How Windsurf stays lean
AI Summary
This video features insights on maintaining a lean startup culture from Lenny’s Podcast. The speaker discusses their philosophy on company growth and hiring practices, emphasizing the importance of staying lean while pursuing ambitious goals.
Key Points:
Philosophy on Being Lean:
- Doesn’t idolize being a small company (10-20% of workforce) making $50-200M revenue for its own sake
- Instead focuses on being “the smallest company we can be to satisfy our ambitions”
- Asks: “What is the minimum number of people to go out and build the crazy ambition project that you have?”
The Ambitious Goal:
- Company’s mission: “completely transform the way software gets built”
- Acknowledges this is tremendously ambitious and may eventually require scaling beyond a 10-40 person engineering team
Hiring Strategy:
- Only hire when the team is “actually underwater for that function”
- Wait until people are “raising their hands up being like I’m dying. We need one more person”
- Avoid hiring when there are already enough people for a role
Rationale Against Over-hiring:
- When you hire unnecessarily, people will “manufacture some other thing that they should go work on”
- This creates “weird politics” - not because people are bad, but because they lack clear purpose
- Startups don’t have bandwidth to deal with manufactured work and resulting politics
The Dehydration Analogy:
- Company should be like a “dehydrated entity”
- Each hire is “like a little bit of water”
- Only hire when the company is “back to being dehydrated” (desperate for help)
This approach ensures every hire has a clear, urgent purpose and prevents the inefficiencies that come with premature scaling.