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OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google
- upmind 1y agoDoes anyone know which side cancelled the deal?
- moralestapia 1y agoLol. I commented on the OG thread something like "weird since MSFT owns VS Code" and got downvoted to oblivion. Yet here we are, always right :).
- SMAAART 1y agoHow does this happens? They raised A, B, and C round (according to CrunchBase), and then the founders just walk away and get a job/deal at Google?
- moralestapia 1y agoNepotism. The same set of rules that apply to you and me are not universal.
- manquer 1y agoPerhaps it as combination of how much founders were diluted and how much they are being offered upfront. We are hearing about $100M signing bonuses. It is hard to say no when Google/Meta gives you say $100M upfront and hundreds more if not Billion+ in RSUs. After 3 rounds it is not unreasonable to have only 5-10%. 10% of a company worth a few billion burning a lot of cash, that needs to keep raising more rounds i.e more dilution, may have less value than RSUs from multi-trillion dollar publicly traded liquid tech company today. It is also quite hard to raise $5-10+Billion in cash. There are only handful of startups which have ever done so Very few funds/investors can afford to do so large rounds. This was SoftBank's thesis for most of last decade, compete by just outfunding competing products in a market.
- t0mas88 1y agoThe deal for the founders may not have been as good as what Google offered. They may only hold 10% after those rounds, a serious part of the acquisition price could go to liquidation preferences of the VCs and the deal is mostly in OpenAI stock instead of cash. Not that hard to imagine the Google option offering them much more actual cash right now.
- conartist6 1y ago[flagged]
- lvl155 1y agoOpenAI needs to up their game on Codex to be on par with Claude Code. o3 is a better planner relative to Opus.
- beering 1y agoWhere do you think Codex lags behind Claude Code?
- romanovcode 1y agoThe big one is that they do not offer "unlimited" plans where you can forget about the tokens and just use it. UI is also worse compared to Claude. They still have some work to do if they want to compete with Claude TBH.
- Ancalagon 1y agoSo Google, Meta, and Microsoft will just hollow out the best AI startups of their talent instead of buying them - out of fear of monopoly lawsuits I'm assuming? Nice plan I guess. Kind of obvious to spot though.
- brianwawok 1y agoLikely cheaper too. Nothing to pay the original shareholders
- Kinrany 1y agoIt's been working with software developers with no issues.
- bix6 1y agoCan shareholders sue? I presume the only avenue is IP since that belongs to the company? Or the non-exclusive license somehow negates that? Brutal.
- Ancalagon 1y agoI actually don't know if there's much that can be done unless there's some non-competes in those employees' contracts which are usually not very enforceable outside of finance iirc.
- bix6 1y agoNon competes aren’t enforceable in California but the company owns the IP so I’m curious about this license loophole they are using.
- nrmitchi 1y agoNon competes can definitely be enforceable in California for executives and those with fiduciary responsibilities to a company. They’re just not enforceable against “rank and file” employees.
- rvnx 1y agoWindsurf and Cursor are in the business of reselling ChatGPT and Claude at a loss, but the tech itself is not impressive at all
- cpursley 1y agoThose wrappers are gonna go away now that there's Claude Code and Googles CLI thing. They are that much better.
- taytus 1y agoI agree. I use claude desktop with MCP and Gemini CLI exclusively. I have 20+ years of writing code, and this is awesome!
- warmedcookie 1y agoAre they? Cursor's Accept / Reject feature for each change it makes in each file is nice whereas I have to use a diff tool to review the changes in Claude Code. Also, if I go down a prompt alley that's a dead end, Cursor has the Restore Checkpoint feature to get back to the original prompt and try a different path. With Claude Code, you had better have committed the code to git, otherwise you end up with a mess you didn't want. My company pays for both, but I mostly use Cursor unless I know I am doing a new project or some proof of concept, which Claude Code might have an edge on with a more mature TODO list feature.
- Unearned5161 1y agoI got burned too many times from that Restore Checkpoint thing not working right, maybe it's been fixed by now but seems silly to rely on something thats not a literal tool built for the job (version control), not a good shortcut.
- pqdbr 1y agoIt has worked perfectly for me every time, and it’s such a great feature.
- m_a_g 1y agoLooks like Sama can’t catch a break.
- parpfish 1y agoI only learned this week that “sama” is “Sam Altman” and not the first name of some other ai startup ceo
- BobbyJo 1y agoIt's his hackernews username.
- browningstreet 1y agoWell, more actively nowadays, it's his X username...
