{"id":9239,"date":"2025-07-20T20:34:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T20:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/9239\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T20:34:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T20:34:08","slug":"windsurf-ceo-opens-up-about-very-bleak-mood-before-cognition-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/9239\/","title":{"rendered":"Windsurf CEO opens up about \u2018very bleak\u2019 mood before Cognition deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Days after AI coding startup Windsurf announced that it\u2019s being acquired by Cognition<\/a>, Windsurf exec Jeff Wang took to X<\/a> to offer more details about the drama and uncertainty around the deal.<\/p>\n

Windsurf was previously reported to be in acquisition talks with OpenAI<\/a>, but that deal fell apart, with Google DeepMind instead hiring the startup\u2019s CEO Varun Mohan<\/a>, co-founder Douglas Chen, and some of its top researchers. Google would reportedly license Windsurf\u2019s technology as part of the $2.4 billion deal \u2014 but not take an equity stake in the company.<\/p>\n

This looked like the latest in the trend of \u201creverse acquihires,\u201d<\/a> in which large tech companies seek to avoid antitrust scrutiny by hiring key startup team members and licensing their technology, rather than acquiring startups outright.<\/p>\n

But what happens to the startups and the employees who get left behind? As we discussed on the latest episode of Equity<\/a>, one startup founder compared the departing Windsurf executives to a captain abandoning his crew on a sinking ship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wang, who had been Windsurf\u2019s head of business, became the company\u2019s interim CEO after Mohan\u2019s departure. In his post on X, he offered some sympathy to Mohan and Chen, who he described as \u201cgreat founders\u201d in a situation that \u201cmust have been difficult for them as well.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, Wang recounted an all-hands meeting on Friday, June 11, where most team members were expecting to hear about the OpenAI acquisition. Instead, he had to share the news about the Google deal and resulting departures.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mood was very bleak,\u201d Wang said. \u201cSome people were upset about financial outcomes or colleagues leaving, while others were worried about the future. A few were in tears, and the Q&A had been understandably hostile.\u201d<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

In Wang\u2019s view, although the company \u201chad lost some great people and taken a serious blow to morale,\u201d it still had \u201call of our IP, product, and strong talent including an excellent [go-to-market] machine.\u201d So Windsurf could still try to raise more money, sell, or just keep going.<\/p>\n

That evening, however, Wang heard from Cognition executives Scott Wu and Russell Kaplan, and he said Windsurf leadership \u201ctook the Cognition approach very seriously from the start and launched right into negotiations.\u201d In his telling, what followed was a frantic weekend of discussions with Cognition, while considering inbound interest from other potential acquirers and meeting with Windsurf\u2019s remaining engineers to convince them not to leave. (And as all that was happening, \u201cthe timeline was exploding with memes and commentary.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The two companies are a good fit, Wang argued, in part because of complementary teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile [Cognition] had overinvested in engineering, they had frankly underinvested in GTM and Marketing, and our teams in those functions are nothing short of world class,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, we now were missing a Core Engineering team, and there\u2019s no better group of AI engineers than the lineup Cognition has assembled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plus, Wang said he and Wu (pictured together above) were aligned on the need to \u201ctake care of all Windsurf employees.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat resulted in a key part of the deal: structuring it to give a payout to every employee, to waive all cliffs, and to accelerate all vesting for Windsurf equity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The acquisition agreement was apparently signed at 9:30am on Monday morning, announced to the team shortly afterwards at another all-hands, then announced to the public<\/a> shortly after that.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Bloomberg<\/a>, Wang described that Friday all-hands as \u201cprobably the worst day of 250 people\u2019s lives,\u201d followed Monday by \u201cprobably the best day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Days after AI coding startup Windsurf announced that it\u2019s being acquired by Cognition, Windsurf exec Jeff Wang took…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,10888,10889,10890,105,10887],"class_list":{"0":"post-9239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-cognition","14":"tag-jeff-wang","15":"tag-scott-wu","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-windsurf"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}