2 posts tagged with “startup

In case you missed it, there’s been a major shift in the AI tool landscape.

On Friday, OpenAI’s $3 billion offer to acquire AI coding tool Windsurf expired. Windsurf is the Pepsi to Cursor's Coke. They're both IDEs, the programming desktop application that software developers use to code. Think of them as supercharged text editors but with AI built in.

On Friday evening, Google announced that it had hired Windsurf's CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and several key researchers for $2.4 billion.

On Monday, Cognition, the company behind Devin, the self-described “AI engineer” announced that it had acquired Windsurf for an undisclosed sum, but noting that its remaining 250 employees will “participate financially in this deal.”

Why does this matter to designers?

The AI tools market is changing very rapidly. With AI helping to write these applications, their numbers and features are always increasing—or in this case, maybe consolidating. Choose wisely before investing too deeply into one particular tool. The one piece of advice I would give here is to avoid lock-in. Don’t get tied to a vendor. Ensure that your tool of choice can export your work—the code.

Jason Lemkin has more on the business side of things and how it affects VC-backed startups.

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Did Windsurf Sell Too Cheap? The Wild 72-Hour Saga and AI Coding Valuations

The last 72 hours in AI coding have been nothing short of extraordinary. What started as a potential $3 billion OpenAI acquisition of Windsurf ended with Google poaching Windsurf’s CEO and co…

Earth 3 Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.comsaastr.com

In a dual profile, Ben Blumenrose spotlights Phil Vander Broek—whose startup Dopt was acquired last year by Airtable—and Filip Skrzesinski—who is currently working on Subframe—in the Designer Founders newsletter.

One of the lessons Vander Broek learned was to not interview customers just to validate an idea. Interview them to get the idea first. In other words, discover the pain points:

They ran 60+ interviews in three waves. The first 20 conversations with product and growth leaders surfaced a shared pain point: driving user adoption was painfully hard, and existing tools felt bolted on. The next 20 calls helped shape a potential solution through mockups and prototypes—one engineer was so interested he volunteered for weekly co-design sessions. A final batch of 20 calls confirmed their ideal customer was engineers, not PMs.

As for Skrzesinski, he’s learning that being a startup founder isn’t about building the product—it’s about building a business:

But here’s Filip’s counterintuitive advice: “Don’t start a company because you love designing products. Do it in spite of that.”

“You won't be designing in the traditional sense—you’ll be designing the company’s DNA,” he explains. “It’s the invisible work: how you organize, how you think, how you make decisions. How it feels to work there, to use what you're making, to believe in it.”
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Designer founders on pain-hunting, seeking competitive markets, and why now is the time to build

Phil Vander Broek of Dopt and Filip Skrzesinski of Subframe share hard-earned lessons on getting honest about customer signals, moving faster, and the shift from designing products to companies.

Earth 3 Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.comdesignerfounders.substack.com