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 53 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
George: AI coding assistant Cursor has reached billions in revenue
“Cursor, as an example, is, you know, billions of dollars of revenue. And they're very small, and it's very early in their life.”
Truell: Microsoft will struggle to compete in AI code editing
“I think it's one of the things that makes it pretty tricky for a Microsoft to really compete in a big way.”
Wang: All 24 surveyed a16z startups use Cursor, driving up to 10x productivity
“This year I was pretty blown away by the answers that we got. They spanned from, call it, 30 to 50% on the low end in terms of productivity gains to, I kid you not, one CTO told us that he had seen a 10 X productivity lift from himself and his team. They were …”
Patel: Claude Code and Cursor have surpassed GitHub Copilot in ARR
“If you look at the revenue ARR chart, it's like, Cloud code in, like, three months has surpassed them, and, like, cursor, you know, easily surpassed them, and then, like, even, like, companies like Replin or, like, and Windsurf slash Cognition are, like, gonna…”
Verdian: Cursor recently raised at a $400M valuation on $3M ARR
“Tell me if I'm wrong, three million ARR, four hundred million dollar round, or somewhere maybe around there.”
Casado: Product-First Startups Should Build Standalone Apps Over Plugins
“Like if you really believe in the product, you would never do a plugin because then you're part of somebody else's product. If you really believed in the product, you wouldn't do enterprise early, you do it later, because the product itself is the kind of go-t…”
Casado: Building an AI Coding Model Requires a Frontier Language Model
“It turns out that you don't speak to these models in code. You speak to these as humans in natural languages. Therefore, the model has to, like, understand, like, the breadth of human experience and language, right? And so, you know, that means in order to bui…”
Fraden: Cursor makes mediocre engineers good and great engineers into gods
“Cursor has taken mediocre engineers and made them good, but it's taking amazing engineers and made them gods.”
Baker: Cursor's token flywheel will become tough for competitors to catch
“And the reality is, Kirscher, now they have a trillion, trillion tokens. And you know, there will be a point where they have enough coding tokens that it's tough to catch them.”
Acharya: Big tech will fail at multi-model aggregator tools like Cursor
“I think the other interesting area where the labs and the bigs are not going to be successful is products that benefit from being multimodal, right? Not multimodal, but multimodal. So cursor is good because you can use every model inside of it. And Google is n…”
Dixon: Modern software network effects are externalized to the web ecosystem
“Maybe a lot of the network effect has been externalized to the internet, right? And so the idea being, you know, your cursor, and then suddenly all of the, you know, it becomes popular or, you know, mid journey, let's say, right? And then you get all of these,…”
De la Garza: Enterprises are freezing engineering hiring due to AI productivity
“A lot of folks are freezing hiring for engineers because they're getting additional productivity out of the staff they already have, because these large language models through tools like cursor are generating a tremendous amount of code.”
Casado: Cursor navigated Microsoft/Anthropic competition and M&A in two years
“I mean, imagine like starting competing with Microsoft, ending, ending up competing with say, Anthropic, you know, both of these kind of, you know, mega companies with tremendous amount of capital and power and distribution. In the meantime, you evolve like fu…”
Cursor reached 50% of the Fortune 500 faster than any a16z startup
“I mean, they got to over 50% of the Fortune 500 and I think faster than anyone we've ever seen.”
Casado: Coding is the most competitive startup market ever seen
“Founding teams work on exactly what is needed by the business, and I think they did a very good job, and I think it allowed them to navigate the most competitive market we've probably ever seen. Has there been a more competitive market than coding?”
Casado: Cursor and Elon Musk's ventures are the best M&A fit seen
“I actually think that these two companies, I mean, we just like, you know, talk about the M&A little bit are very good fits. They're very good fits on, on like a technical level, right? Like Elon has a compute, they have the distribution and the data on a visi…”
Bornstein: Startups like Cursor and Harvey shifted to open source for customization
“But I do think we passed a threshold in like, I want to say about a year ago where a bunch of smaller companies or like new application companies, as they were trying to figure out, how do I really build an AI? Without just being a wrapper on top of open AI, t…”
Moore: Only 9% of AI users subscribe to multiple major LLMs
“So only nine percent of consumers are paying for more than one out of the group of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Cursor.”
Casado: Cursor is one of the fastest-growing companies a16z has ever seen
“It's one of the, ah, fastest growing companies, certainly, we've ever seen.”
Truell: Cursor drives a high double-digit percentage of its API providers' revenue
“Their thing now comprises like a really high double-digit percent of their API revenue”
Truell: Cursor originally built its IDE from scratch before forking VS Code
“We didn't even fork VS code. We actually built from scratch. So we built IDEA from scratch that we used ourselves as a daily driver. Couple more weeks to actually get into other people's hands. And then in the span of total, I think a couple of months, we had …”
Casado: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor show tremendous real growth
“The reality is, is open AI has grown tremendously, and Anthropic has grown tremendously, and Cursor has grown tremendously, and so, like, there is some underlying market signals To fuel the chaos.”
Casado: Early AI coding tools reached $400M to $600M in ARR
“The first kind of monetized AI app was code, right? It was Copilot, and so Microsoft had invested a ton of money and matured the market with Copilot, with VS Code, and so everybody knew it. It's just, like, the models weren't quite ready then, and so you had, …”
Bornstein: Cursor is a16z's top developer tool company right now
“Cursor is probably our top developer tool company right now.”
