Scott Wu and Jeff Wang on closing the Cognition-Windsurf deal in 72 sleepless hours

are ready whenever. Bring them in. How you guys doing? Congratulations. Thank you. Round of applause. Did you guys have a relaxing weekend? Yeah. Really chill weekend. Yeah. Yeah. Easy, easy, easy. Nothing too much. Nothing too much. Lot of sleep. Honestly, we we both haven't really slept. Okay. So, go easy on us. Okay.

Well, you had a lot of you had a lot of people to take care of and and honestly when you know we uh we heard the news, you know, a few minutes before we went live and we were fist pumping here in the studio because it's such a such a fantastic outcome and uh I I'm I'm sure everybody involved is grateful for the work you guys put in to get this done.

But give us Yeah. kick us off with the the high level. What's actually um the partnership look like? What do you like how would you describe it in your own words of like what's actually happening? Yeah, I mean this is a this is a real acquisition. Okay. We are being acquired by Cognition. Okay.

And um you know must feel great to say that too. You don't hear that much. It was a tough It was a tough uh Friday I would say. Um I don't think anybody would want to be in my shoes on Friday. Um but we talked to a lot of uh teams out there.

There's a lot of AI companies, uh, foundational companies, and, uh, after talking to Scott and the Cognition team, uh, there it was done in my mind. It was a done deal.

Um, I don't know if you guys know this, but, uh, Cognition was, uh, probably the only other team that we thought was smarter than our our team, actually. Yeah. No, and that's what that's what we put we put that together just on the show, seeing the announcement.

It's like you take this incredible, you know, go to market sales machine that that you guys had built and you combine that with one of the best, you know, research and just hardcore engineering culture. Perfect. And it's a and it's a perfect, you know, match. Perfect overlap. Yeah, absolutely.

And on the Windsor side, I'll just, you know, obviously there were all these stories breaking out on Twitter and everything going on and people were saying, well, you know, the the thing that's left is just the shell. And we looked at it and we said, well, actually, I don't know if that's right.

you know, it's the there's there's the code, there's the product, there's the customers, most importantly, there's the whole team, obviously. Um, and and it's an amazing product and there's a lot to do and a lot to build together.

And and so I think as we started talking about it, we found that there were just so many natural ways to partner, you know, both in terms of obviously the customers and and customers would love, you know, are super excited to have a solution that that basically combines both the IDE and the agent.

Um and and and then the technology itself which is you know I think we dev at Devon you know building Devon have always focused on this kind of remote background agent as the thing that we've kind of done um whereas you know windsurf is is really focused on the agentic IDE and and I think there's a lot of kind of things that play in there um all the way down again to to the kind of the fit of the the the relative teams and the team strength and so on.

So, it's almost like you predicted this because like the like like these types of mergers are really hard because you have two brands that are popular, but Scott, you've been managing cognition and Devon, like you've had the the the corporate structure and the product structure for a while and so like it doesn't seem nearly as complicated as like where does this go?

Do you have to rebrand one or another? I I don't know if you have thoughts on it yet. I'm sure you this is down the road. Uh but it seems like you're actually fairly set up to to integrate these two companies in a in a way that's like not so super chaotic to you either, which is great. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I I I wouldn't say it was intentional.

I think on our end for example it's probably more that just we we we we tend to overfocus on on software engineers because it's just a lot of who we are and how we think about it and in particular kind of just like the these like product and capabilities things whereas I think on the windsurf side I think um Jeff and the team you know the whole team have built out a really great kind of suite of of all the different kind of functions right you know sales deployed engineering um enterprise work infrastructure um marketing operations and so on you know finance etc and and and yeah, just turned out to be a really really great fit.

Yeah. Jeff, uh Friday, end of day, did you think you would be running a process so quickly? I I know, you know, part the the obvious move would just be, you know, continue to to run uh and scale the business. You guys had a lot of momentum, but uh what was going through your head Friday night?

because I I imagine at the time you were also balancing uh you you were all of a sudden managing a team of hundreds of people that uh I probably all uh you know wanted wanted uh your time and attention as well. My my immediate priority was just to get a lot of options on the table and to have a lot of paths forward.

Uh I had to tell the team like this is the path forward immediately because this is this is happening now. Uh, and then outside of the meeting, you know, I I I was thinking like, okay, who do I need to talk to? What what is the best use of my time?

I can tell you I was on the phone for pretty much 24 hours non-stop on my phone uh after after the all hands. And uh me and Scott, we we worked really fast. Uh we met at our office the next day. Um he even brought in everything on a piece of paper to sign. Uh he even brought he had to talk through a lot.

Uh but that was uh it was really it was pretty dramatic. Scott. But it was cool. It was cool. Yeah, it was fun. And naturally, you know, because it has to be this way, we got things signed like one or two hours before we were able to put out the announcement.

But like look, as soon as we started talking about it together, I think it was kind of clear for both of us like the the the way that we really make this a success is, you know, obviously customers kind of want to understand what's next. The team wants to understand what's next.

You know, the whole world is talking about it. We want to be able to come out together as soon as possible and say, "We're going to do this. We're going to make this really amazing. um we're going to make sure we take care of all the users and all the customers.

We're gonna make sure we take care of the team and there's just a really great product here at its core and and that's what we want to focus on and that's what we want to build out together. And you know what's crazy? Um what is crazy like we talked pretty late on a Friday night as well.

Um we were comparing notes and there was like almost no overlap. I mean we talked about the team already um but even the product the product is like missing exactly what the other product is offering and the ability to combine the products together is going to be so amazing for our users. It's gonna be really cool.

