Ejaaz: So there's this company called windsurf which in
Ejaaz: the last 24 hours got stolen from open ai
Ejaaz: and sold not once but twice for
Ejaaz: over 3 billion dollars and then
Ejaaz: everyone lost their minds completely when they realized that
Ejaaz: two of the co-founders were taking almost all of that money
Ejaaz: for themselves and leaving the rest of the
Ejaaz: company 250 employees in the
Ejaaz: dust and as you can imagine josh this sparked a lot of outrage online but it
Ejaaz: did end up having a fairy tale ending when another company swooped in and bought
Ejaaz: the rest of the company and the 250 employees got paid josh i'm exhausted can
Ejaaz: you tell me what's happening well
Josh: I'm actually not sure myself this feels like an episode out of like a sitcom
Josh: or a silicon valley episode where there's so much drama so many twists and turns
Josh: that seemingly don't make any sense i mean it was.
Ejaaz: Acquired i have a fun anecdote for you josh actually the office that the windsurf
Ejaaz: company was set up in guess no
Josh: Not silicon valley,
Josh: oh man it's so real silicon valley was such a testament at the.
Ejaaz: Time so i swear they
Josh: Were they were ahead of the curve but yeah i i'm actually i'm excited to record
Josh: this episode because i need you to explain to me a lot of what's happening i
Josh: don't know too much about the recent news i've been very much in in the grok
Josh: rabbit hole i know a lot of the earlier topics maybe i could help set the stage before we get into it.
Josh: So for people who aren't familiar, Windsurf was not always Windsurf.
Josh: It was a company that was founded in 2021 called Exifunction.
Josh: And it was founded by two MIT graduates initially focused on GPU optimization.
Josh: So they were a GPU optimizer company.
Josh: They were doing absolutely nothing relative to what they're doing today.
Josh: Three years later, they raised a series C round at $150 million,
Josh: which valued them unicorn status, one and a quarter billion dollars.
Josh: And that was when they rebranded to Windsurf. And Windsurf was not a GPU optimization
Josh: company. It was instead the company that we all know today, which is the AI
Josh: coding companion, cursor competitor, vibe coding extraordinaire.
Josh: Exactly. Yeah. So that's when they kind of came into their final form,
Josh: which was only last year.
Josh: So the first three years of operation, this like strange company trying to figure
Josh: it out last year, it was huge.
Josh: And then we get into 2025 where their annual revenue went from not a lot to
Josh: a hundred million plus. And I think this is where I'm going to hand it off to
Josh: you because things got crazy.
Josh: They turned into a really big company. They started collecting valuable data.
Josh: Their revenue went through the roof into the nine figures.
Josh: And that's where this drama begins.
Ejaaz: So Josh, do you remember around that time, it became a kind of trending narrative that AI...
Ejaaz: Coding or coders was going to replace software engineers. So companies were
Ejaaz: getting really nervous and software engineers were getting really nervous because
Ejaaz: they were kind of like consistently held in as like the highest regard of employee, right?
Ejaaz: You had like knowledge workers, product managers, and then you had like the
Ejaaz: wizards at the top that could like create software with their fingers.
Ejaaz: And then you had AI come along and be like, well, actually, we might be able
Ejaaz: to replace you in about six months.
Ejaaz: So all of these companies' valuations skyrocketed, Winsurf being one of them, right?
Ejaaz: Cursor was another popular one. And there was this massive frenzy for all the
Ejaaz: model creator companies like OpenAI, Claude, Meta, to try and acquire one of
Ejaaz: these companies so that they can have that feature set within their own product suite.
Ejaaz: And OpenAI kind of came in guns ablaze and said, Winsurf, we have tried to buy Cursor.
Ejaaz: It's not working. We need you. And we are willing to pay big bucks.
Ejaaz: So they offered basically $3 billion and it's written here in this Reuters article,
Ejaaz: but that's basically the headline takeaway that they offered $3 billion to buy these guys out.
Ejaaz: And that was a huge price tag at the time, but it was what a lot of individuals
Ejaaz: thought, a lot of people thought that Winsurf and AI vibe coding companies was worth at the time.
