For Varun Mohan, Insights Are Always Depreciating

"Every single insight we have is a depreciating insight,” said Varun Mohan, CEO of Windsurf, in the Lightcone Podcast hosted by Y Combinator. “Technology moves fast. If we’re not continuing to have insights—and executing on them—we’re just slowly dying.”

That mindset helps explain how a team of eight engineers pivoted from GPU infrastructure to building one of the most widely used AI coding platforms. It also sheds light on why OpenAI is now reportedly acquiring Windsurf for $3 billion, in what would be its largest acquisition to date.

Windsurf began as Exofunction, a GPU virtualization company. In 2021, Mohan and his co-founder were helping enterprises manage over 10,000 GPUs. Revenue was solid, surpassing a couple of million dollars, and they had raised $28 million. The bet was that many companies would soon need to train their own deep learning pipelines.

But by mid-2022, that assumption began to unravel. “Our belief was that a wide range of companies would train their own deep learning models,” Mohan said. “But even an early version of GPT-3 could outperform them on tasks like sentiment classification. It became clear people wouldn’t need to train models like BERT anymore.”