Windsurf CEO & Co-Founder, Varun Mohan: AI's Biggest Acquisition to Date!

One of the weird things about startups is that you don't win an award for doing the same wrong thing for longer. Down the line when you fail, none of them will care.

So excited to welcome one of the hottest, most talked about startups from the Valley to Windsurf and their CEO, Varun.

Companies that are usually first to a new paradigm are companies that are willing to disrupt themselves. When you have a new great idea, even the crappy version of that idea is already amazing. Startups don't fail because they look like messes inside. Startups fail because they don't do the right thing well enough. It is much easier to run a company that has only one thing that matters than it is to run a company with the same amount of revenue with five things that matters.

What idea do you think that you are too in love with today?

I think if I was to go empirically...

Ready to go? Varun, I'm so excited for this dude. I've heard so many good things, by the way, from Lee Marie, from Neil Mehta, from many others. So thank you so much for joining me, man.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Harry, for having me.

Not at all, dude, but I wanted to kind of pick apart, I've literally just been running, and I've been listening to some of your shows before. And there are a couple of segments where I was like, "Damn, I wish we'd double clicked on that." And there was one that I thought I wanted to start with. You said, "It's very rare that the first thing you believe will be the right thing." How have you changed your mind on what a truly great idea is versus what's not?

I think there's a lot that's right about the Peter Thiel-ism of you want to pick something that seems a little bit not obvious to start with, right, um, for, for whatever company you're starting. And the problem is most ideas that are not obvious are just bad ideas. Like most ideas that are non-conventional, just because you are non-conventional doesn't mean you're going to pick a good idea. Um, and I think people sometimes forget that. But I think at a high level though, like if you pick an idea that is like obvious to everyone, there's probably no alpha, right? A big company is going to go out and already beat you to the market, right? Because they have more distribution, resources, and capital than you. So startups usually win by picking non-conventional ideas to the public, but you kind of need to go in and be humble enough to understand that probably there's a good chance that your weird idea is not actually a good idea.

What'd you believe was your non-conventional insight when you made the pivot to Windsurf?

Yeah, so, I mean, I could even start before this. Like the first idea that we had, even like our company name has changed twice now at this point, it was called ExafuncTion when we first built GPU virtualization technology, was that GPU workloads were gonna power the world, right? That was like sort of the, the mission there. A lot of us at the company had previously worked in autonomous vehicles and ARVR, um, at the, at the company. We had a fairly small team. That was actually accurate that GPUs were going to become very popular. Like we were, we basically said NVIDIA's gonna sell a lot of GPUs. The thing we were wrong about was how diverse the GPU workloads were going to be, right? We thought a bunch of different model architectures would be run, there were gonna be hundreds of different model architectures, and we were wrong. All of them ended up being transformers. And in a world in which all the architectures look the same, um, there's very little reason for us to be a differentiated infrastructure provider in that category. So we needed to pivot at that point. But that's some, one of those things where you don't know going into the market that that's how the world is gonna turn out, uh, right? And we were just wrong about our hypothesis. And, uh, so that's why, like sometimes you have a take that is not very obvious at the time, and then you could be wrong.