The Windsurf CEO said that he maintained the company as lean as possible

The CEO and co -founder of Windsurf, Varun Mohan, wants to keep his startup lean – and dry.

“I want the company to be almost like this dehydrated entity,” said Mohan in an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published on Sunday. “Each rental is like a little water, and we only go back and hire someone when we are back to be dehydrated,” he added.

The goal is not to idolize small teams for the property, he said. It is “to be the smallest business that we can be to satisfy our ambitions”.

Windsurf, formerly known as codeium, builds AI tools that allow developers to write code using natural language prompts.

This is part of a new wave of startups based on the “atmosphere coding”, a term invented by the co -founder of Openai Andrej Karpathy to describe the invites of IA to write code. As Karpathy says, developers can “give in to vibrations” and “even forget the code”.

Founded in 2021, Windisurf, based in Silicon Valley, raised more than $ 200 million in venture capital funding, according to Pitchbook data. The company was evaluated at $ 1.25 billion in an agreement led by the General Catalyst last year, with the support of Greenoaks and Kleiner Perkins.

Employee income has become a significant metric for investors, especially after many technological companies increased rapidly during the pandemic. Maintaining small teams is often preferred if it leads to the same output level.

“If we can actually fall for a fairly important business, but still works as if we were a startup,” said Mohan, “it’s the dream.”

Windsurf has 170 employees, by Pitchbook data provider, and its website lists more than 30 roles open to its website, including software and recruiters.

Lean teams, less drama

Mohan also said that keeping the number of low heads is not only a financial decision – it is a way to avoid unnecessary problems.

Hiring for teams where there are already enough people often leads to a “strange policy,” he said.

When there is no real need for their role, people can make something to work on.

“Realisticly, it is not that important, but they will come out and try to convince the rest of the organization that it is,” he said.

This kind of distraction, he said, can slow a business more than it helps. “As a startup, we don’t have the bandwidth to go out and manage this,” he added.

Hiring should only occur when “everyone raised their hands almost and said to me:” I die, we need one more “,” he said.

Windsurf did not respond to a request for comments from Business Insider.