I've never heard of Windsurf before. I use Cursor daily however.
It used to be called Codeium. Their TOS are insane...
OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
561–570 of 604 posts
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#562why AI needs a text editor?
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been a WindSurf customer since day one. It was my first true AI agentic experience. [Dev mode] While working on Alembic migrations I broke one of my migration files. After an hour of manual debugging I handed the task to WindSurf. It methodically checked every config file, applied the migrations one by one, and narrowed the issue to a single file. It rewrote the migration, verified the fix, wrote tests, ensured…
I was involved in an M&A once; my role was to evaluate the technology and determine how long it would take us to build a competitive product. If it was less than some X then we’d build it, greater than X and we’d buy. The function for X was not clear to me from my perspective; it had legal fees involved, etc. The person leading M&A said an intangible aspect of the price is what it does to the adjacent market. If the…
I would also think that a critical component of X there would be the opportunity cost of time spent on building in-house while competition chugs along.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#564Pretty stupid move with Microsoft moving to put the kibosh on all of these proprietary vscode forks. Could be worth almost nothing in a matter of months...
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#565I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…
They have no moat, Cursor does the same stuff. Microsoft's moving to kill all of these anyway and has added agent mode to copilot.
OpenAI would have gotten more value by setting that 3 billion on fire, at least it would have powered the data center for a little while.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#566I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…
Steel man: Windsurf own the customer relationship. The models are just generic interchangeable services they use for processing. Realistically: I don’t know how many users windsurf actually has and I never actually met anyone that uses them. Whereas Cursor AI took a huge percentage of the VS code users I know in real life.
I use Windsurf. It had the smoothest agentic experience when I subscribed. I think still does.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#567Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#568I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…
"I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation".. Nothing to be skeptical about. The market has spoken. It was worth 3b to OpenAI. Companies arent worth a vague notion of what "value" someone in an armchair thinks they might be worth, they are worth what people are willing to pay, and OpenAI paid.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#569Has anybody actually used Windsurf's Emacs mode?
You'd think that with a generative AI coding editor, they'd stay on top of it and make it work. But I guess that wasn't the case up until now.
Maybe with this acquisition that might change...
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was involved in an M&A once; my role was to evaluate the technology and determine how long it would take us to build a competitive product. If it was less than some X then we’d build it, greater than X and we’d buy. The function for X was not clear to me from my perspective; it had legal fees involved, etc. The person leading M&A said an intangible aspect of the price is what it does to the adjacent market. If the…
That's a really interesting thought, I'd love to get involved in software PE/M&A on the technical analysis side but I don't have the academic pedigree for it (it seems every shop that does this work is 90% Ivy and Ivy-adjacent universities and FAANG-level work history). So if I'm understanding your point then part of the value in paying $3B for Windsurf is that it acts as a pricing anchor on future raises (and presum…
The insanity of it all is that these companies are worth about $3M.