The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 97 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 7 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: A $100 billion startup exit will happen within a year
“The big exits will solve it, right? The whizzes and the, I mean, we thought whizz was big. Now we have cursor. Now I'm going to win the bet of a hundred billion dollar exit in the next year.”
Murdock: Baseten's Deal With Cursor Yielded Scale but Little Profit
“I think cursor was pretty smart in the base 10 contracts from last year with cursor. I don't think there was much profit in it for a base 10. They just got revenue and they got scale from it, but they didn't get a lot of earnings.”
Stebbings: The $1 Billion Valuation Has Become the New Series A Standard
“I think a billion dollar valuation is the new series, eh? And you're like, whoa, Harry, whoa, whoa, kiddo, calm down, listen to the facts. We used to do a fifty million post and hope it would become a 1,000,000,020 x, without dilution, blunt. Now, you enter at…”
O'Driscoll: SpaceX has far more differentiation than Cursor's IDE wrapper
“There is a lot more fucking differentiation in putting rockets in the sky than there is making forking an open source IDE and running it on top of Claude code.”
Stebbings: Cursor doubled revenue from $1B to $2B in three months
“Cursor announces their movement from a billion to two billion in revenue in, in three months. Rumors of secondary round being done at fifty billion.”
Jerry Murdock: Most companies view AI coding assistant Cursor as obsolete
“Most of the companies, their view, as they've told me, is cursor is obsolete.”
Stebbings: Cursor could lose half its revenue this year to Claude Code
“I think there's a chance that Cursor loses half of their revenue this year with the cannibalization of them by claw code.”
Harry Stebbings says Claude Code cannibalized Cursor's business overnight
“Claude Code, Has cannibalized a lot of Cursor's business overnight and everyone's canceling Cursor.”
Lemkin: Anthropic Solved AI Coding; Cursor and Replit Just Grafted On
“Claude figured that out. Cursor didn't figure this out. Replit and Lovable and Bolt didn't figure it out. I can tell you the story. Claude figured it out. Anthropic, the guys, you know, once they quit OpenAI, they figured it out and everyone grafted on this, i…”
Shlomo: AI software building is not a winner-take-all market
“Software building as a category is gonna grow insanely fast. I think our notion from the previous age of venture capital where a winner takes it all is wrong. And I think this category is going to be so big that everybody will take a niche at some point.”
Mercor scaled from $1M to $500M run rate in 17 months
“We scaled the business from one to five hundred million in the last 17 months, which is the fastest revenue growth of all time. One month faster than Cursor's time.”
Lemkin: Vibe coding TAM is 50x to 100x bigger than developer tools
“The TAM really is much bigger than cursor. It's much bigger than cursor or windsurf. It could be like 50 or a hundred times bigger.”
Greze: AI wrappers face broken economics paying suppliers 70% margins to compete
“And the problem with the frontier is, I have zero pricing power at the frontier. And I mean, I think this is what happened to Cursor, right, at the end. It's like, you can have huge market share and customers love you and everything, but if you're paying your …”
Stebbings: Cursor just sold for $60 billion after only four years
“Cursor just sold for sixty billion dollars after four years.”
Reyes: Enterprises will hesitate to adopt Cursor due to model lock-in
“However, I do think for that, most of the enterprises are going to have a second look at the idea of sort of seeding their software development lifecycle to a provider who is one, likely to be model locked, and two has an existing sort of history or pattern of…”
Reyes: Cursor will struggle to stay model-independent and orient around Grok
“It's going to be a very hard story to become Model independent, or rather stay model independent when you're attached to a model lab. So they're going to want to push Grok, the models, the products are going to become increasingly oriented around Grok, and tha…”
Cursor Is the Best AI Agent Startup Outside Sequoia's Portfolio
“It's probably cursor. One, they're in one of the most important markets. But second, where there was a lot of chatter around AI wrappers, they were the first company to really understand that you could post train models and actually be, go deeper into the stac…”
O'Driscoll: Price hardly matters in winning VC deals unlike PE buyouts
“In venture deals, if you're in the right thing, it almost doesn't matter what you paid. You see cursor for details, see open router for details, right? This is the exact opposite. This is fine, precise financial engineering. If you're wrong by 20%, 30% on pric…”
Lemkin: Cursor's Origin Will Replace GitHub's Workflow Within Months
“I mean, cursor launched origin, right? Which would bought graphite or whatever. It's going to become a GitHub entire workflow replacement in a couple months, right?”
