Leigh Marie Braswell

Investor at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

Claims

As speaker

Mentioned in

Key positions and views

In the current AI market, speed of execution is the only truly sustainable competitive moat for a startup.

A chaotic, 'on fire' environment within an early-stage startup is a strong, positive signal of product-market fit and intense customer demand.

Venture capital firms that halt investments during market downturns are making a strategic error and will inevitably miss out on generation-defining companies.

The financial viability of many AI application companies is questionable, as their gross margins are negative due to the high cost of API calls to foundation models.

The established 'triple, triple, double, double, double' growth benchmark for SaaS is obsolete for elite AI companies, which are now expected to achieve '10x, 10x, 10x' growth.

Podcast consensus on Braswell

Points of consensus

▶Leigh Marie Braswell consistently emphasizes that speed of execution and shipping new products is currently the only sustainable competitive advantage, or 'moat,' for AI startups.Apr 2026

▶She maintains a strong conviction that venture funds must continue to invest actively through market downturns, believing that ceasing investment will cause them to miss out on future significant companies.Apr 2026

▶Braswell repeatedly uses Kleiner Perkins' portfolio companies—such as Windsurf, Glean, Chainguard, and Ambience—as concrete examples to illustrate broader market theses on pivots, internal tool adoption, and investment strategy.Apr 2026

▶She highlights the precarious financial models of some current AI application companies, noting they operate on negative gross margins due to API costs from foundation models exceeding user revenue.

Points of debate

▶Braswell points to a debate over financial reporting standards, observing that founders are increasingly misusing the term Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for revenue that is not actually predictable or recurring.Apr 2026

▶She presents a contrast between the old and new paradigms of startup growth, stating the traditional SaaS 'triple, triple, double, double, double' benchmark is being replaced by a much more aggressive '10x, 10x, 10x' expectation for top-tier AI companies.Apr 2026

▶While bullish on AI's overall impact, she notes a key limitation: core enterprise sales processes have not yet been successfully automated by AI and still require human-led teams.Apr 2026

▶She identifies a tension in startup financing, describing an emerging 'seed strapped' trend where companies become profitable after a single seed round, while simultaneously detailing the multi-stage, high-valuation funding path of companies like Windsurf.

Key themes

▶AI Investment Thesis: Speed as the Ultimate MoatApr 2026

Braswell's core investment thesis for the current AI market centers on the belief that traditional moats are less relevant than a startup's velocity. She argues that the ability to execute and ship products rapidly is the only sustainable advantage in a fast-evolving landscape. This is compounded by her observation that many AI applications have unsustainable unit economics due to high foundation model costs.

This focus suggests an investment preference for teams with exceptional engineering and product velocity over those relying on early data advantages or novel algorithms alone, as the underlying tech stack is rapidly commoditizing.

▶The Kleiner Perkins Playbook: Conviction Through CyclesApr 2026

Braswell portrays Kleiner Perkins as a conviction-driven, relationship-focused firm that deliberately avoids scaling by simply increasing fund size. She details its structure, including a nine-person core investment team, an $800M venture fund (KP21), and a $1.2B growth fund (Select), emphasizing the philosophy of continuing to invest through market downturns.

Kleiner Perkins' strategy, as described, is positioned as a stable and founder-centric alternative to momentum-driven funds, leveraging its brand and experience to support companies from seed stage ($1M+) to growth stage ($100M+).

▶Evaluating Startups: Prioritizing Signals of Extreme DemandApr 2026

Braswell's evaluation framework looks past potentially misleading metrics like misused 'ARR' to focus on qualitative signals of intense market pull. She views a chaotic, 'on fire' environment at an early-stage startup as a positive indicator of overwhelming customer demand and strong product-market fit. Similarly, she highlights high employee retention as a key competitive advantage.

For analysts, this indicates that when assessing a Kleiner Perkins portfolio company, one should look for evidence of extreme customer engagement and strong internal culture, as these are likely the signals that triggered the initial investment.

▶The Anatomy of a Successful Pivot: The Windsurf/Codium StoryApr 2026

Braswell uses the evolution of Windsurf to illustrate a successful response to market shifts. The company began as ExaFunction (GPU virtualization), pivoted to Codium (AI coding assistant) after seeing GitHub Copilot's potential, and is now evolving into Windsurf (a no-code platform). She details its funding journey, including a Kleiner Perkins-led $40M Series B, and major enterprise validation like JPMorgan's 'Hall of Innovation' award.

The Windsurf case study serves as a template for the type of adaptable, visionary founding team Braswell seeks—one that can abandon its original idea to pursue a much larger opportunity revealed by market-defining technology shifts.

Source episodes

Timeline

Seed Stage

Describes the origin of Windsurf as a GPU virtualization company named ExaFunction, which raised its seed round led by Greenoaks Capital.

The Pivot

Recounts how the founders of ExaFunction, inspired by the emergence of GitHub Copilot, pivoted the company to become Codium, an AI coding assistant targeting enterprise gaps.

Series A

Details Codium's $20-25 million Series A funding round, which valued the company in the hundreds of millions and included participation from Founders Fund.

Series B & Enterprise Validation

States that Kleiner Perkins led a $40 million Series B funding round for Codium. Around this time, JPMorgan inducted Codium into its 'Hall of Innovation' for its impact on the bank.

Current Vision

Explains that the company, now known as Windsurf, has a mission to enable non-technical users to build software and intends to fork VS Code to create a proprietary IDE.

Suggested prompts

How does Braswell's emphasis on 'speed as the only moat' reconcile with Kleiner Perkins' investments in potentially more defensible infrastructure companies like Chainguard? &nearr;Given her observation of negative gross margins in AI applications, what specific characteristics does she look for in a founding team or business model to believe a company can overcome this challenge? &nearr;Braswell highlights the pivot of ExaFunction to Codium as a key success factor. How does Kleiner Perkins evaluate a founding team's ability to execute such a significant pivot before an investment is made? &nearr;How does the '10x, 10x, 10x' growth expectation for AI companies impact valuation, dilution, and the long-term sustainability of these businesses compared to the traditional SaaS model? &nearr;

Key concepts

Kleiner Perkins 13 ep Windsurf (Codium/ExaFunction) 7 ep AI Investment Strategy 6 ep Venture Capital Market Trends 5 ep Startup Moats & Competition 2 ep SaaS & AI Growth Metrics 2 ep Scale AI 2 ep Glean 2 ep Enterprise AI Adoption 2 ep Chainguard 1 ep

Notable quotes

“I think it's very unclear right now what out of all these companies who has a moat, but I do think like speed right now is kind of the only moat that you can have.”

Leigh Marie Braswell · Windsurf: The Making of a Billion-Dollar AI Company | Leigh Marie Braswell, Kleiner Perkins

“the triple triple double double double sass thing is like you throw it out the window you know it's like there's a new it's like 10x it's 10x 10x 10x”

Leigh Marie Braswell · Windsurf: The Making of a Billion-Dollar AI Company | Leigh Marie Braswell, Kleiner Perkins

“margins can be quite sketchy... they're calling open ai models they're calling anthropic models and they're like you know maybe charging the user a certain amount but then they're calling the models you know and the cost there is more than that amount”

Leigh Marie Braswell · Windsurf: The Making of a Billion-Dollar AI Company | Leigh Marie Braswell, Kleiner Perkins

“And I think if you talk to somebody and they're not making any investments right now, they're going to miss a lot of really big companies.”

Leigh Marie Braswell · Windsurf: The Making of a Billion-Dollar AI Company | Leigh Marie Braswell, Kleiner Perkins

Report last updated: Apr 21, 2026

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