A founder explains why Windsurf stays small by hiring only when necessary to hit ambitious goals. Unnecessary hires breed internal politics and slow things down. Lean teams move faster.
I love the idea of being a lean company, but I don't idolize it in the way that, hey, like it is a dream to be a 10% or 20% company that's making 50, 100, 200 million in revenue. That's like not, I think, what we idolize inside the company. I think what we idolize is be the smallest company we can be to satisfy our ambitions. What is the minimum number of people to go out and build the crazy ambition project that you have? And I think the project we are trying to go out and do, which is completely transform the way software gets built, it is a tremendously sort of ambitious goal. And it's not possible for us to be a 10, 20, 30, 40 person engineering team in the long term and actually satisfy that goal. We only hire for a role if we're actually underwater for that function. And the reason for that is I actually think when you hire for a role and you already have enough people there, you get a lot of weird politics that ultimately ends up happening. And it's not because people are bad people, but what happens when you have people that join a company and in reality you didn't really need them. They will go out and manufacture some other thing that they should go work on. I just think as a startup, we don't have the bandwidth to go out and deal with that. I would like to see everyone just almost be like raising their hands up being like, I'm dying. We need one more person. And that's when we go out and hire someone. And one of the analogies I like to give is I wanted the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity. And every hire is like a little bit of water. We only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated.