Stebbings: SpaceX closes $60B takeover of Cursor
“SpaceX closes the sixty billion dollar all stock takeover of cursor, minting thousand X returns for the likes of Alipartovia Neo. Open AI startup fund is a mega winner who invested six to eight million dollars very early, which Rory, I thought of you when you …”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI and Anthropic training data spend exceeds non-Cursor AI app revenues
“There's probably more money being spent on training data for the foundation models, you know, the Mercosurge and that, than pretty much any app company outside of Cursor. In fact, probably the sum of all the apps companies outside of Cursor, right, you know, a…”
Stebbings: Cognition and Factory will thrive due to model independence
“I respectfully disagree, and that's why I actually think both Cognition and Factory will do very well, because they're model independent”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic is a better standalone AI bet than xAI
“Would I prefer, on a standalone foundation model, lab bet, would you prefer to own Entropic than X.AI plus Cursor plus the Frankenstein of Twitter? Yeah, you would, but at least it's a full-stack story now.”
O'Driscoll: Cursor Deal Will Be Private M&A Peak for Next Decade
“I think this will stand as the high watermark of private M&A for a decade.”
Lemkin: xAI's $60B Cursor deal may not close due to unmet milestones
“I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't close, because I think there are a big milestone that needs to be hit. The Cursor needs to make progress, and maybe I'm wrong.”
O'Driscoll: Cursor loses money despite generating $4M per employee
“Cursor does four million per employee. Salesforce does 700 per 700,000 per employee. Oh, Cursor must be more efficient. Well, it turns out Salesforce has 30% operating margins and Cursor's losing a lot of money. Why? Because they spend a whole ton on tokens, r…”
Reyna: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor are enterprise AI's only blue-chip brands
“I think, like, the two companies that today have been able to make it is, or three companies, if you want, OpenAI, Anthropic, full respect for them, Cursor. The three of them, I think, for me, are, like, Cursor has killed enterprise unbelievably well. Yeah, th…”
Clements: Cursor will build specialized coding models for enterprise users
“Cursor is going to build specialized coding models that are going to serve specialized coding tasks, especially for a lot of enterprise users.”
Clements: Accel's initial Cursor investment was priced at 4-5x year-end ARR
“Actually, this company is growing so quickly that on a multiples basis, you know, our first investment was at like four times, five times year-end ARR.”
Acharya: AI dev tools Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code will all grow
“The desire and demand for software, both to make it and to consume it, is dramatically more than the supply that we have today, and I think there is a developer and developer adjacent archetype for whom Cursor is going to be perfect, Codex as an app, Codex as …”
Anish Acharya: Early AI market leaders from 2023-2024 have maintained their dominance
“In this product cycle, what's actually interesting is a bunch of the early leaders from 23 and 24 have maintained their lead. You know, we talked about Harvey. That's a really impressive company. You know, Gamma is a really impressive company. You know, Cursor…”
Harries: AI will push product managers into growth or product engineering
“Yeah, I think PMs move to either growth, so you combine the PM role with marketing, and depending on your size and how strong your engineers are, you do more or less of the PM, or many PMs will actually move towards product engineering, which is they're somewh…”
Jason Calacanis: Cursor will maim Figma and SaaS incumbents by lowering NRR
“I think the bigger risk for so many vendors is that it maims Figma... HubSpot and box and even anthropic using it, they don't leave, they renew, they don't buy as many seats, right? Because the team is also using cursor, but of course they don't churn. The log…”
Shlomo: AI apps can fix low margins by training proprietary models post-distribution
“Kerser came out, I think it was two weeks ago, or maybe a few weeks ago with their own model, right? Composer. And this is like an, a nice way to like think about strategy of those types of businesses. So think about Kelsa, right? I don't know how the margins …”
Lloyd: Autocomplete has stronger enterprise PMF than agentic AI
“In the enterprise market, I actually think the thing that has most product market fit is like autocomplete. Which is not the sexiest type of AI. So it's not agentic AI. It's like cursor's original product or even co-pilot.”