Ejaaz: And the reason why it was worth this much was because it was like this magical
Ejaaz: tool where you could type words and turn words into fully fledged apps,
Ejaaz: games, tools, services,
Ejaaz: Therapy apps, gym logs, whatever you might, whatever your mind could potentially think of.
Ejaaz: It's like turning chat gbt into like this like app
Ejaaz: maker and that as you can imagine is a billion dollar multi-billion dollar industry
Ejaaz: and you can kind of like see on my screen here like there's this like demo on
Ejaaz: this website where you can effectively just type words in and say like hey i
Ejaaz: want you to create like a folder or a website that like kind of displays my
Ejaaz: profile picture and all these kinds of things and it just
Ejaaz: You can see it coding in real time on the left here, Josh.
Josh: Yeah, and the interface is the thing that's different, right?
Josh: Because when you're using ChatGPT, it can code very well, but you only have
Josh: a text box and it kind of spits out code, but then you have to put it into your
Josh: compiler and it creates this like very messy workflow.
Josh: What Windsurf did is they kind of took that whole workflow and compressed it
Josh: down into one really powerful tool.
Josh: And that's what we're seeing here, right? It's like, this is the developers
Josh: come all in one, build your code, generate your code, debug your code all under one roof. Right.
Ejaaz: So you can imagine that if you are a software engineer that learns how to use
Ejaaz: this tool or gets access to a tool like this, you can suddenly work at 10x your
Ejaaz: speed and output, right?
Ejaaz: So there's this term that's often used in tech, which is called like 100x engineer,
Ejaaz: and they're usually super rare.
Ejaaz: This tool turns everyone into 100x engineer.
Ejaaz: And that means that you could hire probably fewer engineers to get your thing
Ejaaz: done, or you could scale your company 100x from where it is right now,
Ejaaz: just using existing employees and access to this tool, which is insane, right?
Ejaaz: So you can imagine something like this is worth a ton of money.
Ejaaz: But if you remember on a previous episode, Josh, we actually mentioned that
Ejaaz: OpenAI wasn't just, didn't just get to where they were on their own, right?
Ejaaz: They had some pretty impressive backers behind them. And one of their backers
Ejaaz: was this little known company called Microsoft.
Josh: I remember that.
Ejaaz: You remember Microsoft? You know, they've been around a while,
Ejaaz: right and some of the terms that microsoft struck with open air when they invested
Ejaaz: i think something to the tune of 16 billion dollars josh or is it like 24 i
Ejaaz: feel like i'm off by like 10 billion which is just like tens of billions tens
Ejaaz: of billions okay let's just go with casual tens of billions
Ejaaz: Part of the terms that they struck with OpenAI was that they get full access
Ejaaz: and IP control over OpenAI's models up until the year 2030.
Ejaaz: And also they get a significant chunk of revenue that OpenAI generates.
Ejaaz: And the final point, which is what is about to cause the rift that I'm about
Ejaaz: to describe, was access to any and all IP that they may acquire as well, Josh.
Ejaaz: So as you can imagine, OpenAI is buying this massively valuable company,
Ejaaz: Windsurf, for $3 billion.
Ejaaz: And their plan presumably is to build an amazing product suite and earn tons of money from it.
Ejaaz: But Microsoft would be eligible to owning the IP of Windsurf.
Ejaaz: And Sam Altman, OpenAI didn't like this.
Ejaaz: So the rumor behind the scene was that Sam Altman was negotiating with Microsoft,
Ejaaz: basically trying to get them off the cap table with that respect and not give
Ejaaz: them access to Windsurf.
Ejaaz: There was a lot of back and forth, a lot of insider knowledge,
Ejaaz: basically saying that Satya wasn't happy and that they couldn't come to an agreement.
Ejaaz: So the rumor was Satya walked away from the negotiating table.
Ejaaz: Now, typically, when an offer is made as big as this, $3 billion,
Ejaaz: It comes with some terms and conditions.
Ejaaz: And usually it comes with an expiry date.