- mi_lk 1y agosama is nothing without drama
- foobiekr 1y agoGood.
- 3abiton 1y agoIt's unclear if OpenAI cancelled the deal, or Google poached them? Either way, this season of "OpenAI Drama" is wild. First Meta, now Google. Your turn Amazon / Microsoft.
- jamessinghal 1y agoApparently OpenAI allowed the deal to expire; likely Google had already been in discussion with Windsurf as I'm sure they knew the deal was likely to die well before today.
- sumedh 1y agoMS probably killed the deal, MS wanted access to Windsurf to make Co Pilot better while OpenAI did not want to give them access.
- barbazoo 1y ago> OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday. > Mohan and the Windsurf employees will focus on agentic coding efforts at Google DeepMind and work largely on Gemini. Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology. Sounds to me like they're "hiring" them like one "hires" a consultant?
- consumer451 1y agoI did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV. I wonder what happened with the OpenAI deal. Anyone have any guesses? My first guess is "Look at Claude Code, we can do this ourselves." But, I am likely thinking too simply. edit: does this mean that Windsurf and its users will stop being iced-out by Anthropic? Or, is this the end of Windsurf?
- consumer451 1y agoDerp. Weird IP sharing issues.
- imiric 1y ago> I did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV. You must be new around here.
- wagwang 1y agoAll of this game of thrones is going to create an amazing documentary if AI capabilities taper off and valuations vaporize.
- tamersalama 1y agoAre the AI capabilities tapering-off, or commoditized? Building the next Windsurf (iteration 0) doesn't feel it's quite niche anymore.
- wagwang 1y agoI think the current valuations imply at least 2 magnitudes of improvement over existing functionality.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- h1fra 1y agoI know David Fincher is jumping on his seat
- DiscourseFan 1y agoObviously these things are difficult to tell from the outside
- xyst 1y agoApparently somebody missed crypto mania between 2019-2022
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoPour one out for the regular employees not getting absorbed by Google and suddenly not millionaires like they imagined they were a week ago.
- plumeria 1y agoLike in WeCrashed (2022)?
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoMaybe the expectation that a job leading to an equity windfall is something people should be more cautious about.
- gsibble 1y agoIt's something you should never assume is true until the wire hits your account. I had a deal where I was going to make $15 million called off 36 hours before closing.
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoAw man, I'm really sorry to hear you had to experience that.
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- kirlev 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250711213611/https://www.theverge.com/openai/705999/google-windsurf-ceo-openai https://web.archive.org/web/20250711213611/https://www.theve...
- metadat 1y agoIt's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company. What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind. [0] Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer Returns to Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141112 - 11 months ago (87 comments) Edit: Thank you @jonny_eh for the clarification. I can't imagine it feels awesome being a leftover but at least you vested out. "Take the money and leave" is still a bit raw when the founders and researchers are now getting the initial payout + generous Google RSU's.
- takklz 1y agoThe rank and file equity pitch is quickly falling apart…
- bix6 1y agoAlways has been
- bravetraveler 1y agoThink it started that way... I'm currently in a vesting/allocation situation where the incentive is to drive the share price down.
- takklz 1y agoGeeeeeze
- silenced_trope 1y agoThis. Character.ai reached out to me for an opportunity, but they've already been carved up. I think it's great that the rank and file got some of their equity cash-out (based on the other comment), but I imagine it isn't an attractive prospect as a start-up to join at this point. I just ignored the recruiter. I can't imagine their would be a second liquidity event.
- sampton 1y agoZuck swoops in and hire them 100mm a piece.
- baal80spam 1y agoI really think that Apple is smart to sideline this shitshow.
- nimchimpsky 1y ago[dead]
- raspasov 1y agoThis.
- metadat 1y agohttps://archive.today/urwCT https://archive.today/urwCT
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoWhat is the source Verge? Give us a link more than "Google and Windsurf announced Friday"
- asdev 1y agoI never knew anyone who used Windsurf. These AI acquisitions have been unbelievable(in a bad way). WIX acquired some garbage Lovable.dev clone for 80 million. I think many of us are waiting for this bubble to pop(economy will likely pop too)
- nimchimpsky 1y ago[dead]
- sunaookami 1y agoIt was barely better than Cursor and they got shafted by Anthropic because of the takeover announcement so nobody really used it anymore because let's face it - Claude Sonnet is just the best coding model. Design-wise the chat panel and autocomplete integration was a bit nicer than in Cursor but not by much. Subscription for Windsurf was/is also 5$ cheaper.
