There had been murmurs of disapproval when Windsurf’s founders had jumped ship to Google leaving most of their employees to fend for themselves, but now some VCs are openly criticizing their actions.
Khosla Ventures’ Vinod Khosla has said that he wouldn’t work with Windsurf’s founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen after they left to join Google in a $2.4 billion acquisition that didn’t include most of their team. Khosla was reacting to a statement made by Cognition CEO Scott Wu, whose company eventually ended up acquiring all of Windsurf and its remaining employees.
“I think there’s an unspoken covenant that as a founder, you go down with the ship,” Wu said on the 20VC podcast. “And i think that for better or for worse, it’s changed a bit over the last year. And it’s a bit disappointing to be honest,” he added.
Vinod Khosla seemed to agree with his views. “So true. Windsurf and others are really bad examples of founders leaving their teams behind and not even sharing the proceeds with their team. I definitely would not work with their founders next time,” he posted on X.
“It is about values. Either you have them or you don’t. Too many people selfishly don’t care about values, but I believe they are in the end wanting more and are more dis-satisfied and unhappy even when they get more,” he added.
Windsurf had gone through a whirlwind couple of months prior to the acquisition. It had been widely reported that the company had been acquired by OpenAI in a $3 billion deal. The deal hadn’t been officially announced, but that hadn’t stopped Anthropic from cutting off the access of its models to Windsurf, given how it now was owned by a competitor. But as time went on, an official announcement of a deal never came, either from OpenAI or from Windsurf.
It was then reported that OpenAI and Microsoft — OpenAI’s biggest shareholder — hadn’t been able to agree to the terms of the deal. This appeared to put the deal in limbo, until Windsurf was acquired out of the blue by Google for $2.4 billion. But it wasn’t a conventional acquisition — only Windsurf’s co-founders and a select few employees were joining Google, and Google was licensing Windsurf’s tech. This left nearly 200 of Windsurf’s acquisition behind, and they were now manning a company that had no founders or top employees. A few days later, it had emerged that Cognition Labs, maker of the AI coding platform Devin, had acquired Windsurf, and said that all employees had made financial gains from the deal. But the behaviour of Windsurf’s founders — who jumped ship and left their employees in the lurch — is now coming under the scanner in tech circles.