Ejaaz: So if, God forbid, anything goes wrong, the deal suddenly becomes off the table.
Ejaaz: So, you know, typically anyone has kind of like an out.
Ejaaz: And what happened after Microsoft walked away from the negotiating table was
Ejaaz: that this $3 billion dollar offer josh expired on july 11th so literally a few
Ejaaz: days ago and that's when all the drama started
Josh: Unwinding expiration that is like a tremendous amount of money just to let,
Josh: expire right i feel like if i was i mean put yourself
Josh: in the the shoes of a windsurf employee where you own
Josh: equity you are worth on paper now a tremendous amount
Josh: of money and you're sitting there every day waking up looking at
Josh: like the news like am i going to get this money or is this
Josh: going to respond and then it expires it's like an option if you have a call
Josh: option it just expired worthless you you're left with nothing so now the windsurf
Josh: employee i guess i'll play that role because i'm pretty clueless in this whole
Josh: thing i'm pretty sad but i know my company's still worth a lot so like what
Josh: happens next to me as the windsurf employee after okay a ideal falls through i.
Ejaaz: Want you to to envision this josh okay so you're a windsurf employee and you've
Ejaaz: kind of been told that OpenAI is going to buy you for $3 billion.
Ejaaz: You go to bed one day, you wake up the next, and you realize that the deal has expired, right?
Ejaaz: And then a couple of hours, yeah, it's expired, it's done.
Ejaaz: And then a couple of hours later, you open up your laptop and you see this tweet.
Ejaaz: Josh, tell me about your reaction.
Josh: Big welcome to Mohan Solo and others from the Windsurf team joining DeepMind.
Josh: Now, if I remember correctly, the name of my CEO is the same handle that that was tagged in this post.
Ejaaz: Exactly.
Josh: Okay, you're good so far. I believe I've just learned that the CEO of my company,
Josh: as well as other, I guess, higher executives.
Ejaaz: You, the Windsurf team.
Josh: Me. I'm joining Google. I'm going to Google today. You're joining Google.
Ejaaz: You're joining Google, Josh. You're joining Google. Congrats.
Ejaaz: Are they paying me $3 billion?
Ejaaz: Exactly. And now your question is, are you paying $3 billion?
Ejaaz: Well, what if I told you this, Josh? They're not paying you $3 billion.
Ejaaz: They're paying you a little less. They're paying you $2.4 billion.
Ejaaz: Okay. How does that sound? So far, so good? Yeah.
Josh: I mean, at least better than nothing.
Ejaaz: You'll take that. You'll take it, right?
Josh: That'll make me multimillionaire for sure. That seems pretty chill.
Ejaaz: Sounds good. Except that there's one clause, which is that $2.4 billion is actually
Ejaaz: being used to buy your CEO that was just named in that tweet,
Ejaaz: one of his other co-founders and about four researchers on the entire company team.
Ejaaz: So this $2.4
Josh: Billion is really just an acqui-hire for the talent.
Josh: A hundred percent. And they're still not buying my company.
Ejaaz: Yeah. So the long story short of this is Google announced that they struck a
Ejaaz: deal with Winsurf, particularly the CEO, and agreed to pay $2.4 billion,
Ejaaz: but primarily to hire Winsurf CEO and one other co-founder and a group of key researchers,
Ejaaz: along with the non-exclusive rights, non-exclusive licensing rights to some
Ejaaz: of Winsurf's technology.
Ejaaz: So this is, as you said, yeah, you just got zapped. They just paid a couple
Josh: Hundred million dollars, took the talent out of my company, and now I'm just
Josh: left with the shell, which is devastating, right?
Josh: I work so hard on building this. I am the reason this value exists because I
Josh: have been working hardcore engineering on this for years, And that seems really upsetting.
Ejaaz: Think about it. You are a founding engineer of this company.
Ejaaz: You're a founding employee of this company.
Ejaaz: Typically, you'd expect when you go from zero to $3 billion,
Ejaaz: you're going to see at least some of that.
Ejaaz: Surely, they're not going to concentrate over $1.25 billion for a single person.
