"A lot of the bets we're making inside the company are for things that are not you know, 3, four weeks away. We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every 6 to 12 months. Every 6 t..."

"Mohan. Baroon is the co-founder and CEO of Windservef which has quickly become one of people's favorite AI coding tools and is basically the main competitor to cursor with over 1 million users 4 month..."

"There's so much to learn about where things are heading for engineers and product builders in general in this conversation and I'm really excited to bring it to you. Thank you to everyone on LinkedIn ..."

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"this." And we did that overnight, right? This wasn't this thing where we just said, "Hey, maybe a quarter, one or two quarters." Because one of the things we knew that's very important for startups is..."

"wrong and sometimes you're right. But if you have an organization that comes out and you feel like morale is not going to be low if you made the wrong decision um that that's the best right that means..."

"describing. Okay. So let's talk about windsurf. Uh what's the simplest way for people to understand what is windsurf? Yeah. So windsurf is an IDE, right? It's an application to go out and and build so..."

"we built the product we thought we were going to get limited a ton if we had very very basic UI out there and I'll give you even a simple example here we have this autocomplete product right that comp..."

"that I guess gave us confidence in is yeah like you could argue technology is very important and I think techn is very important but if our users are getting very little value from the technology we'r..."

"deal. Yeah. No, of course. And one of the key pieces that I just maybe Lenny that would be important to share is we a lot of our developers do use Visual Studio Code. Uh but there are lots of people t..."

"It's just like an insane time right now. You touched on something that I wanted to get to later, but I may as well bring it up now. The question of just how engineering will change in the future. You ..."

"now does that mean that no one needs a CS degree I think I think that's maybe a little bit overplayed uh a little bit just because you know maybe maybe here's here's maybe my argument for that a lot o..."

"think it's pretty valuable. Is everything you learn in your computer science degree useful? I'd say a lot of things that I learned in my computer science degree are not useful. I'll give you an exampl..."

"important. You know, a skill for us for a startup obviously these are skills that we just look for. We look for people that are really high agency because we just recognize that by default if we don't..."

"a lot of crazy things happening and a lot of innovation happening. And if you can't keep up, uh, you'll die. So, let's talk about hiring. You have a really interesting approach to hiring. There's a fe..."

"way I would sort of put that out there is if I told you, hey, I'm going to build an autonomous vehicle and I said "Our team is 10 people." You should rightfully say, "Hey, Verun, you're not serious." ..."

"in terms of hiring philosophy, the way we sort of think about things is we only hire for a role if we're actually underwater for that function. So let's say we're going out and building inference tech..."

"I love this metaphor so much. Uh and it sounds uh it sounds painful. It sounds painful that you need to be underwater and raising your hand. I'm about to die and dehydrated, but I also know that it's ..."

"classes doesn't mean, you know, being you know, just doing illegal things. that that basically means you just depp prioritize things that don't matter. you know that actually forces this organizationa..."

"resonates to even get even deeper on just what it looks like when someone's underwater to tell you it's time to hire. Is it just someone coming to you Verun? We need I need someone on this team. This ..."

"hey look like I don't have enough time to do X. Us having a conversation to be like okay uh what can you do then? And if the answer is I I can only do less than that then maybe we make a decision actu..."

"be rewarding internally. How many people do you have at Kodium at this point? So we have we have close to 160 people and the engineering team is over 50 people right now. Awesome. Oh what what what's ..."

"key pieces that we look for we have a very high technical bar. So assuming that they actually meet the technical bar, I think we sort of look for people that are really really passionate about the mis..."

"not going to be thinking about the one engineer that's not pulling their weight. It's the team of people they work with that are almost basically saying, is this the bar internally at the company? Is ..."

"Yeah. Uh you said at some point earlier that your uh engineering pass rate is you said it was like 6% of candidates something like that. Yeah, it's probably post a take-home it's probably that actuall..."

"hopefully they're not just like taking what we're saying, putting it in a voice translator and sticking it into Tatsubishi and getting the answer out. So, there is a way to do this. My viewpoint on th..."

