SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – Work weekends or take a buyout? That’s reportedly the message employees at AI startup Windsurf received after being acquired by fellow AI coding startup, Cognition.
Tech insider blog The Information reports that after cutting 30 employees, Cognition offered the remaining 200 team members at Windsurf a stark choice: Take the buyout or stay on and work six days or 80 hours a week.
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“We don’t believe in work-life balance,” wrote Cognition CEO Scott Wu in an email to staff, as reported by The Information, “building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn’t possibly separate the two.”
Based in San Francisco, Cognition is an applied AI lab that builds end-to-end software. Wu, the company’s CEO, boasts of maintaining an “extreme performance culture.”
“We’re upfront about this in hiring so there are no surprises later,” said Wu in a post on X Tuesday. “We routinely are at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into the night. Many of us literally live where we work.”
“We know that people who joined Windsurf didn’t expect to join Cognition and while we’re proud of how we work, we understand it’s not for everyone,” he added.
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Windsurf was reportedly an acquisition target for industry-leading AI company OpenAI, but that deal fell apart early last month. Google was in the frame briefly, agreeing to pay $2.4 billion for nonexclusive licensing rights to Windsurf’s tech and access to its AI talent.
In the end, Google hired away CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and a handful of researchers. The remnants of the company were acquired by Cognition on July 14.
The buyout offered to those who don’t want to sign on for an 80-hour weekly slog was reportedly the equivalent of nine months’ salary, along with company equity from the July buyout.