Ejaaz: Surely, that's ludicrous, right? But that's unfortunately exactly what happened.
Ejaaz: So $2.4 billion for like five people and non-exclusive licensing rights for
Ejaaz: like some of Windsurf's tech.
Ejaaz: But the majority of the 250 people, its core business, the IP,
Ejaaz: the product, the brand, and the remaining team just kind of got left to the wayside.
Ejaaz: This was a pure play acquire.
Josh: Yikes. And I guess we could kind of speculate on what led to this.
Josh: Like if you remember, we actually spoke about this briefly on the show when
Josh: OpenAI made the offer to acquire Windsurf, immediately Anthropic and a few others
Josh: started pulling out their contracts with Windsurf.
Josh: So they were making the product less valuable because they didn't want to give
Josh: their data over to OpenAI.
Josh: As a result, it lowered the valuation of the company.
Josh: So when OpenAI then steps away and Winsurf still has to deal with the lost customers
Josh: of Anthropic and whoever else stepped away, well, suddenly the company is worth a little bit less.
Josh: And now Google steps in, they're like, okay, well, maybe we get a discount because
Josh: now your average revenue or your recurring revenue is way lower than it was
Josh: just a few months ago. So there's your 25% haircut.
Josh: And then they're like, well, we don't actually want the business because the
Josh: business is kind of failing. There's a lot of drama.
Josh: There's a lot of, a lot of your larger clients aren't interested because they're direct competitors.
Josh: So let's just take the talent. And that is such a sad thing to watch your baby
Josh: just get pummeled over and over again by these high executives.
Josh: But it's on, it's on brand, right? Like we've seen this happen before.
Josh: Zuck is offering hundreds of millions to billions for employees.
Josh: And now Google is doing the same exact thing.
Ejaaz: I think you just highlighted a really important trend, which has just been confirmed.
Ejaaz: By these events, Josh, which is the stars of the show for any AI company are
Ejaaz: its researchers, are its model creators.
Ejaaz: They're the ones that are selling for like multiples of a top NBA super sports star, right?
Ejaaz: Hundreds and hundreds of millions, potentially billions for a single person.
Ejaaz: That is just an absurd amount of money and has probably never been seen the
Ejaaz: like from any kind of industry before, right?
Josh: They're like professional sports athletes.
Ejaaz: Yeah. Yeah, they're not worth their weight in gold. They're worth a hundred
Ejaaz: times their weight in gold, apparently, right?
Ejaaz: And then the second thing I think that's happening here, Josh,
Ejaaz: is Google got a bit antsy when they saw that Zuck aggressively poached OpenAI's staff.
Ejaaz: I think they hired like, what, 10 people? So that's probably somewhere around
Ejaaz: $2.5 billion spent, if we want to believe the rumors of like hundreds of millions
Ejaaz: being spent for certain researchers.
Ejaaz: So Google's probably watched this happen over the last two weeks,
Ejaaz: which is an insane thing to say, by the way.
Ejaaz: This has happened over the last two weeks and thought, oh shit, we're next in line.
Ejaaz: We're the next best model provider for many a reason.
Ejaaz: They have access to all our AI papers so they can see who the best researchers that we have are.
Ejaaz: And Zuck's probably reaching out to all of these. So they saw this opportunity
Ejaaz: and jumped on it and decided to do the opposite and say, well, screw you, Zuck.
Ejaaz: I know what you're coming for, but I'm going to jump ahead of the curve and
Ejaaz: actually poach these guys before you do so that we keep bolstering confidence
Ejaaz: in our team and our ability to build up the team? What do you think of that? Is that fair?
Josh: Yeah, well, one of the biggest things I've been wondering is like,
Josh: how are they actually worth $100 million? How are they worth a billion dollars for a single person?
Josh: And I posted this publicly and I like did some digging and the answer is really,
Josh: it's still a fuzzy answer, but basically they're a series of difficult problems,
Josh: most of which are unknown that are required to be solved in order to reach this goal.
Josh: So in the case of training improvements, I mean, we spoke about Kimi K2 yesterday.
