Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1m developers in 4 months: Inside Windsurf

When you hire for a role and you already have enough people there, you get a lot of weird politics that ultimately ends up happening. They will go out and manufacture some other thing that they should go work on.

Previously, vertical software companies succeeded because they offered comprehensive feature sets, even though individual customers typically only used about 10% of available features, but lacked technical resources to build custom solutions.

The domain specialists now have access to build the tools that they ultimately wanted. Each individual company only wanted 10% of the features, but that has now changed entirely. Now they can.

It's very unlikely the first thing that you believe you should go work on is going to be the right thing. You need to kill the beliefs that you had. You should never be too in love with your ideas.

You don't win by doing 10 things well. You win by doing one thing really well and maybe you fail nine things. I just need to get an A+ on the one class that matters. And then I can get an F in all the other classes.

We've saved over half a million dollars of SaaS products we were going to buy because our go-to-market team has now built apps instead of buying them. Our head of partnerships, instead of buying a partner portal product, has actually built its own partner portal.

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.

Be the smallest company we can be to satisfy our ambitions. If I told you, 'I'm going to build an autonomous vehicle,' and I said our team is 10 people, you should rightfully say, 'You're not serious.'

One of the things that's maybe a little bit undervalued is this kind of agency piece. We don't prioritize how do you make sure you get people with real agency that want to build something.

If a software project could get built in two to three weeks, what does that really mean about the true complexity and differentiation of what you built? It's probably not very high, unless you believe you are way smarter than everyone else. But I think that's hubris.

The engineers are now able to produce more technology. The ROI of building technology has actually gone up. This actually means you hire more.

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 existing product look dumb.