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Posted by mfiguiere 4/17/2025

OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to Windsurf(www.cnbc.com)
130 points | 116 commentspage 2
threecheese 4/17/2025|
Interestingly I had an email from Windsurf a few days back suggesting I lock in an early adopter price, as they expected to release new pricing plans and increases.

Related to a potential M&A from OpenAI? I’m less likely to follow their suggestion if they turn around and bake this into OpenAI’s product suite.

baq 4/17/2025|
> Related to a potential M&A from OpenAI?

related to locking in revenue, any dollar counts when your multiple is 100

AriUgwu 4/19/2025||
I like Windsurf and that is an _odd_ feeling. In part because it does feel like I’m working with a very smart junior developer.

It allows me to do documentation driven design in my hobby work and as a result has restored a great deal of joy in that process. Genuinely a surprise for me.

Tried all the front runners and only Windsurf gave me this feeling. Happy for their success. Less happy that my current $10/mo sub might get locked behind a $$$ bundle because someone in the OpenAI c-suite said “Finally, some steak to help sell our sizzle!”

basisword 4/17/2025||
I can see why they’re doing it. If I use Cursor I can pick the best model - I’m not stuck using OpenAI if someone outperforms them. If they own the tools they can takeaway that choice.
warthog 4/17/2025||
i wonder what the price was. If it was around $20 Bn which OAI could have afforded and okay to ask by Cursor guys, tough decision not to sell here.

You are 25 yo and made $2.5 Bn in 4 years

InkCanon 4/17/2025||
Strongly suspect OAI can't afford 20B cash. Their latest funding round was 40B, and they're burning through money like it's rice paper. They could offer OAI equity, but Cursor's founders would probably be very suspicious of private valued stock (which is fairy money).

How wise it is to buy Cursor is another question. Current valuation has them at 100x revenue. And I suspect agentic products will be a lot less cash flow positive than traditional SaaS because of the massive cost of all that constant codebase context and stream of code.

sksxihve 4/17/2025|||
> The initial funding will be $10 billion, followed by the remaining $30 billion by the end of 2025, the person said. But the round comes with a caveat. SoftBank said in an updated disclosure on Monday that its total investment could be slashed to as low as $20 billion if OpenAI doesn’t restructure into a for-profit entity by Dec. 31.

They might not even get the full $40 billion

blitzar 4/17/2025|||
I would have assumed the same - earlyish stage comanies in this area will likely be happy to take a big wedge of openai stock and a little cash.
Aurornis 4/17/2025|||
Rumors from yesterday were around $3 billion.

They had raised a Series C investment recently. Historically that puts ownership of founders and employees at around 40%. Could be a lot higher for a hot AI company though.

Given two founders, AI company, Series C, and a $3bn purchase price they could each have netted around $750 million in a good scenario. Less if they cashed out in secondaries in previous rounds (which would have been smart). Fantastic outcome for them, obviously. This is the 0.001% scenario that founders dream about.

lowkey_ 4/17/2025||
Fair, but worth noting the founders almost certainly already have gotten fat secondaries, and now have a chance to build something much larger if they can execute.
bhl 4/17/2025||
What's the hard technical aspects of building a product like Windsurf or Cursor?

I've only seen codebase indexing or generating embeddings with Turbopuffer. There has to be more magic to that, right?

viraptor 4/17/2025|
On the agent side it's just the UI and LLM wrapper really. But the completion is a completely different custom thing. There's a video of the cursor team on Lex Fridman where they mention a few details https://youtu.be/oFfVt3S51T4
bionhoward 4/18/2025||
I’m hopeful the Windsurf folks see reason and refuse this deal, because OpenAI’s prohibition on learning is absolutely insane to force on devs, isn’t it?
square_usual 4/17/2025||
Holy shit, what are these numbers? $3B for Windsurf? Windsurf doesn't even have models of its own, or any fundamental research, it's mostly a wrapper around an editor (that is becoming hostile to wrappers, btw) and prompts. How can anyone look at the amount of money flowing around here and think this is rational?
segmondy 4/17/2025||
So no AGI? and AI is not good enough to replace their programmers?

Or... do they need more coding data from programmers to train their models?

ipnon 4/18/2025|
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
maille 4/17/2025||
Are there any similar solutions for MSVC? Almost all these tools are focused on VSCode.
thefourthchime 4/17/2025||
Just open the root folder in cursor and it'll still do all the stuff for you. Just go build it in MSVC. This is how I build apps. I create an empty project in Xcode, and then I go over to Cursor and have it write all the code. And then I go back to Xcode to build and run it.
aitchnyu 4/18/2025||
I was also shopping around second class Pycharm (from Jetbrains) extensions till I found Aider+Openrouter (Gemini 2.0 Flash costs at least 4x cheaper than Sonnet 3.7). I keep a terminal in sight to see what its doing, and leave comments `//do this ai` and tell it to act. All other AI assisted workflows feel clunkly now.

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

dgellow 4/18/2025||
Have you tried Claude code? It’s of course more expensive but the terminal UI is fantastic
demarq 4/17/2025|
If OpenAI buys windsurf I’m canceling my subscription immediately!
falcor84 4/17/2025||
If I can get Windsurf included in the ChatGPT Plus subscription, that would actually probably keep me from intermittently signing up and abandoning that.
plextoria 4/17/2025||
Why?
tcdent 4/17/2025||
misdirected combative tendencies guised as free thinking