Josh: The reason that model performed so well is was because a novel breakthrough
Josh: that a researcher discovered and then deployed into the code base.
Josh: And now they have a model that competes with Claude, but it's open source and free to use.
Josh: So that's a huge advantage. And that is a multi-billion dollar advantage at scale.
Josh: So if you can pay one researcher to come up with a novel breakthrough like this
Josh: and then deploy it to your code base, then suddenly you have gained billions
Josh: of dollars of market cap. and it compounds because the scale is so large.
Josh: And this exists all the way down the stack because when you're doing a training
Josh: run, I mean, a lot of these companies have 100,000, 200,000 GPUs that are all
Josh: focused on one single training run.
Josh: And that means they can't be serving customers. They can't be serving queries
Josh: to make the company money.
Josh: It is a net spend that they're incurring to train this model.
Josh: And in the case that an engineer didn't make the right decision or went down
Josh: the wrong decision tree, that could cost them many, many billions of dollars,
Josh: days, weeks of time. and in this world, those weeks cost a lot of money.
Josh: So basically what I realized, what I came to consensus on is they're just giving
Josh: themselves the best probability by having the most intelligent people on the
Josh: specific topic of making the correct decision trees required to get to where they want to go.
Josh: And that is why the stakes are so high. And that's why they're being paid billions
Josh: of dollars because someone like Ilya, who has been around for a decade plus,
Josh: is probably most likely to make the right decisions, even though it's no guarantee.
Ejaaz: What you've just described is the wild west and
Ejaaz: i love how you described it as kind of like an ai model
Ejaaz: josh you were like it's probabilistic we don't
Ejaaz: really know which path it's going to take but they're running it through this
Ejaaz: model and they're estimating that the output would be like this so they're spending
Ejaaz: hundreds of millions of dollars i thought it was beautifully done but josh if
Ejaaz: you remember at the start of this episode i said that it ended like a fairy
Ejaaz: tale So right now, we're at devastation point, right?
Josh: I'm deep in my nightmare right now. I'm living it. I've just seen my entire
Josh: C-suite get poached for two and a half billion dollars. I got nothing.
Ejaaz: You just hustled for five to 10 years and you have nothing to show for it.
Ejaaz: You have a family of kids to feed and you promised them you're going to get
Ejaaz: them millions and nothing's happened, right?
Ejaaz: So here's what happens next. Do you remember way back when, and I think this
Ejaaz: is like a year ago, when the first AI engineer agent was released.
Ejaaz: It was this thing called Devin, D-E-V-I-N. Do you remember that?
Josh: I do, yeah. Yeah.
Ejaaz: Yeah. Do you remember the hype that was caused because of it?
Ejaaz: I think they released like this 30 second demo of this really slick AI agent.
Ejaaz: It's kind of like ChatGPT, but it was just doing all the coding and engineers
Ejaaz: lost their mind. They were like, oh my God, I would. There were two camps.
Ejaaz: One, I would love using a tool like this and it'll enhance me 10x or whatever.
Ejaaz: And then a vast swathe of people online that hated it and said,
Ejaaz: there's no way it's as good as it is. and then, you know, A16Z jumped in.
Ejaaz: I think they threw them like a $200 million check, classic A16Z.
Ejaaz: And there was a lot of hype around this. That was like one of the clearest signals
Ejaaz: early on that Vibe coding was going to become a thing. Do you remember that?
Ejaaz: I do. So this company that created Devin is called Cognition.
Ejaaz: And we saw this post come up literally the day after Google's acquisition.
Ejaaz: So imagine you wake up one day, you realize you've lost the OpenAI deal. You're like, damn.
Ejaaz: And then a few hours later, So you see the tweet from Logan Kilpatrick from
Ejaaz: Google saying, hey, we bought you for $2.4 billion.
Ejaaz: You're elated until you realize that you're not getting paid any of that stuff.
Ejaaz: So you go into like peak depression.
Ejaaz: And then the next day, you see an announcement from Cognition.
Ejaaz: And this is the official announcement on Cognition's website.
Ejaaz: Cognition acquires Winsurf.
