'We Don't Believe in Work-Life Balance': A Newly Acquired Startup Just Offered Its 200-Person Team a Choice — Work Weekends or Take a Buyout The buyout amounts to nine months of pay.

AI coding startup Cognition acquired fellow AI startup Windsurf's intellectual property, product, and staff last month in a deal with an undisclosed price.

This week, The Information reported that after cutting 30 employees from the Windsurf team last week, Cognition is giving the remaining 200-person group a choice: Accept a buyout equivalent to nine months' salary, or stay on the team and work long hours, at least six days or 80 hours a week. According to an internal email viewed by the outlet, Windsurf employees have until August 10 to decide to stay or take the buyout.

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"We don't believe in work-life balance — building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn't possibly separate the two," Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in an email, viewed by the outlet.

Wu further backed up his stance in a post on X on Tuesday, which acknowledged that Cognition has "an extreme performance culture" and that the company is "upfront" about the atmosphere when hiring.

"We routinely are at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into the night," Wu wrote in the post. "Many of us literally live where we work... we understand it's not for everyone."

A typical buyout starts at four weeks of pay, plus an additional week for every year spent at the company, according to CNBC. Nine months is a higher buyout than usual.

People have asked about our culture and recent employee communications. Cognition has an extreme performance culture, and we're upfront about this in hiring so there are no surprises later. We routinely are at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into…

— Scott Wu (@ScottWu46) August 5, 2025

Windsurf has faced a turbulent few months. The startup was initially in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition, but the deal fell apart in early July.

Then, Google stepped in and agreed to pay $2.4 billion in exchange for nonexclusive licensing rights to Windsurf's technology and access to Windsurf talent to join Google's AI effort. Google hired CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and a select group of researchers from Windsurf as a part of the deal. The rest of Windsurf was ultimately acquired by Cognition on July 14.

Related: Google Swoops in to Make a $2.4 Billion Deal With a Startup Previously Promised to OpenAI

Windsurf, which claims that its AI code editor is "the most powerful way to code with AI," has more than a million worldwide users.

Cognition, meanwhile, asserts that it has built the first AI software engineer that can act autonomously to engage with users through Slack and GitHub. After a March funding round, the startup's valuation rose to $4 billion, crossing the $1 billion threshold and making it a unicorn.

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