Why this AI CEO wants his startup to cannibalize its own product every 6 to 12 months

Varun Mohan said he wants Windsurf to rebuild its products every six to 12 months.
Big bets are part of the startup’s DNA, said Mohan, one of two cofounders.
Windsurf builds AI tools that help developers write code.

For some tech founders, building a product so good it lasts forever might sound like the dream. Windsurf’s CEO and cofounder, Varun Mohan, wants his AI startup to regularly blow up its product.

“We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months,” he said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Sunday. “It should almost make the form factor of the existing product look dumb.”

Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, builds AI tools that let developers write code using natural language prompts.

The company is part of a wave of startups embracing “vibe coding,” a term coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy to describe giving AI prompts to write code. As Karpathy puts it, developers can “fully give in to the vibes” and “forget the code even exists.”

Founded in 2021, Silicon Valley-based Windsurf has raised more than $200 million in venture capital funding, according to PitchBook data. The company was valued at $1.25 billion in a deal led by General Catalyst last year, with backing from Greenoaks and Kleiner Perkins.

While other companies fine-tune existing products based on user feedback, Mohan thinks “the value of that is going to depreciate very quickly.” The cofounder said Windsurf needs to stay a step ahead of customers’ requests.

“It’s these longer-term efforts inside the company that almost disrupt the existing product that are ultimately the reason why we’re going to succeed,” he added.

‘Getting things wrong’

Mohan said making big bets is part of Windsurf’s culture.

“We were making money on this,” he said, referring to Windsurf’s earlier product. “And we were just like, ‘Hey, we’re going to pivot entirely from this.'”

At the time, the company had already raised $28 million. But staying focused mattered more than keeping momentum on a product they no longer believed in, he said.

Startups are almost guaranteed to fail if they’re chasing the next big thing while still focused on a product they don’t think is valuable, he added.

Windsurf started building graphics processing unit virtualization infrastructure, then moved to an integrated development environment plugin, and eventually launched its own IDE.

IDEs are software platforms providing all the services developers need to run the apps they are building, including automation and debugging tools.

Each shift came with risk. Mohan said it also came with the acceptance that getting things wrong is part of getting things right.

“Every year is a new lease on life for us,” he said.

“It’s almost a new way for us to test out an entirely new set of hypotheses. And maybe we were wrong about our original hypotheses in the first place,” he added.

Windsurf did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

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