flâneur

windsurf gets margin called - by Ethan Ding

ethanding.substack.com · 1,775 words · saved by 1 readers

imagine you relaunch your company twice, and manage to become one of the fastest-growing saas companies in history — literally record-breaking. go from zero to $82m arr in eight months. get enterprise customers like nvidia and palantir. go on every single vc podcast to tell people about it. then give it all away for almost free. in 72 hours. over a weekend. that's exactly what the windsurf founders did last week. everyone's so busy talking about the talent or the equity of the team that was left behind, they’re not asking “why did you sell one of the fastest growing products in history for nothing?” after the acquisition, windsurf was left with about $100M on the balance sheet — cognition acquired the company for $250M — this means the enterprise value of the company [ignoring the cash] was $150M… you have a business that went from 0 - $82M ARR in 8 months that no one wanted to touch, and the best offer was for a less than 2x multiple? what the fuck was so broken that the founders woul

imagine you relaunch your company twice, and manage to become one of the fastest-growing saas companies in history — literally record-breaking. go from zero to $82m arr in eight months. get enterprise customers like nvidia and palantir. go on every single vc podcast to tell people about it. then give it all away for almost free. in 72 hours. over a weekend. that's exactly what the windsurf founders did last week. everyone's so busy talking about the talent or the equity of the team that was left behind, they’re not asking “why did you sell one of the fastest growing products in history for…

related reading