- break_the_bank 1y agoi don't think it was better than or comparable to cursor at all. except for the month prior to the OpenAI Acquisition news where some minor influencers on X were calling it better. if it was better it would have survived.
- buzzerbetrayed 1y ago> if it was better it would have survived. Not sure how you can claim this when: 1. It is still very much alive, and 2. The whole point GP is making is that what made it better got stripped from it because of the acquisition announcement
- cellis 1y agoBase44 is absolutely not garbage. I’ve tried it and can say it’s as good or better of a vibe-builder than Lovable or Bolt. Have you benchmarked it against the competition or can you otherwise substantiate the “garbage” claim? FWIW I do know one amazing engineer using Windsurf
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- WeirderScience 1y agoI wonder if this is a result of the previously reported clashes between OpenAI and Microsoft over access to the Windsurf IP (under their investment agreement)
- ghuntley 1y agoFor the love of God, can we get a reboot of the Silicon Valley television show? Just on AI. Like when they wrapped it, they wrapped it on AI usage. So, it's got the perfect arc for a reboot that focuses perfectly on AI.
- beering 1y agoEven the original Silicon Valley didn’t match the zaniness of real life. Why do we need a reboot? Just check HN!
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoMy favorite thing about that series was watching it with friends who weren't from the Bay Area. Often they'd be laughing at the sheer absurdity of a situation, and I'd get to point out that it was barely exaggerated from real life.
- gsibble 1y agoThat's what my friends not from SF said. "This is insane, this would never happen" Dude, I saw a lot crazier things happen on a monthly basis. And don't even get me started on the personal lives and partying that the show didn't display.
- timy2shoes 1y agoMy wife refuses to watch it because it hit too close to home.
- seydor 1y agoWhy ? we get to watch the original reality show in real time, for free!
- mizzao 1y agoThe "Son of Anton" was an coding agent that deleted the entire codebase. Not so far off from Cursor's YOLO mode, is it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262383
- xyst 1y agoC-level executives get paid. Labor gets stuck grinding at Google. What a waste. Google will probably shelve/hoard the IP from Windsurf.
- bhl 1y agoI don't know anyone who heard or used Windsurf outside the Bay Area. Even Cursor feels very Bay Area bubbly (although that is the market to go after if you're in ai dev tools).
- jongjong 1y agoCursor does add value but it's just a thin layer on top of VSCode so companies could just build that in-house and don't need to acquire. There's no moat there.
- bhl 1y agoCursor has custom tab and embedding models. And has a lot of distribution / paying users already. Arguably they have the strongest product moat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they beat OpenAI in a vertical coding model from that. Easy for them to have users generate evals and have model product feedback loop here.
- arresin 1y agoThe tab completion is fast and the best available right now but is still so garbage that I turn it off 99% of the time because the suggestions are mostly noise.
- anon7000 1y agoI have the opposite experience, it’s at least 90% correct. For example, if I start writing the name of a function that I just added in a different file, tab will suggest the function, then jump to the top of the file to import it. If I’m changing the way something is called in 5 places, if I change it in the first place, tab will jump to make the same change in the other places. It’s honestly pretty spot on. Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it’s slow)
- bluefirebrand 1y ago> I have the opposite experience, it’s at least 90% correct. For example, if I start writing the name of a function that I just added in a different file, tab will suggest the function, then jump to the top of the file to import it Intellisense has done this for ages. A decade at least.
- layer8 1y agoAccording to The Information, Microsoft gaining access to Windsurf’s IP if OpenAI acquired them was a factor: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-windsurf-break-acquisition-talks-microsoft-ip-concerns https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-windsurf-brea... (paywalled)
- modeless 1y agoI don't understand why Windsurf would care after they've exited.
- gk1 1y agoNot Windsurf… OpenAI. And OpenAI cares because they’re competing (in part) against Copilot, so if Msoft gets all the benefits of Windsurf then OpenAI would effectively be paying 3B to feed their competitor.
- modeless 1y agoThis would also happen if OpenAI developed the same thing internally, right? I don't see how not acquiring them improves anything.
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoI guess building it internally is cheaper
- modeless 1y agoIf that's true today it was true the day they made the original offer. Microsoft didn't change that.
- subarctic 1y agoDoes that ip deal expire at some point?
