"We don't believe in work-life balance": Cognition boss offers team to leave with 9 salaries or work 80+ hours a week

In July, AI startup Cognition acquired Windsurf for an undisclosed price and at the same time acquired a large team of employees — 30 were fired immediately, and the remaining 200 were given a rather strange ultimatum.

It was as follows: each employee had to either agree to work 80+ hours a week by August 10 or resign from the company with a generous severance package of 9 salaries.

Wu confirmed his position publicly in a post on X on Tuesday, where he noted that Cognition has an “extremely high performance culture” and the company is open about it when hiring.

It should be noted that Cognition’s severance package is quite generous. A typical severance package in the US includes 4 weeks of salary plus another week for each year of employment.

As for the acquired Windsurf, the startup has had a tumultuous last few months: first, it had negotiations with OpenAI to sell for $3 billion, but the deal fell through in early July; later, Google intervened with a $2.4 billion offer in exchange for non-exclusive licensing rights to Windsurf’s technology and the addition of some specialists to the tech giant’s artificial intelligence initiatives. Eventually, Google hired CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and a select group of researchers from Windsurf, with Cognition taking over the rest after acquiring the startup on July 14.

Windsurf offers a code editor based on artificial intelligence for the so-called “vibecoders” and previously reported more than 1 million users worldwide. Cognition, meanwhile, claims to have created the “first autonomous AI programmer” that can interact with users via Slack and GitHub. In March, the company became a “unicorn” by raising $4 billion in funding.

Source: Entrepreneur