture-backed startups. Brex knows that nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. So they built a banking experience that focuses on helping founders get more from every dollar. It's a stark difference from traditional banking options that leave a startup's cash sitting idle while chipping away at it with fees. To help founders protect cash and extend runway, Brex combined the best things about checking, treasury and FDIC insurance in one Powerhouse account. You can send and receive money worldwide at lightning speed, you can get 20x the standard FDIC protection through program banks, and you can earn industry-leading yield from your first dollar while still being able to access your funds anytime. To learn more, check out Brex at brex.com/banking-solutions. That's brex.com/banking-solutions. This episode is brought to you by Product Board, the leading product management platform for the enterprise. For over 10 years, Product Board has helped customer-centric organizations like Zoom, Salesforce and Autodesk build the right products faster. And as an end-to-end platform, Product Board seamlessly supports all stages of the product development lifecycle, from gathering customer insights, to planning a roadmap, to aligning stakeholders, to earning customer buy-in, all with a single source of truth. And now, product leaders can get even more visibility into customer needs with Product Board Pulse, a new voice of customer solution. Built-in intelligence helps you analyze trends across all of your feedback and then dive deeper by asking AI your follow-up questions. See how Product Board can help your team deliver higher impact products that solve real customer needs and advance your business goals. For a special offer and free 15-day trial, visit productboard.com/lenny. That's productboard.com/l-e-n-n-y.
Varun, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Varun Mohan** (4:03)
Lenny, thanks for having me. A long time listener.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:05)
Oh, I really appreciate that. I'm so excited to have you here. I feel like just you guys have become this overnight success, which is definitely not an overnight success, but I feel like I've been hearing about Windsurf more and more as people's favorite AI tool. And I just don't think people know the story behind Windsurf, behind Codeium, the company that you built. So I thought it'd be good to maybe just start there and have you just briefly share the history of Codeium and how Windsurf emerged out of Codeium.