- extr 1y agoIMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less $$$ to develop than forking an entire IDE. - CC is dead simple to onboard (use whatever IDE you're using now, with a simple extension for some UX improvements). - Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins (and middlemen like Cursor) in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue + training data access. What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) - Some UI niceties like "add selection to chat", and etc. Personally I think this is a harbinger of where things are going. Cursor was fastest to $900M ARR and IMO will be fastest back down again.
- alanmoraes 1y agoI never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?
- extr 1y agoIIRC problem is that VS Code does not allow extensions to create custom UI in the panels areas except for WebViews(?). It makes for not a great experience. Plus Cursor does a lot with background indexing to make their tab completion model really good - more than would be possible with the extensions APIs available.
- efitz 1y agoCline and Roo Code (my favorite Cline fork) are fantastic and run as normal VS Code extensions. Occasionally they lose their connection to the terminal in VSCode, but I’ve got no other integration complaints. And I really prefer the bring-your-own-key model as opposed to letting the IDE be my middleman.
- milofeynman 1y ago
- acaloiar 1y agohttps://archive.is/Rdt3z https://archive.is/Rdt3z
- dalemhurley 1y agoCursor (and Garry Tan’s X post) has shown us that the VC money is propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request, which means they need to innovate like crazy. The moat is paper thin. GitHub has open sourced copilot. The open source community is working hard on their own projects. No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovations, but if the competition only focuses on thin wrappers they are not worth the billion dollar valuations. I love watching this space as it is moving extremely fast.
- tootie 1y agoI think the recent Grok release and considering xAI was relatively late to the game shows that the only moat to training giant models is how many GPUs you can buy. ChatGPT was earth-shattering and it took less than two years for multiple credible competitors to match or exceed them. Making these models profitable is proving extremely difficult in the face of so much competition and such unsustainable expectations being set. Google seems to be most likely to sustain themselves through this melee. Them and the Chinese companies.
- bmau5 1y agoWhat was Garry's post?
- forrestthewoods 1y agoI have same question
- ec109685 1y agohttps://x.com/garrytan/status/1941553682736439307 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1941553682736439307 The thesis is that once you’re paying $200 a month, you’re beholden and won’t pay and compare it with anything else.
- romanovcode 1y agoUntil something else comes around for similar price and is much better. Good thing for consumers who use AI coding tools is that there is no lock-in like in Photoshop or similar software where you hone your skills for years to use particular tool. Switching from Cursor to any other platform would literally take 10 minutes.
- ashvardanian 1y agoThe title made sense until the comma, and then it didn’t :)
- rvz 1y agoThis deal always looked strange in the first place. The usage of Windsurf was significantly lower than Cursor and Copilot and somehow it was worth $3B. Given the release of Claude Code, it was already over for them.
- pimlottc 1y ago@dang - The title’s wording suggest that OpenAI’s CEO is leaving, not Windsurf. A more accurate title might be: “Windsurf’s deal with OpenAI is off, and its CEO is going to Google”
- dang 1y agoOk, thanks! (Submitted title was ""OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off — and its CEO is going to Google"")
- tlogan 1y agoCould anyone explain the implications of this for Windsurf as a company? Are they going to close?
- jamesliudotcc 1y agoNothing for certain, but yes. The IP payout is to give the investors something.
- mrcwinn 1y agoWhat if OpenAI is buying Cursor instead?
- jamesliudotcc 1y agoNot out of the question after a week of Cursor just absolutely torching goodwill
- submeta 1y agoI went from Emacs to VS Code, then to Cursor, next to Claude Code, which is so good that I feel like I am having half a dozen junior devs at my fingertips, 24/7. Since Claude Code is cli based, I reviewed my cli toolset: Migrated from iTerm2 to Ghostty and Tmux, from Cursor to NeoVim (my God is it good!). Just had a 14h workday with this tooling. It’s so good that I complete the work of weeks and months within days! Absolutely beast. At this point I am thinking IDEs do not reflect the changing reality of software development. They are designed for navigating project folders, writing / changing files. But I don’t review files that much anymore. I rather write prompts, watch Claude Code create a plan, implement it, even write meaningful commit messages. Yes I can navigate the project with neovim, yes I can make commits in git and in lazygit, but my task is best spent in designing, planning, prompting, reviewing and testing.
- mr_toad 1y agoIDEs were a crutch, and now that crutch has been replaced by a semi-autonomous bot that can fetch and carry.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- didibus 1y ago> I don’t review files that much anymore You don't review the code? Just test it works?