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"angels that actually were operators go to market operators. So an example of one was Carlos Delator who used to be the CRO of MongoDB and I think for us we never viewed enterprise sales and sales as l..."

"I mean look, if you want to sell to the Fortune 500, it is very hard to do that purely by swiping a credit card. Let's talk about cursor. I hate I don't want to spend too much time on competitors but ..."

"right. Yeah. So we that's like a big thing that we spent a lot of time on which is just understanding sort of what the what the codebase is doing and actually like one of the other things is what are ..."

"dollars a year, right? So it's a very very large company. So for us, that's another key piece. We actually like want to meet developers sort of where they are and if they if they use a different platf..."

"little shared screen where you have wind surf pulled up. Great. So some context. This is a very basic React project. There's nothing in it right now. So if you were to open any sort of file, it's it's..."

"all the you kind of start so you open up Windsurf you had a boilerplate React project ready to go and Windsurf had never really seen this code before. You ask it to do stuff on your codebase which is ..."

"between the lines there is like get a gut feeling of what the model is capable of like how specific to be versus how abstract it can be. And there's kind of this like gut feeling you start to build ov..."

"there's like an AI review flow as well right? Which is kind of like what I was saying, the goal of AI is now changed a lot in that it is now modifying large chunks of code for you. And the job of a de..."

"right? And because it deeply understands the codebase, it should go out and find all the corresponding places to go out and make the change. And obviously now when I reload my app, there's no no bug i..."

"all the things those apps do. Oh, wow. There's the retro version. That's good. I like that it built on your red and made it really nice, actually. Actually the red looks way better now. Yeah, with the..."

"buying a partner portal product has actually built his own partner portal right? And that was that you know he had never built software in the past. So and we've actually come up with ways inside the ..."

"these software companies able to exist uh these vertical software companies the reason is because they had many features the kitchen sink of features worked for a lot of companies but each individual ..."

"And so that's why this example you're sharing of go to market folks building their own things. It's like they don't need to know anything about product building. It's just describe it in some ridiculo..."

"obviously it would not be a good idea if we had a 100 million line codebase to send that entire codebase to anthropic. First of all, you couldn't do that. That's over 1.5 billion tokens of code right?..."

"one that does uh that does the edits and autocomplete that is also in-house. Like as you're typing, we actually do some autocomplete related stuff. I'm happy to show that, but I think a lot of users a..."

"retrieval right there's a way to find out are we retrieving the right data right did the user accept the code change after that was the retrieval actually a good retrieval a signal that we can get so ..."

"and over with time. I see. Because if they're just sitting on top of sonnet and just doing what every other sonnet rapper is doing, there's not a lot of differentiation or or it depends on how you do ..."

"the next like couple years. I love that your sales folks now are running like local host servers and well with the browser previews it's easier, right? You kind of just like open it up on the side. Ye..."

"it looks. uh for the enterprise side of the company because we do work with a lot of large enterprises where the requirements are not something that like our engineers would automatically understand, ..."

"centrally planned in this regard the two pizza team concept I saw a tweet long ago where someone from in India was like there's all these talk about two in pizza teams but pizzas in India are much sma..."

"record straight, if AI is writing over 90% of the code, that doesn't mean engineers are 10x as productive, right? Engineers spend more time than just writing code. They review code, test code, debug c..."

"ways in which our users are not even asking. So there's this tension here where incremental feels very safe right? Add this one more button. Users say, "Hey, I would like to be able to have this drop ..."

"thing is outside looking at everyone's like, "Wow, like actually, you know, the decision was made at the right time." But in my head, I'm always banging my head being like, what if we had made it a co..."

"and asking you questions is there anything else that you wanted to share before or I leave listeners with any last piece of nuggets or wisdom uh before I let you go to to be honest I could give predic..."

"under estimated point you're making here. There's apps that can build things from scratch and then there's apps like this that can edit your existing codebase if you're PM at like what's what are the ..."