Cognition negotiated the Windsurf acquisition in one weekend

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 8:18

   in a redemption story of a company called Windsurf. So can you bring us back to that moment and how M&A has played a role in the growth? Yeah, it's a fun time. I mean, it was all of 11 months ago. um but um so we uh and by the way it's kind of topical because i think recently you know there's similar news with cursor um uh you know we at the time kind of heard this news roughly around the same time as everyone else that hey this company windsurf which is building a really great ide um that a lot of folks used individuals companies and so on um the some of the team was going to google right and so there was kind of like a you know uh aqua hire deal almost where where a number of the researchers on that team were going to Google, right?

2. 9:00

   And there was a company kind of behind that, you know, that still had all the customers, that still had a ready-to-go go-to-market team, a lot of the platform engineering, the product itself, you know, all the details there. But obviously it kind of like, you know, was trying to figure out what to do. And that was announced that Friday afternoon. And, you know, we at Cog, at Cognition, we were talking about that internally.

3. 9:26

   And we were kind of joking about it at first, like kind of interesting like is there um and then you know as we actually thought about it seriously more we were like actually this is really interesting for us because you know if you think about where we're at like you know we've always been focused on obviously you know the research the product itself like really making progress with the agent product um i think as time goes on it's become more and more clear that like the the really good coding ide products you know the tool that you're the the tool that you're kind of like um sitting in and and and like using to look at the code itself versus the agent product which is kind of that almost the engineer that you can delegate um you obviously want this to be very hand in hand like a lot of the same

4. 10:04

   information on on like understanding your exact code base you know obviously like you want the same you know you want the same knowledge to persist across a lot of like how you even go and do your work and manage assessments is very common you know you're you're looking at the code yourself and then you figure out there's something you want to go do and so you hand that off to like a remote agent right um and so ton of synergies in the product similarly in terms of go-to-market it like um you know windsurf had an amazing um enterprise traction already had a team that was really you know had a lot of expertise in going and selling um um to these folks and and and kind of like figuring out how to actually you know deliver uh and so on like a really really amazing deployed engineering motion all the pieces that you would need basically um and so we got in touch

5. 10:50

   with the windsurf team that evening so it was friday evening and then basically over the course of that weekend we worked out the entire acquisition together so by monday morning we had the announcement ready to go uh fun announcement both myself and jeff and honestly our entire team you know we all got very little sleep that weekend um but uh but you know we put everything together and and yeah no it's great that we were able to do that i mean i think it made a lot of sense for us as a company i think it was also obviously like a really great team that was just kind of figuring out what to do um and i think over the last like um year you know there's why i remember saying this it's like it's like peanut butter and chocolate honestly for us like it's been it's been a lot of fun and at this point it's like i think the first few months a lot of little details as

6. 11:36

   you can imagine to figure out like some of the same customers or companies you know it's like yeah we had somebody on the cognition side who had a relationship with them we had somebody on the windsurf side who had a relationship there's tons of stuff to figure out right all the product stuff you know it's like we're talking at the high level about what the synergies are ton of detail involved and actually going and plugging that in and making billing work and thinking about how you actually hand a session off from the local environment to the remote environment and All these other things. And then similarly, even like the teams, the offices, all of that, you know, stuff to figure out.

7. 12:06

   But today, I would say it's like, it's all, you know, it's all one product. It's all one kind of clean. You know, you come to see our office and it's like, you wouldn't know at all. Like, okay, is this person from the old Cognition or the old Windsurf or do they join after, you know, that time? And it's kind of like, it's been really nice in that time.