- yoz-y 1y agoAt work we’re encouraged to use AI, so I do. For me the one thing that works well is using it to write one off scripts that do stuff and would be a chore to write. Usually in 2-3 prompts I can get a python or shell script that reads some file list somewhere, reads some json/csv elsewhere. Combines it in various ways and spits out some output to be ingested by some other pipeline. I just test this code if it works it’s good. Never in my life would I put this in a critical system though. When I review these files they are full of tiny errors that would blow up in spectacular manner if the input was slightly off somewhere. It’s good for what it is. But I’m honestly afraid of production code being vibe coded by these tools.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seatac76 1y agoHow long does Windsurf go on now? Losing your CEO to a poach job not even an acquihire must blow up any fund raising plans.
- mvkel 1y agoBullet dodged. Windsurf's value to OpenAI was for the latter to "see the whole chessboard" of context, which is helpful when you're training models to be good at coding. But codex (and Claude Code) fulfill this from the CLI, and it's a first-party utility, not an acquisition.
- mrdependable 1y agoI wonder how these two events came to be declared in the same news release.
- m3kw9 1y agoSmart move, I always wonder if they have disposable money to spend on stuff like this and figure out what to do with it after.
- xnx 1y agoNice to get a sanity check that confirms Windsurf was never really worth $3B to all those who thought that number was ridiculous.
- fnord77 1y agoGoogle is paying $2.4billion to them
- diegof79 1y agoI'm not surprised. I started using Windsurf when it came out because I liked its UX better than Cursor's. However, while Cursor and GH Copilot improved, Windsurf went in the opposite direction. On each update, I started to get more and more issues. The agent often tried to run shell commands, and it hung up, or I found minor UI bugs. One day, I decided to give GH Copilot another chance, and I was surprised by how it evolved, to the point that it worked better than Windsurf for my usage. I don’t know what happened internally at Windsurf, but I notice the degradation as a user. If my case indicates what happened to other users, maybe OpenAI saw declining subscriptions and canceled the deal.
- beambot 1y agoAre these "acquihire & license" the new M&A...? I recall hearing that this was a "hack" to avoid DOJ and FTC scrutiny over acquisitions, but I have no clue how such deals are structured. Anyone care to chime in?
- smcleod 1y agoHonestly there's no value that windsurf, cursor and all the other VSCode forks provide that couldn't be provided as an extension and even then - none of them perform as well for agentic coding as Cline / Roo Code (debates about the subscription pricing aside due to people often not realising their model limits, public US only based APIs, pay for useful API limits etc aside).
- sashank_1509 1y agoSo the result of aggressively scrutinizing big tech acquisitions is acquihires, not a more competitive tech ecosystem with say more IPO’s. The libertarian spin on this would be government should have never scrutinized acquisitions and the result is just worse for everyone. The progressive spin would be to now ban acquihires somehow, and then whatever new legal invention will be created next. I can imagine the next step being, creating a consulting company out of your startup and then selling yourself as consultants to big techs. Now you are neither acquired nor technically acqui-hired and the whackamole continues. At some point, we need to realize the solution is the culture of people involved. If the government could just ask to reduce acquisitions to make the ecosystem more competitive and companies tried following it in spirit to the best of their ability, we might have much better results than whatever we have now. When culture degrades, the govt can’t trust companies, the companies can’t trust the govt, everything just gets worse, regardless of what rules you write and enforce.
- agd 1y agoThis wasn't a result of regulator scrutiny. The issue was that MS (owner of Copilot) was demanding access to the IP (due to their existing agreement with OpenAI), and OpenAI was resisting. In addition, Claude blocked access to Windsurf, which also damaged them as an acquisition target. Nothing to do with regulators.
- sashank_1509 1y agoI find this hard to believe considering all the recent acquihires that happened recently like Character AI, Inflection, Covariant AI, Scale AI, context AI and so on. Maybe you’re right about the specifics of this situation, but my prior for this being an acquihire is very high and I would need to see very compelling evidence that that is not the case.
- arrosenberg 1y agoThe culture of the people involved got us to this point, I’m not sure it’s the solution to the problem. > The progressive spin would be to now ban acquihires somehow, and then whatever new legal invention will be created next. Progressive has become a moving target, but the pro-competition view would be to break up the massively concentrated companies that are further consolidating markets. Thats what the Khan FTC was trying to do, but we need a Congress interested in a competitive marketplace, which we haven’t had in a while.
- ashraymalhotra 1y agoJust curious - would this negatively affect OpenAI's ability to acquire companies in the future?
- ec109685 1y agoThey have got get their act together from a structure standpoint or these types of acquisitions are going keep failing.