Ejaaz: And it's this joint announcement from the CEO of Cognition, which is Scott Wu.
Ejaaz: And one of the co-founders and by the way this is the co-founder that didn't
Ejaaz: get included in the $2.4 billion win self deal Man, that's got to sting Yeah,
Ejaaz: yeah, yeah Well, calling him a co-founder is kind of like a bit of a
Ejaaz: kind of like graceful title to give him. But his name is Jeff Wang.
Ejaaz: And he was the recently appointed CEO after the two co-founders just ditched him, basically.
Ejaaz: And they were like, okay, Jeff, you're head of BD, but we need you to step up
Ejaaz: as CEO because we're going to bounce and take this billion dollar check.
Ejaaz: But you're the new CEO. So this guy, Jeff Wang, and this CEO, Scott Wu of Cognition,
Ejaaz: struck a deal to basically take over the remaining IP, product,
Ejaaz: brand, And remaining team, most importantly, 250 individuals all have families,
Ejaaz: mouths to feed, whatever lives to live and include them in this package deal.
Ejaaz: So this was the major announcement that like kind of like swept the social media
Ejaaz: realms and made everyone super happy and elated by this and,
Ejaaz: you know, gave them their happy ending.
Josh: What was the total cost that they paid? Did they announce that?
Ejaaz: That's a great question. Let me pull up this tweet of this guy called Harry.
Ejaaz: Oh, here we are. His title is Harry Digresses.
Ejaaz: It wasn't official how much they got paid for, but there were some really amazing
Ejaaz: deal terms in this, Josh.
Ejaaz: So I'll highlight a few things here. The first one is this.
Ejaaz: So not only were all 250 employees that were left behind going to get paid,
Ejaaz: but they were going to have all their cliffs removed and have accelerated vesting on all their equity.
Josh: Amazing. Okay. So they're making things right, or at least as best they can.
Josh: It's not the $3 billion dollar offer initially but like they're doing the best
Josh: they can and i mean as an employee of windsurf that feels really good feels.
Ejaaz: Really good but then you're you're wondering you're wondering well how much
Ejaaz: am i am i getting paid like like how much are we getting acquired
Josh: For yeah let's say i had one percent i mean that's 30 million dollars i was
Josh: about to bag and now so where are we at now it.
Ejaaz: Might be it might be a little less but he basically does this
Ejaaz: rundown and estimates it to be around 300 to 400 million dollars which is a
Ejaaz: significant drop from what you are going to get paid but it's also not nothing
Ejaaz: the other way i was thinking about it is it's probably all in cognition stock
Ejaaz: josh there's no way they had that much
Josh: Cash yeah just cash sitting on hand okay so my my 30 million dollars is now
Josh: three million dollars in stock for cognition which is a private company not
Josh: even liquid oh yeah lots of tax implications,
Josh: okay so i mean at least i have a job i guess is where i'll end up on this is like cool.
Ejaaz: I mean, now that I recounted to you, Josh, you're still screwed.
Josh: You're still screwed, dude. At this point, I'm just happy to be employed.
Josh: I'm just glad that I still have some sort of a job. I'm hopefully collecting some sort of paycheck.
Josh: One day, it is hopeful that the stock will be worth money, and then I'll be
Josh: able to sell it and cash out. But man, yeah, what a roller coaster.
Josh: And it kind of sets this new paradigm, right? Where you can cut,
Josh: you could kind of rip the value out of a company and then just kind of throw the rest to the side.
Josh: But it's this really interesting ideological debate you could have as a founder
Josh: of a company whose fiduciary duty is to serve right by the shareholders.
Josh: And in this case, your shareholders are the employees that you've given stock options to.
Josh: And in the case that they're just going away and they've destroyed the value
Josh: of the company, they've extracted the value of the acquisition.
Josh: They have kind of just left the shell of a company and left the people who are
Josh: responsible for putting them in that place on the side of the road and like
Josh: that doesn't feel very good but there's really nothing legally preventing them
Josh: from stopping that it's really just an ideological,
Josh: debate in this case it doesn't i mean i'd be pretty i'd be pretty upset sure
Josh: if i'm one of the founders i just made a billion i'm now a billionaire like
Josh: that's cool but for everyone else. It kind of leaves a bed for the.
