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 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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.”
Truell: Public cloud providers are figuring out extreme scale on the fly
“You think of these public clouds as they have it all together but really it's a very small set of customers for the highest, highest level of scale, and they're figuring it out on the fly.”
Truell: Software engineering remains far from full automation
“Despite the headlines, despite how much demand there is in this market, and how much software's changed over the last few years, it's so far away from being automated. It's so inefficient. Building software in a professional setting, especially with, you know,…”
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 …”
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 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: 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 …”
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 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 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: 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 originally started as an AI CAD tool for mechanical engineers
“Yeah, initial false start of working on, ah, working on mechanical engineering actually, and working on mech models to help people be more productive within CAD systems, and also building, building our own sort of CAD system.”