- nrmitchi 1y agoThis isn’t a great look for OpenAI, but acquisitions fall through all the time. The issue isn’t an acquisition not working out, it’s that the founding/exec team felt it appropriate to arrange their own exits and abandon their team before even communicating that their “successful exit” wasn’t actually happening.
- kolja005 1y agoFunny to see this today. I'm a rank and file dev at a non-big tech company and I got a call from a Windsurf sales rep this week who I had connected with on LinkedIn the day before (I never gave them my number). They told me my company was in talks with Windsurf about a licensing deal but that they would give me a 30 day trial of an enterprise account for use on personal projects to let me try it in advance. I guess the idea for them is to build enthusiasm among devs in the company? Is this a standard sales strategy for products like this? It seems pretty aggressive to me but I'm just an engineer so I wouldn't know.
- aabhay 1y agoVery standard yep. Sales folks are sort of trained /indoctrinated into telling white lies like that in order to get in the door. There are loads of examples of using fake momentum to close deals. If its a senior person it’s “My CEO asked me to personally reach out to you” or a fake email from the CEO forwarded by the rep. If one person at the company uses it, it’s “we’re negotiating a company wide license” or “we already have a group license with extra seats” or “one of your teammates sent us a list of priority teammates” yada yada.
- blindriver 1y agoThe founders fucked over the employees and the investors and sold out. I guess they don’t care if they are worth $200M each but they fucked every employee that poured their heart out into that company. I hope no one works for them again.
- almost_usual 1y agoThis is why working for startups is not worth it.
- SamDc73 1y agoWhen Claude kind of cut them off, they realized these AI Agentic tools are as good as your model, little to no moat here. And it was a crazy deal to begin with, for reference JetBrains who's building IDEs for 24 years are evaluated at $7 billions
- screye 1y agoWorks out for Google and the C-suite. Horrible for the employees. These fake-acquisitions are effectively arbitrage against employees, who get left holding nothing. Should be illegal and regulated. Not sure how the VCs get their cut. I'm guessing that Google can balance it out by participating in rounds for other startups in that VC's porfolio.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoIt is always the case that the employees get screwed
- another_twist 1y agoI recently read a reddit thread about how somebody made 12M on a stock that IPOd. But yeah the majority opinion is that employees get shafted.
- slad 1y agoI have been using Windsurf for few months. They even have their own AI model SWE-1 model. I really liked using Windsurf. They also have integrations with other IDEs ex: jetbrains, VS code, etc. This week I have been using Claude Code and Windsurf side by side. I would make change with one, stash it, ask the other for similar change and then would diff it. Overall Windsurf was pretty on a par with Claude code.
- yieldcrv 1y agoand Windsurf employees have worthless equity and no CEO loool dead
- bb_i_love 1y ago[dead]
- osigurdson 1y agoThis certainly aligns with my own usage. I'm currently using OpenAI's own Codex 50:1 compared to Windsurf. For me, I'd rather take some time to create a good quality prompt and have it work away for a few minutes and create a material delta. It isn't always perfect, and I often have to make a few tweaks myself, but it is much nicer and waiting around and watching Windsurf bang around on a tiny part of the solution. Windsurf is still nice to use for quick UI iteration however.
- asciii 1y agoThis sounds terrible if they're just taking management and key employees? Imagine backing this startup and the founder team takes a parachute...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bb_2x_times 1y ago[dead]
- awaymazdacx5 1y agononexclusive proprietary licensing at its zenith
- mortsmel 1y agoI don't know if you noticed but cursors language server aspect that runs the coding edits and stuff like that from a server to the workstation is a lot better than windsurf. Windsurf phone's home on every code edit that you have and takes on 30% load on your servers or on your workstation depending on what you're running. I would strongly discourage the use of windsurf on your systems. Case in point their AI model that they just built.
- nrmitchi 1y agoThis whole situation feels shockingly close to the Meta/Scale situation, where founders and specific employees were plucked out, and effectively gutted any future prospects for the company. At least in the Scale case there seemed to be some form of payout to employees and equity holders, but this takes it a whole lot further by just throwing out all other employees. There is supposed to be the concept that “all common stock is the same”. These fake-acquisitions completely undermine that.
- BrtByte 1y agoYep, if investors and early employees keep getting left out in the cold while execs get a soft landing at Big Tech, it's going to shake a lot of trust in the startup game
- herval 1y agoI don’t think anyone trusts any tech company much these days. It’s been a steep decline in the past 5 years, from arbitrary mandates to the constant talk about firing everyone and hiring an AI. Even as an investor, it’s hard to trust that the “honor system” that once existed is still in play.
