A few days after AI coding startup Windsurf announced it was being acquired by recognition, Windsurf’s startup Jeff Wang took X and provided details on the drama and uncertainty surrounding the transaction.
Windsurf was previously reported to be in acquisition talks with Openai, but the deal collapsed, and Google Deepmind instead hired startup CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and some of its top researchers. Google reportedly licenses Windsurf’s technology as part of its $2.4 billion deal, but the company’s shares will not take any shares.
This looked like the latest in the “Reverse Acquiairs” trend. In this trend, large tech companies are trying to avoid antitrust scrutiny by hiring members of key startup teams and supplying licensing for technology rather than getting a full startup.
But what about startups and marginalized employees? As discussed in the latest episode of Equity, one startup founder compared the departing Windsurf executives to the captain who abandoned his crew on a wreck.
Wang, who was Windsurf’s business director, became the interim CEO of the company after Mohan’s departure. In his post on X, he offered sympathy for Mohan and Chen. Mohan and Chen described them as “great founders” in a situation where “it must have been difficult for them too.”
Still, Wang spoke about the All Hands meeting on Friday, June 11th. There, we were hoping that most team members would hear about Openai’s acquisition. Instead, he had to share news about Google’s deals and the outcome of its outcome.
“The mood was very dark,” said the Wang. “Some people were angry at the financial outcomes and the departure of their colleagues, while others were worried about the future. Some people were in tears and the Q&A was, of course, hostile.”
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In King’s view, the company “losed great people and took a serious blow to morale,” but “contains all of our IP, products and excellent talent.” [go-to-market] machine. “So Windsurf can try and collect, sell, or continue to spend more money.
However, that night, Wang heard from cognitive executives Scott Woo and Russell Caplan, who said Windsurf’s leadership “takes the cognitive approach very seriously from the start and led him to negotiations.” What followed was what followed in his narrative was the inbound interest from other potential acquirers and meeting with the rest of the Windsurf engineers to persuade them not to leave. (And like everything that’s happening, “The timeline was exploding with memes and commentary.”)
The two companies claimed that because of their complementary teams they were perfect.
“They were overinvestment in engineering, but they were frankly not investing in GTM and marketing, and our team of those features is nothing but world class,” he said. “On the other hand, we were missing out on our core engineering team now. There’s no more group of AI engineers than lineup awareness has built it up.”
Furthermore, the king said that he and Wu (pictured above) were in line with the need to “take care of all Windsurf employees.”
“The result was a key part of the transaction: we provided payments to all our employees, abandoned all our cliffs, and built it to accelerate all vesting for Windsurf’s fairness,” he said.
The acquisition agreement was clearly signed at 9:30am on Monday and was announced to the team soon after, and soon after.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Wang said everything on Friday was “probably the worst day of 250 lives,” followed by “probably the best day” on Monday.
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