Bornstein: Cursor is outperforming GitHub Copilot in AI coding adoption
“And I think companies like Cursor have just done a much better job with that now.”
Rocha: Uber designer spent two weeks prototyping with Cursor instead of Figma
“This is a designer that works at Uber, and he was telling me how, like, for the past two weeks, he didn't open Figma. He was just building all these prototypes using Cursor, using vZero, using these tools that are now available for folks.”
Wang: Cursor beat every forecast provided to a16z
“They actually beat every forecast they ever gave us”
Casado: Cursor rapidly self-cannibalized from an IDE to an agent and model platform
“And I think another thing that the Cursor team probably doesn't get, you know, the level of credit for is to the extent they cannibalized themselves so dramatically in like a Reed Hastings type way in a matter of two years, right? So they were first an IDE, an…”
Casado: Cursor's technical founders spent 40% of their time recruiting
“Well, they all, they also spend 40% of the time recruiting. Which is amazing for technical product founders to spend 40% of the time recruiting. I've never actually seen it before.”
Casado: Cursor acquired Graphite as a larger strategic M&A move
“It wasn't until later like, the graphite acquisition, where they started thinking about acquisitions in terms of strategic direction. And of course, that was a much larger acquisition.”
Bornstein: OpenAI, Midjourney, and Replicate engineers adopted Cursor early
“Engineers working at the time, the leading AI companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, Replicate, a bunch of others you know, all, all kind of use this and subscribe to this model.”
Gaybrick: Roughly One in Six AI Free Trial Users Were Abusive
“And I think it was something like one in six users of free trials were, Abusive.”
Moore: Top-Revenue Prosumer AI Apps Generate Minimal Web Traffic
“Some of the consumer prosumer AI apps that are generating the most revenue have very few, very little usage on web. It's almost all in kind of a dedicated app.”
Acharya: People use AI code editor Cursor for writing essays
“I'm hearing increasingly about people doing knowledge work and writing essays in cursor instead of just writing code.”
Haber: Large financial institutions are adopting AI developer tools like Cursor
“Many of these institutions are beginning to adopt products like Cursor or, you know, even GitHub Copilot or a broader ecosystem of kind of AI products in their employee base, and people are seeing the productivity gains.”
Truell: Cursor flew across the world to recruit candidates who rejected them
“Us growing the initial 10 people on the team, we did crazy recruiting stunts, like flying across the world to the person. Oh yeah. After they say no.”
Truell: AI code editors are moving from an iPod to iPhone moment
“I think that one of the key challenges facing the company in the future, and we've faced in the past, is we are in a market that's like, you know, had a iPod moment, and like, it's gonna have an iPhone moment.”
Truell: Cursor must become a multi-product AI coding provider
“I do think we're going to need to be a multi-product company going into the future. I think that there's a big multi-product opportunity in our space where there's a whole AI coding bundle to be built, and we kind of want to be the, ah, for many of our custome…”
Truell: Cursor maintains two-day in-office work trials past 200 employees
“And so, that's one of the more unorthodox things we do, is we have this two-day onsite, and we've clung to it, even though we are over 200 people now.”
Truell: Cursor conducts its own AI model training and inference
“I, I'd say now, right now, we do a decent bit of our own training. We do some of our own inference”
Truell: Cursor's first acquisition was Supermaven, founded by Tabnine's creator
“The first real M&A we did was SuperMaven. And so This as just one concrete example, this was a team of five people. It was started by the person who had built Copilot, GitHub Copilot before GitHub Copilot, which was tab nine and was also a researcher at OpenAI”
Truell: Cursor gave early sales candidates access to live customer data
“It was, yeah, it was a little bit more structured where, you know, they would do a demo they would do some, like, mock customer communications, but we would give them access to the real data and have them dig in.”
Truell: Cursor plans early M&A to add products and GM structures
“I think increasingly in the future, you know, with the whole suite of products that are possible in our space and with the benefits we think of bundling those together, we're especially interested in earlier than most companies in their maturity using M&A as a…”
Truell: Founders knew developers would switch editors because Copilot converted them
“So at the time, it's not super controversial now, but at the time, people just thought it was very weird to do an editor. Whether it was a fork or not a fork they said you can't get people to switch their code editor. They're too tied to it, which we knew was …”
Rose: Pitting multiple AI models against each other resolves bugs faster
“And if I run into a problem, I then take that problem over to the other side, have them also work on it. And if I put them against each other, you can typically get to a solution pretty quickly.”
Martin Casado: AI coding products bifurcate into casual and professional markets
“Some products are very clearly for the casual user trying to replace like, you know, like think about like cursor versus lovable, right? So lovable is like, I'm a casual user. I'm going to create a website. I don't even have to know about code. And that's grea…”
Levie: Enterprise AI coding tools cost just 1% of an engineer's salary
“Let's say your most aggressive cursor usage or something is like a thousand bucks a year, 2000 bucks a year. So you're at like one percent salary maybe.”
Appenzeller: AI user interfaces are specializing into interactive copilots and async plugins
“It seems like we're seeing to some degree a specialization of user interfaces in sort of two directions, right? There's, let's say, a cursor or something like that, which really emphasizes the tight loop between the user, the tight feedback loop between the us…”