- neilv 1y ago> Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, [...] Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology. [...] Google didn’t share how much it was paying to bring on the team. OpenAI was previously reported to be buying Windsurf for $3 billion. Why not an acquisition? How did Google get Windsurf and investors to agree to this maneuver that decapitated the leadership and key talent, without a big exit event for everyone? My read of the article: "Here's x% of what OpenAI offered you, you waive legal challenges while we cherry-pick your people and license the tech in their heads, and you can keep the company, and everyone left behind can promote themselves to fill the vacancies."
- taspeotis 1y agoIf they acquire a company they might need approval due to anti-trust. If the people instead just quit their jobs and start working at Google … nothing to see here.
- neilv 1y agoAnd everyone who didn't get a Google employee badge agreed because "x%" was big enough?
- rfks 1y agoI guess VCs can't force founders to stay (the only penalty for joining Google is loosing some/all of their Windsurf equity, but I'm sure they chose what's better for them), and employees didn't need to agree (they have no vote).
- neilv 1y agoI can guess a few angles and causes for legal action. I'm wondering what the deal was to incentive people not to take that legal action.
- 1y ago
- impulser_ 1y agoIs Lina Khan to blame for this new acquihire meta? She was very aggressive in blocking any tech acquisition during her time and ever since we have seen more and more acquihires which I believe these companies are using to prevent themselves from getting sued. Google is having a hard time acquiring Wiz for 32b, and if it's blocked they owe 3.2b to Wiz. So why risk it when you can just spend the money to hire the talent behind it and spend a few month building out a new product.
- hatenberg 1y agoThe police is to blame for trying to enforce the law, it makes criminals innovate is exactly the kind of take I come here for.
- impulser_ 1y agoI mean that's exactly what is happening right now. Companies are buying the assets of companies instead of the companies themselves so they don't have to worry about being sued which is a timely and costly process that has become very unreliable due to how much politics are involved in the process now.
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoUpdate: > Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4 billion AI talent deal https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/google-windsurf-ceo-varun-mohan-latest-ai-talent-deal-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/google-windsurf-ceo-varun-mo...
- hedayet 1y agoI was so surprised (or shocked) to hear that Windsurf was getting acquired for 3 billion dollars, I made an HN post asking about the truth of that news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933825. HN's system didn't like my tone I guess and removed it, lol. But in any case, I just can't see how AI code editors like Windsurf or Cursor, without any proprietary model, can be valued at billions. What's the underlying IP that justifies these valuations?
- BrtByte 1y agoMaybe Google sees something under the hood
- rpunkfu 1y agoSimilar thing to what we’ve witnessed with crypto coins. It’s AI season and those with money invest in it, pump it and will exit post IPO. Difference here is, that besides value that those products “hold”, it’s possible also to provide AI as a service, making Google / Microsoft etc interested.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoThey both have proprietary models.
- hedayet 1y agoAnyone can build a proprietary model in under a week; but the point is - Cursor and Windsurf don't have proprietary models that remove dependency on external models, and/or have capabilities that competitors don't have.
- vachina 1y agoThey sell stuff that actually works, and people who use it convince people who pay money to pay for it.
- scotty79 1y ago> I just can't see how AI code editors like Windsurf or Cursor, without any proprietary model, can be valued at billions. Windsurf used to be GPU rental company before they decided to make a text editor. I imagine they own a lot of silicon they are running their coding assistant on. https://www.afp.com/en/infos/windsurf-launches-first-gpu-cluster-germany-expanding-secure-enterprise-ai-europe https://www.afp.com/en/infos/windsurf-launches-first-gpu-clu... It's not a rinky-dinky startup that just forked VS Code in a month.
- Domainzsite 1y ago[dead]
- muskmusk 1y agoI guess masks are completely off now. We can see who sells out to the highest bidder and who won't sell because they care more about the mission.
- raphinou 1y agoAnyone know what the deal was? Can it be scrapped like that? I expected to read more info about that but it's not even mentioned.
- Weryj 1y agoCould be conditional on DD and deliverables
- BrtByte 1y agoWow, this is a pretty fascinating twist. First OpenAI's $3B deal falls through, and now Google swoops in to poach the key talent anyway? Classic big-tech maneuvering
- s_ting765 1y agoSounds like the death knell for Open AI. They can't outswim the FAANG sharks. Once Microsoft is out, it's over for them.