Lloyd: Prompt-driven development, not autocomplete, is the future of software
“I don't think autocomplete is the future. So I don't feel like I'm like seeding competitive ground here to Cursor. The future is more like developed by prompt.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic will not cut off Cursor from model access
“I think it'd be very stupid of Entropic to just cut off a, probably the largest customer at the knees. And I, and the one thing, they're not stupid. So I don't think they will.”
Tenev: AI generates the majority of new code at Robinhood
“We've moved from, you know, GitHub Copilot, which is an auto-complete system, to Cursor, and now things like Windsurf, where, I mean, nearly all of the code is, is written by AI, and the adoption rate within engineering for us is, You know, close to a hundred …”
Lemkin: AI spending is actively cannibalizing legacy SaaS budgets
“If cursor did almost half a million, half a billion dollars in revenue in the same time, It sucked up an enormous amount of that dollar that would have gone to Okta and Salesforce, right? Five hundred million. That's a lot in that period of time, right? So AI …”
Mohan: Non-developer AI coding tools and developer AI IDEs will converge
“I think with time, they're going to need to build out more and more tunables, more and more ways to configure the product with time. But I think for us, if we can deeply understand code, like large code bases, it'll naturally follow that with very little effor…”
Stebbings: Anthropic and Cursor Venture Investments Would Have Saved FTX
“When you look at FTX, their positions in Anthropic and Cursor actually would have saved them if they had the time to prove that out and they hadn't done the commingling. That would have saved their financial performance with those two investments alone.”
Lemkin: HubSpot engineers using Cursor are pushing out too many features
“Literally I talked with Yamini wrong on from HubSpot last week. Okay. This is HubSpot. She said now at HubSpot there with cursor, they are pushing out so many features. They can't put them into production anymore. She wasn't kidding. They're there. It said the…”
Lemkin: Destroying Cursor and Windsurf is existential for Microsoft's GitHub
“Co-pilot versus Cursor and WinServe is number friggin' one on their gotta kill list for Microsoft, number one. It's all over. It is existential for that, for GitHub to destroy them.”
Torres: Cursor's Fast Revenue Growth Is Fragile Due to Low Switching Costs
“The cursors and all that stuff, like you can easily switch to like windsurf and you can switch to this and you can go back to copilot and like, so that revenue could disappear. This is a brand new phenomenon and we do not know how it plays out.”
Saper: B2B software vendors will survive AI-enabled internal code generation
“I believe that B to B software, I believe software vendors have an important role in the future, even if the bolts of the world, the curses of the world make coding cheap, easy, in some cases free.”
Cursor and OpenAI Were Doomed to Clash Over AI Coding Economics
“Cursor and OpenAI were on a collision course already competitively because As we've discussed over and over again, and as I repeat every Monday in my partner meeting, coding was the model load, right, for LLMs, and Cursor is the dominant coding app, and OpenAI…”
OpenAI Made the Right Strategic Decision in Cutting Off Cursor
“My guess is this was the right move for open AI. Like you go from someone that was both a partner and a competitor, right. And keeping them honest to someone that's now a direct competitor. And if it's only five percent anyway, Sam's losing no money. There's n…”
Reyes: Enterprises View Cursor as an IDE, Not a Development Strategy
“I don't think that anyone really perceives cursor to be their primary enterprise software development strategy as much as an IDE, which is I think still a great business because they're still going to get a lot of usage, but that sort of is how I see them.”