Varun Mohan

🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)

Jul 28, 2025 · 3:53:23

This episode traces the oral history of Windsurf (formerly Codeium and Exafunction) with founders Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, and Anshul R, charting its evolution from a GPU virtualization startup to a leading agentic IDE and its dramatic acquisition by Cognition. The narrative covers the pivot to code completion in 2022, the shift to a free model to gain traction, and the launch of the Windsurf editor in November 2024 with Cascade, an agent that operates on a shared timeline with the developer. Key principles include meta-learning (auto-generated memories that adapt to each user's preferences) and scaling with intelligence (replacing hard-coded rules with LLM reasoning as models improve). The episode also details the acquisition weekend when Cognition bought Windsurf after Google acquired a stake, highlighting product synergies between the synchronous agent (Windsurf) and async agent (Devin) and the ambition to build a comprehensive platform for real-world software engineering teams.

Windsurf: The Enterprise AI IDE

Dec 13, 2024 · 1:06:36

Varun Mohan and Anshul of Codeium explain why they built Windsurf, a new AI IDE, arguing that VS Code's API limitations prevented them from delivering the best agentic experience. They detail how Cascade, their agentic system, uses proprietary retrieval and planning models alongside third-party LLMs, and describe their evaluation method that masks commits and tests incomplete code states. The duo also reveals that over 800,000 developers use Codeium extensions, that they still support JetBrains and Eclipse for enterprise customers, and that they intentionally avoided a waitlist launch. They discuss the trade-offs of building first-party vs. third-party models, the importance of 'go slow to go fast' in enterprise infrastructure, and their belief that individual developer profits should come after building switching costs through superior product.