- iwontberude 1y agoI can’t wait for these companies to start laying people off so I can buy their house. They are inflating real estate prices with their dumb AI money.
- TechSquidTV 1y agoIf this isn't some kind of sign of the times, idk what is. This is too far.
- d_sc 1y agoThere’s a lot of talk about Claude Code in here, and I agree it’s a great agentic coding tool. One of the benefits of Cursor & Windsurf is/was the ease for smaller companies to setup Team accounts and have control over spend. Claude Code I think misses this. You can get an enterprise account if you commit to over, what.. 70 seats annually? If you’re an individual you can get Max 5x/20x .. But for smaller companies, I don’t think they are addressing that space. Am I wrong? Are there any Agentic tools like Claude Code that can provide a fixed cost per user?
- mikeg8 1y agoA small company can just pay the $250 a month for X number of employees to each have CC max plan. Not that complicated
- d_sc 1y agoI thought that was against the terms of service from Anthropic and they have the rights to disable/ban accounts doing that.
- jimmydoe 1y agoEnterprise is where you make the money. I’m sure they will have something soon. For now, i can just piggybacking on bedrock or vertex which is peanuts comparing to production cost.
- d_sc 1y ago> piggybacking on bedrock or vertex Can you elaborate? I’m not familiar with this approach.
- thorio 1y agoThis my friends is how the next iteration of venture capital contract templates becomes even longer... Otherwise, normally with the amount of capital raised by Windsurf, the founders must have signed some kind of non-compete for the event of a bad-leaver (which this obviously is). Guess covering these penalties was just part of Google's deal, hm?
- mikebuds1 1y ago[dead]
- warthog 1y agoi would be so pissed if I was an employee who got nothing out of the deal and left to dry now
- sammerslam 1y agoWow must have seen the numbers and decideed they wanted to call it off. Not a good business model probably so the human talent is where you find the best amount. Still why would anyone ever want to work at Google? Don't they know they are contributing to a system that covertly disseminates information they want you to see. Especially the AI models. Has anyone ever wondered about the training data sometimes? What would people think of them if they knew they had the entire pestein list in their hands but decided its better to protect the ones that pay them. People need to reconsider what they believe from AI, it can be extremely abused to scale narratives.
- jspaetzel 1y agoIt's somewhat telling that the most valuable part of an company is the people, some things don't change
- asdf6969 1y agoCan someone explain how this works financially for the acquihired? I know they aren’t joining like a regular employee with a high TC. Does Google offer them a giant multi-million (billion?) dollar signing bonus? Why would they tank the value of the company they own just to be another employee at Google?
- janpaul123 1y agoKilo Code CEO here. We’d like to welcome ex-Windsurf users by offering you $100 in credits. :D We'd love to show how through open source there is a better way (better community, more transparent pricing, won't mess with your or the product). https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/windsurf-is-over-switch-to-open-source https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/windsurf-is-over-switch-to-open-s...
- twolf910616 1y agodang, I feel like my Bay to Breaker tote bag value just went up 10x right?
- ur-whale 1y agohttps://archive.is/SkCKz https://archive.is/SkCKz
- ivape 1y agoWhat could Google have possible offered? Must have been astronomical. Sundar has been aggressive ever since OpenAI knocked the wind out of them by being first release gpt.
- senderista 1y agoNot every exit is a liquidity event these days. Startup employees take note.
- gmerc 1y agoIt's clearly designed to avoid anti-trust https://centreforaileadership.org/resources/opinion_startups_are_just_big_tech_rnd_now/ https://centreforaileadership.org/resources/opinion_startups...
- mikebuds1 1y ago[dead]
- jschveibinz 1y agoThere are probably some extremely unhappy VC's, angels and employees over at Windsurf right about now. Windsurf's Funding Rounds Windsurf has raised a total of $243M over 2 funding rounds. One was Series C round of $150M from Investors like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins and the other was Series B round of $65M from Investors like Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst. Here is the list of all funding rounds of Windsurf: Round Details Series C, $150M, Aug 29, 2024 Post money valuation - Revenue multiple - Investors General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks Round Details Series B, $65M, Jan 30, 2024 Post money valuation - Revenue multiple - Investors Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, Greenoaks
- benoau 1y ago> Bloomberg reports that Google is paying $2.4 billion to license Windsurf’s technology and hire its top employees. Sounds like they're getting a payoff but probably not what they had in mind with the much larger numbers being thrown around for AI.