Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding

Listen to this episode from Lightcone Podcast on Spotify. Varun Mohan didn't set out to build one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools. He just knew his company had to change, or die.After initially betting on GPU virtualization, he saw the writing on the wall: if there was a future for his company, it would be at the AI application layer, not infra. Over a single weekend, he and his team pivoted to building Windsurf— a tool to help everyone, both technical and non-technical, write code faster and smarter.In this conversation, Varun shares the inside story of how they pivoted at the edge of failure, trained new models from scratch, outpaced giants like GitHub Copilot, and what the future of building with AI looks like.Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https:/workatastartup.com