"One of the things that I think is is true for any startup is you have to keep proving yourself. Every single insight that we have is a depreciating insight. You look at a company like Nvidia. If Nvidi..."

"Welcome back to another episode of the Light Cone. Today we've got a real treat. We have the co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, one of the people who literally brought Vibe Coding into existence, Verun. ..."

"ago. uh we didn't start as windsurf uh we actually started as a company called exofunction we were a GPU virtualization company at the time uh previously me and my co-founder had worked on autonomous ..."

"weekend me and my co-founder had a conversation along the lines of I don't think this is going to work. We don't think we know how to scale this company. Um and uh at the time, we were early adopters ..."

"the thing that's remarkable is when you started the company, you had this thesis where you were betting that a lot of companies were going to build their own custom deep learning pipelines to train bi..."

"models these generative models handle so many of the use cases right uh maybe an example is in the past you would train a BERT model uh to actually go ahead and do sentiment classification. But very q..."

"would fail we'd fail immediately. We came with an opinionated stance of we were early adopters of a product called GitHub copilot. We thought that that was the tip of the iceberg on where the technolo..."

"irrational optimism we basically said hey we know how to run and train models ourselves. We actually trained the first autocomplete models ourselves and ran it on our product gave it out for free. I d..."

"beginning of 2023, I'd say the autocomplete capabilities were much better than what co-pilot had. Was that a totally new capability for you guys? Cuz like you guys have been building GPU infrastructur..."

"because you were running your own models you started getting interesting customers right? Yeah. So basically what happened the product was free at the time. So we ended up getting a lot of developers ..."

"Why? I think maybe the fundamental reason that that we thought was quite critical is if we were going to work with companies, companies have developers that write in many languages. Uh like for instan..."

"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. With..."

"beginning of last year and and they just didn't work. But there were different pieces we were building that we felt were going to be important to making agents work which is understanding large code b..."

"you did that was you forked VS code for VS code was got a whole new set of capabilities that you guys had to learn like basically how to like develop on this VS codebase that I'm sure is super complic..."

"And what what happened like was did it like take off immediately or was it unnoticed for for a long time? It took off pretty quickly I would say. Um I think the speed at which it took off among early ..."

"were working on in the past and work on it immediately. And at that time, how how big uh were you guys? The engineering team was probably still less than 25 people. Wow. This is crazy. Interestingly, ..."

"nontechnical person who leads u uh like partnerships uh at the company. Uh he has actually replaced buying a bunch of sales tools uh inside the company. uh and uh this is one of those things where I t..."

"might be a weird thing about our company, but our company just doesn't have like like morale is not really affected by what other companies do right? Uh it's not possible if uh like our company has go..."

"the way we've always Do you educate yourself at all on the competitor's products, though? Yeah. Yeah. I think we don't want to put our heads in the sand and kind of tell ourselves our product is aweso..."

"everyone would be at mentioning everything, right? This almost reminded us of like the anti pattern of what Google and and these search engines were before like Google improved their product a lot whi..."

"like is that a very obvious decision now I think it's very obvious now it looks very obvious and this is where like one of the things that I think is is true for any startup is you have to keep provin..."

"Yeah. Something that could change with time right I also think for us and I tell the company this if we're not continuing to have insights and that's why I'm completely okay with a lot of our insights..."

"products and we work with OC companies. A lot of uh codegen tools use uh vector databases because we work with a lot of companies and that's was the standard approach how a lot of folks were building...."

"abstract syntax tree parsing and then on top of that using as you mentioned all the GPU infrastructure we have to take large chunks of the codebase and in real time rank it right as the query is comin..."

"a lot of the companies started off working on autonomous vehicles and the reason why that's kind of important is these are systems where you can't just yolo these systems, which is to say you build th..."

"a lot of complexity for any of these AI apps. I think you need to like make a rigorous hill that you can actually climb, right? Otherwise, you're just shooting in the dark, right? Why would we add the..."

"lot of uh there's been a lot of chatter on the internet about vibes code is only for toy apps windsurf is actually being used for real production large code bases can you tell us about how the power u..."

"audience, how should a user that uses windsurf properly provide this intent so that the changes are more surgical? Because what you're saying with the agents creating all these broad changes I've seen..."

"I think that maybe that's like the big big sort of uh tip there which is that uh you know you don't want to get in a situation where you've made 20 changes and on top of that made some changes yoursel..."

"this for this product surface. An example is git has these things called work trees which is like you can have many work trees and versions of the repository all in your all in the same directory. Um ..."

"type of engineer going forward like you're looking for different things Yeah, I think for engineers that we hire, we want to look for people with really high agency that are willing to be wrong uh and..."

"like workh horses to just kind of get certain things done. I feel like in the old days this was like building Android apps. Um it's like you hired someone to do it because there were very few people w..."

"interview people? Yeah, I think I think we have a fairly rigorous and high technical bar and that has a that's a combination of we give interviews that actually allow people to use the AI to kind of s..."

"and it's it's it's you're totally right. There's very few problems now that something like an O4 Mini is not able to solve now. Um, right? I mean, if you look at competitive programming, it's just it'..."

"are that are both system designy plus algorithms algorithms related. But these are questions that are fairly open-ended, right? Uh there may not be a correct answer. there are there are trade-offs tha..."

"it's a herculan task. We need to start targeting more of the development experience. Right? Right now, we've helped a lot with the code writing process. Um and and maybe the the the navigation of code..."

"prompts. The other thing that he came up with that we've been using all at YC internally is a new agent infrastructure that has direct access, read access to our system of record, our Postgress databa..."

"have for themselves. Do many people use windsurf who don't know how to write code at all? It's actually a large a large number of our users. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. How did they end up getting into w..."

"care about it for your evals at least. Yeah. No, you need to you need to care about it for your evals. That maybe that's like the hard part for me that to to imagine for the pure non-developer product..."

"this is not the most concerning is let's suppose that you were to take the foundation model and it's providing 90%. It's reducing the time it takes by 90%. That actually means if we can deliver one or..."

"thing I like about them is that there's like it's not just an opportunity for like two startups. Like each one of those is like a bucket that could have like a hundred large companies in. We actually ..."