Daily Grind July 15, 2025: Windsurf Acquired, Clayton Christensen, & Levers of Success
Welcome to Tech's morning newsletter, featuring one headline, one page of a great book, and one question to ponder
Good morning!
Welcome to The Daily Grind for Tuesday, July 15.
Today we’re continuing to follow the Windsurf saga — there’s another massive update!
Plus, we read what legendary business professor Clayton Christensen has to say about being a good manager vs. bad manager (we’ve seen peak examples of both this week) and discuss your levers for success.
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📰 One Startup Headline: Windsurf Acquired
Windsurf, the third largest code editor by ARR, has been acquired by Cognition, the makers of an AI software engineer called Devin. The price of the deal was undisclosed.
Cognition CEO Scott Wu and Windsurf interim CEO Jeff Wang posted a video announcement on Twitter and key details of the deal on Cognition’s blog:
The Windsurf IDE, now with full access to the latest Claude models [My Note: Windsurf lost access to Claude models after it was announced they would be acquired by OpenAI in April]
Windsurf's IP, including their trademark and the strong brand they have built
$82M of ARR and a fast-growing business, with enterprise ARR doubling quarter-over-quarter
A user base that includes 350+ enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of daily active users
It has been a wild week for Windsurf employees. To recap:
On Friday, the OpenAI acquisition of Windsurf was called off due to disagreement between OpenAI and its largest backer, Microsoft
By Friday event, Google had swooped in and poached Windsurf’s CEO, co-founder, and key researchers, leaving the rest of the Windsurf team with 100% control of the severely debilitated startup
Over the weekend, the tech world (including me) raised hell about the Google deal and the damaging precedent it set for startups.
On Monday afternoon, Cognition and Windsurf announced the new acquisition.
I wrote about the Google deal and its dangerous precedent in yesterday’s Daily Grind newsletter:
Daily Grind July 14, 2025: Google Poaches Windsurf Leaders, What It Means for the Startup Ecosystem
The loudest uproar came on behalf of the Windsurf employees who were left without their leadership, key researchers, and with their technology in the hands of a direct competitor.
Cognition has ensured that every Windsurf employee will benefit financially from the new acquisition. From the Cognition blog:
To that end, Jeff and I worked together to ensure that every single employee is treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction. Specifically:
100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially in this deal
100% of Windsurf employees will have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date
100% of Windsurf employees will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date
This is the best possible outcome for the Windsurf team at this stage. Cognition was recently valued at $4 billion after a large funding round in March 2025. By comparison, Windsurf was valued at $3 billion when it was set to be acquired by OpenAI.
[Counterpoint: SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin thinks Windsurf sold too early!)
However, Cognition’s valuation is just that. While their revenue numbers are not public, it seems clear they earn less than Windsurf’s own $82 million ARR. The startup is still highly speculative, but they do have a massive war chest and are ready to compete.
In short, Windsurf’s employees are basically in the same position they were before the OpenAI acquisition: part of a well-funded, fast-growing startup with dreams of an exit.
The question on everyone’s mind is now: What would stop Cognition’s leadership team from being poached in the future?
And what protections do Cognition/Windsurf employees have against it?
🔗 A Few Good Links
The Windsurf soap opera has dominated the week so far, but here are a few more interesting stories for you to explore:
TechCrunch: Amogy raises $80M to power ships and data centers with ammonia
HackerNews: Kiro: A new agentic IDE from prototype to production
The Verge: US government announces $200 million Grok contract a week after ‘MechaHitler’ incident
📚 One Page: How Will You Measure Your Life?
To me, the Windsurf saga is an example of bad management and good management. Not management in the financial sense, but in the people sense. We saw one group of leaders abandon their team for a (albeit massive) payday, and another group of managers look out for those same people.
It reminded me of this page from one of my favorite books, How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen (highlights mine):
If You Find a Job You Love …
The theory of motivation—along with its description of the roles that incentives and hygiene factors will play—has given me better understanding of how people become successful and happy in their careers. I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But when I compared what I imagined was happening in Diana’s home after the different days in our labs, I concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. I realized that if the theory of motivation applies to me, then I need to be sure that those who work for me have the motivators, too.
The second realization I had is that the pursuit of money can, at best, mitigate the frustrations in your career—yet the siren song of riches has confused and confounded some of the best in our society. In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.
This, in turn, can mean they get paid well; careers that are filled with motivators are often correlated with financial rewards. But sometimes the reverse is true, too—financial rewards can be present without the motivators. In my assessment, it is frightfully easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. You must be careful not to confuse correlation with causality in assessing the happiness we can find in different jobs.
Thankfully, however, these motivators are stable across professions and over time—giving us a sense of “true north” against which we can recalibrate the trajectories of our careers.
❓ One Question: What are your levers for success?
Now that the Windsurf team has a new home, they can get back to building. Which leads to our question for today:
What are your levers of success?
We often know (or think we know, see the One Page above) what success looks like, but actions can we take that will lead us to that success?
I was thinking about this question yesterday as I planned my week for Damn Gravity. My goals for the rest of the year are two fold: sell 15,000 books and sign 6 authors.
To reach those goals I determined my levers of success are:
Attracting followers
Nurturing followers
Acquiring readers (aka people buying books)
Nurturing readers
Expanding readers (aka creating repeat customers)
Opening new author business
Nurturing author business
Closing author business
Making authors happy
That might seem like a lot of levers, but in a world of possibilities, this is a pretty tight list. I can cross-check any potential activity against it and ask, “Which lever does this thing help me pull?”
So what are your levers to success? I’d love to know.
🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback:
That’s it for today! Thanks for following along. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.
See you tomorrow!
Cheers,
Ben