Yeah, I think there's g be a lot of fun stuff around, you know, um you can have have an agent work and then review the code, you know, locally in your IDE. You can be planning tasks out and then kind of sending them off for work.

You can be um you know, you can do a first pass with an agent and then come and look at the work and then kind of finish that up and do the finishing touches with uh you know, with tab and all these other features and so on, right? Um and we're really excited to to to to build that out together.

How is how is the team feeling right now? I imagine this is the craziest 48 hours of of their career as well. Give us a preview of the Slack emojis that are ripping right now. Actually, we uh we announced it uh at another all hands. Uh we probably all hands and we put another Monday all hands and uh very very different.

They're like it couldn't possibly get worse. So, so it's only up. We made it dramatic, too. Uh and we So, me and Scott uh and the team uh we we really went out of our way uh to to make this a very generous acquisition. I'll just say that.

And um I think uh I you know the team probably felt like uh you know their you know their career was over or something you know like it was very sad on Friday but I think today I don't know how long did they clap Scott uh they they kind of cheer for like uh finance or something.

Um so I think the sentiment has shifted the team is even more fired up to go. Uh they the whole product is still there. All the all the things we had in the GTM team is still there and now they also have Devon uh to to sell as well. So everybody's fired up now. That's amazing. Yeah.

Every time I talk to Scott, it's always because like he's done something really incredible and aggressive like like and it's like okay like let's do let's talk about this right now. And before it I was making like documentaries. It took me a month to put out a single video.

Now fortunately I have a daily TV show so I can just have you on. We can chat about it. Um I do have some some random questions. I don't know if it's worth um I'm interested to know about about that go to market team and and channel sales specifically.

Um there was somebody in the comments of one of Jord's posts talking about um how Windsurf was growing revenue and and and working with channel partners.

Can you walk me through how like h uh what would you give advice to somebody who's structuring a like a successful uh channel partnership strategy for a product like this? Um what what incentives do you have to align? How big of a of a piece of business was that? Do you expect it to be a continual source of growth?

I'd love to know about just that as a particular strategy as opposed to say, you know, Google ads or going viral. Yeah. Um, we we made the decision to go 100% partners uh back in February.

Um, the thing about a partner uh channel kind of like segment is like you have to like you have to like kind of feed them like you kind of kind of build belief with them in the product but also show that there's an economic incentive too.

And it did take some time actually from Q1 to to Q2 uh to like get the top priority partners, make sure those partners can easily sell uh on your behalf as well. And it really took like about four to five months to really see this like kind of take off.

Uh so some of our partner partners have already started bringing in seven figure deals uh even without even trying the product. They just go to their customers, they ask them you know what what they want and they just say it's windsurf and uh and now they they can say windsurf and devon. That's amazing. Yeah.

I uh I was getting multiple messages from people Friday and Saturday being like I want this team. I want this team.

And that was what and and and I think that uh it is it is just uh it's such a this whole deal and everything is is really a a testament to the caliber of the team which was the which was one of the major disappointments Friday is if you were on the team that that was staying behind at Windsurf there's this sort of almost like signaling right of like I took this company let's say you joined last August and you brought the the product to market you launched it you grew it to tens of millions of dollars in revenue and then uh don't get to kind of continue the mission.

It's uh I'm I'm just really happy for everyone involved. Yeah. I think Oh, sorry. Yeah. I was just say now, you know, now we're all one big team and it's I mean, we're we're kicking it into another gear.

I I think we're all so amped up to to take this and just go, you know, we're going to go full speed basically for for the next while. Um and we get to play on offense now and go for real brittle. So, are you guys already making plans to get under one roof? What's what's the uh what's we have a lot to figure out.

Um but but but yeah, working getting to the point there there's there's kind of the product collaboration, there's the go to market collaboration, and then there's the literal kind of like team situation. A lot a lot of work to do over the next couple months.

Well, we tell our customers like we got their back now and the product is going to get so much more cool. That's amazing. Well, you guys turned something which was um in in many ways, you know, a disaster.

I was just waiting for I was waiting for the New York Times piece on Monday and getting to see the New York Times push out this news uh and turning this whole thing into a win is is incredible and you guys have done a service to uh the team and the industry. So, thank you.

Yeah, honestly honored to get to be a part of it to to work with such a great group of people and I just want to see you guys you guys have no idea h how things went with all the legal and everything last night in terms of figuring these things out. Are we going to make it there in time?

were we not going to be make it was we we we've been through a lot and I think it's uh it's it's it's just the start of things. So, ju just so you know uh uh Scott was like we are announcing Monday uh hell or high water and uh we we just did not sleep uh for the last like 72 hours.

Yeah, it's been a crazy it's been crazy. I mean we Yeah, we we we appreciate you coughing on the stream. Do you have anything else Jordy should you guys probably too early to sleep but you both deserve a power nap at the very least. So, thank you for coming on.

Anything else that that makes sense to share now or should we let you go? I think we're all good. Awesome. Yeah, stay tuned. We're gonna have a lot more announcements soon. Thanks for having us. Amazing, guys. Great work. Cheers. Talk to you soon. Congrats. Bye. And next up, we have Carl Pay. No, not yet. One second.

Um, that is amazing. That Yeah, what what a great story. Absolute dogs. Absolute dogs. That is the perfect match. cemented in SV lore. Tech lore. For sure. For sure. Didn't know. I mean, I knew Scott could fundra. Yeah. I didn't know he was this kind of this caliber of deals guy. Absolute dog. Absolute dog.

Uh well, we read through some timeline. What else we got? Uh Bigma has such a homey feeling. I spend all day in it. I really enjoy it. Feels cozy, safe, good to come back to. Uh shout out Zack. Giving Figma a little