Surfing the Pivot

What Windsurf Taught Me About Moving Fast and Building Bold

If you’ve been anywhere near AI coding lately, you’ve probably heard of Windsurf. I’ve been using it, studying it, and frankly geeking out over how they pulled off one of the boldest pivots I’ve seen in years. I also use Cursor, Replit, VS — I try anything I find in the market. Although I am an engineer, I am not a developer or coder — I learned BASIC and Pascal millions of years ago. I’ve worked with many engineers across various products and projects, so I can usually understand what they mean when they talk shop with each other.

I didn’t interview the founders directly. But after weeks of following their journey—watching their YC talk, diving into their product updates, and testing the tools myself—I’ve pieced together a pretty vivid picture. In many ways, it felt like I had front-row seats. And what I learned might just change how you think about building startups.

This isn’t a profile. It’s a field note — from one early-stage investor to the builders reading this — about a team that rewrote their roadmap (twice), kept executing at breakneck speed, and built a product that actually delivers on the AI coding dream.

If you’re building anything ambitious, borrow these founder moves from Windsurf’s playbook:

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From GPUs to a Gut Check

Back in 2021, the team behind Windsurf started out as Exafunction. They were deep in GPU virtualization — helping AI-heavy companies run compute more efficiently. VC-backed, a couple million in revenue, a strong technical team.

But by mid-2022, transformer models were taking off. And the team had a realization: when everyone runs the same models, infrastructure becomes a commodity.

They didn’t ease into it. They burned the boats and built Codeium — their new product at the time, which started as a free AI-powered coding assistant available as a browser and VS Code extension — basically over a weekend.

They told the team on Monday. They started building a dev tool — an AI assistant for coding.

"We pivoted in 48 hours because we realized the game we were playing was going to be irrelevant."

Lesson: Don’t confuse momentum with product-market fit. If your insight is expiring, even millions in revenue won’t save you.

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GPU virtualization means using software to split and manage physical GPUs (graphics processing units) so that multiple users or programs can share them efficiently.

Think of it as letting multiple people or programs share one high-powered GPU, kind of like having a shared supercomputer. In simple terms: it’s like turning one powerful graphics card into many smaller ones so different tasks or people can use them at the same time — especially useful in AI and cloud computing.

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Ship First, Perfect Later

Within two months, Codeium shipped as a VS Code extension. It wasn’t prettier or smarter than GitHub Copilot. But it was fast, free, and useful.

And that was enough.

They used an open-source model to start, but then trained their own. They pushed updates fast. They added IDE (short for Integrated Development Environment — a software application where developers write, test, and debug code in one place) support. They watched how people coded. And they found edges others hadn’t.

One small UI change tripled adoption overnight.

Lesson: Your first version doesn’t need to win. It just needs to get used.

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When the Plugin Wasn’t Enough

By 2023, Codeium was growing. But the team realized they were hitting limits inside other people’s editors.

So they built their own IDE. Codeium, their earlier product launched after the first pivot in 2022, started as a free AI-powered coding assistant (like GitHub Copilot), available as a VS Code extension. But as they expanded into a full development environment, they rebranded the company and product as Windsurf in 2024.

That’s how Windsurf — the full AI-native editor — was born. Built in less than 3 months. Released in **November 2024**, with support for agentic workflows, inline refactoring (refactoring means cleaning up and improving existing code without changing what the code actually does), and a fast-growing developer community.

Big companies like JPMorgan and Dell started using it to handle massive codebases. Adoption took off.

Speed becomes a superpower when the conviction is high and the team is aligned.

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Vibe Coding, for Real