Evidence receipt / prediction
Published · transcript-backedVarun Mohan: prediction
20 Apr 2025 Lenny's Podcast Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO)
“Just because of distribution, resources and capital, they're going to commoditize every space. So I think in some ways this amount of just understanding that, hey, re-evaluate your hypotheses and get into an uncomfortable space way more frequently is something I need to remind myself even to this day.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Varun Mohan
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- prediction
- Recorded
- 20 Apr 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Okay. I have one more question. I apologize. What's one thing that you wish he had known before starting Codeium? Honestly, I wish I had... Maybe humility is the wrong term, but this idea of just being okay with being wrong faster. I always think about things on when we make decisions. Me and my co-founder, we always talk about it. We're almost like, "Hey, I wish we had made the decision to do this a couple months earlier." We always talk about this. And the weird thing is outside looking and everyone's like, "Wow, actually the decision was made at the right time." But in my head I'm always banging my head being like, "What if we had made it a couple months earlier?" I think part of that is I waxed poetically about like, "Oh, you need to be irrationally optimistic and uncompromisingly realistic." But it's very hard to do this in practice because you drink your own Kool-Aid too. Because if you're not drinking your own, you won't get up out of bed. The answer is already solved. It's not actually any of these startups. The answer is Microsoft is going to be the winner in any software category. Isn't that the answer? Just because of distribution, resources and capital, they're going to commoditize every space. So I think in some ways this amount of just understanding that, hey, re-evaluate your hypotheses and get into an uncomfortable space way more frequently is something I need to remind myself even to this day. And probably something that I didn't know coming in and starting the company. We started the company at peak zero time. At that time, probably everything seemed like it was going to moon. And there was probably a lot of irrational confidence, I would say, that we shouldn't have had. Varun, we covered so much ground. What an incredible conversation. I learned so much just sitting here listening and asking you questions. Is there anything else that you wanted to share I leave listeners with, any last piece of nuggets or wisdom before I let you go?…
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