Ejaaz: Majority of people. Yeah, you're screwed. I don't know whether it's because
Ejaaz: of all the time I've spent in web three, Josh, but I've kind of grown numb to
Ejaaz: all this like terrible, appalling behavior, unequitable behavior.
Ejaaz: And so I kind of look at a story like this and I'm like, oh yeah,
Ejaaz: he got paid billions and left the entire company and team to dry.
Ejaaz: Yeah. Happens all the time, I guess. But like, I'm just, I'm noticing this trend,
Ejaaz: particularly within AI that there's this more wild
Ejaaz: west kind of degenerate behavior when it comes to acquisitions like people are
Ejaaz: ruthless and i don't know whether this is maybe it's my naivety when it comes
Ejaaz: to like vc deals and acquisitions and mergers maybe i just i just don't know
Ejaaz: maybe this happens all the time but this seems like the most extremely skewed version of this and
Josh: We often refer to it on the show as like the game of thrones and
Josh: i don't think there's a much better description than that where it really is
Josh: cutthroat and this happens a lot in traditional venture and acquisitions but
Josh: this scale i think has never been greater and that's probably what stands out
Josh: among all of these headlines is just how much money is being made lost and thrown
Josh: around to position yourself better to get to this point of agi but you have
Josh: a tweet you had a post here it looks.
Ejaaz: Funny just to round us out josh just to like put a bit of cherry on this cake
Ejaaz: well the tldr is like everyone hates varoon mohan the former ceo who took the
Ejaaz: 1.5 billion dollar check or however much it was.
Ejaaz: And everyone loves Scott Wu, the CEO of Cognition Lambs, who stepped up,
Ejaaz: gave the 250 employees a salary and a lifeline and accelerated vesting.
Ejaaz: So no matter the size of the money, shout out to Scott Wu. He didn't need to do that.
Ejaaz: And then, you know, Varun, I wonder, you know, whether his reputation survives this.
Ejaaz: I can see the reasoning why you would take the big check, but also like leaving
Ejaaz: all your employees out like that to drive without even giving them,
Ejaaz: I don't know, a couple mil is kind of insane. But here we are.
Ejaaz: So what's the price on your reputation?
Josh: Like, would you take a couple billion dollars to just go work on AGI and let the.
Ejaaz: Media do a thing for a couple of weeks? I know a lot of people that would do
Ejaaz: it. I know a lot of people. I mean, I'm one of them.
Josh: I'd probably do that, right? Like, a couple billion dollars? I don't know.
Josh: But also, yeah, it's tough. Well, it's funny because at this graphic,
Josh: it's a win-win for both of them.
Josh: Like, Varun is, or I'm not sure how you pronounce his name, but he's hated.
Josh: The CEO of Winsurf is not liked, but he's rich. and Scott Wu is loved.
Josh: And now he has a bunch of employees that really want to work hard to make this
Josh: work for him and really want to add value to his company and can go to sleep
Josh: with a good conscience knowing he's done well and he's done right by these people.
Josh: Whereas our windsurf buddy cannot do that. So maybe he will just be,
Josh: one of them will be crying in their $100 million mansion while the other will
Josh: be surrounded by people who love him dearly.
Ejaaz: Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. An absolutely outrageous,
Ejaaz: but weirdly normal day in the world of AI, Josh.
Ejaaz: We thank you guys for listening. We are trying out this new format.
Ejaaz: We've said this before, where we kind of talk about trending topics and be or
Ejaaz: try and be the first guys to talk about it and put it in front of your feeds.
Ejaaz: We are welcoming any and all feedback. So, you know, any kind of comments or
Ejaaz: DMs, it's all open, go for it.
Ejaaz: And if you could like, subscribe and share it with all your friends or anyone
Ejaaz: who you think would be interested in this kind of thing, we would be eternally
Ejaaz: grateful and we'll see you on the next episode see you
Josh: On the next one peace guys.
Music: Music