Cursor

“They released Claude code, they released Claude design, and that really pissed off Curser, who was one of the biggest customers that Anthropoc had to date, and they felt they got rug pulled by Claude.”

“Tell me if I'm wrong, three million ARR, four hundred million dollar round, or somewhere maybe around there.”

“Claude inside of cursor allows you to build plans for your feature sets. And it won't put in deep links in the plan. If you don't ask, it doesn't put in error handling and logging and documentation and making sure the design system works. And like, it doesn't …”

“So I, because I'm also doing the marketing, I have two repositories that are both local folders and sync to GitHub. And so what I've done is I've built all of the technical documentation into the repository. Of my application, and then I have, ah, I have a set…”

“Cursor, for example, and some of our coding products, people use it for non-coding tasks all the time.”

“What we saw for coding was a very simple pattern, which was there was an early adopter crowd. The early adopter crowd would use these coding tools and really push them to the limits. And they would mostly push them to the limits on individual projects. They wo…”

“Ultimately when you're shipping production software, we're big believers that that is going to require, you know, a product where every pixel is optimized for that end user.”

“When I joined Cursor originally, we were about 15 people. We scaled to about, to over a thousand. And then now we're a part of SpaceX AI, which is kind of an even bigger organization.”

“And if we as a company can't completely reinvent ourselves every six months, which recently it's felt even shorter than that, of kind of complete, like, very significant reinventions of our priorities, the core product, what users feel we're gonna lose.”

“AI coding has always been competitive from when cursor first, first kind of came to be. And at the time the competitors were Microsoft and others and a handful of maybe 10 or 20 companies. And I think it's notable that none of those competitors are at the fore…”

“I will say that I think if Cursor and many other successful companies of this kind of vintage, I think if they had thought About moats slash kind of tried to work backwards from some strategy diagram or like, you know maybe more abstract notion of how a compan…”

“How could we pull that stuff to today? Even if it requires a little bit of engineering on top to make it work or a lot of engineering on top. To make it work. Even it requires changing the product in a specific way so the user can interact with this new capabi…”

“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 …”

“I also think Anthropic reaffirmed that they're happily continuing to supply”

“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…”

“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…”

“I mean, if I bundle all of the cloud, cursor, codecs, it is one of the fastest growing parts and definitely faster growing than the UI of Glean, which is still by a large margin, a very high daily engagement driver.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Cursor just sold for sixty billion dollars after four years.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“Early on, I think I told Michael a few times too. It's like, oh, you better invest in sales. He's like, nope, I'm not going to do that. They literally set up enterprise at cursor.com. It's like, if you're an enterprise, send your inquiries to this.”

“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.”

“I mean, they got to over 50% of the Fortune 500 and I think faster than anyone we've 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?”

“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…”

“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…”

“They actually beat every forecast they ever gave us”

“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.”

“Think of it as like you're hiring Cursor or Cloud Code or Codex to be the engineer you delegate things to.”

“The challenge is, all those companies, you could take your pick, Base-Ten, Fireworks together, they all focus on low latency inference. And they were pulled in that direction by one very important customer Cursor.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“That's how number two and number three get bought. Not because there's a panic for land grab, but because I didn't get what I wanted, right? That, that, that's when you got to be really thoughtful as number two because that that's when you get bought as number…”

“A couple of times I've said on the other side, I don't know that it creates such a strategic arm race that everyone just gets picked off instantly. That, that might be a VC partial myth.”

“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…”

“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?”

“And I think it was something like one in six users of free trials were, Abusive.”

“I think one thing that's really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but there's like forward deployed engineer, this like technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what is a, you know, c…”

“And we want that like super deep technical engineer that has a little bit more stronger product sense. And so you kind of see that. So I think the people who are maybe like very narrow, very deep and like overly specialized in a way are waning like in like, in…”

“Assuming I have really good interview process and hygiene and all these things, you kind of regress to the mean over time as you get to volume.”

“In a sales funnel, you know, as a salesperson, you're typically selling a widget, a piece of software, an item, those things are relatively static and rational. In recruiting, you have an irrational unit of a hiring manager and recruiter and in another rationa…”

“If you've ever heard that phrase, like, I will, I'll know what, I'll know it when I see it. I'll know what great looks like. You actually, you won't. You won't see, you won't know, because you haven't spent, like, the time objectively identifying what that, wh…”

“And your company is different. Your product is different. And so you owe to yourself to kind of identify what does great look like for you and who's going to be successful in this role in this product versus what was successful for someone else in a process th…”

“The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, hey, Lenny, who's the best, ah, product engineer you know? That is the worst question you can ask. The best, the better question to ask is, hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you've worked with, who st…”

“I think the most valuable one is the most time intensive one, which is spending time and digging into people's networks. I, you know, we've shared this before, but people on my team whose entire job is to dig into our current employees networks. You could auto…”

“We spend a lot of time here thinking about who can create a warm intro to that person. Almost as much effort goes into that Then it does the actual messaging and the, right? Because if you get the right person that accelerates it, right?”

“Having a meal with someone is One of the most human and leveling things that you can do. You know, sharing a meal across the table is just a disarming act and a joining act that I think is just so important.”

“We try to play home games when we can, because you have the power of the team. Right, you have the power. And so, you know, one analogy I think about is, like, when you, sometimes when you walk on, when some people are considering university early in their liv…”

“Research has shown that work samples are the highest predictor of success at a company, but yet most companies are still spending a lot of time doing one-to-one across the table assessments.”

“I think this is where most companies get it wrong on the onsite. They're almost always buying. This is like, we are assessing, we're extracting information. We're not giving much back to the candidate. And I'm a big fan of the power of self-selection.”

“When we ran that experiment you know, because it is quite expensive. It is also a big ask of candidates. We really struggled to have confidence in our decision. Again, this is a confidence building function. And so we are excited to bring it back.”

“We don't have hiring committees. It is hiring manager led. They get lots of input from the team.”

“Closing is a team sport, and so when we have a candidate particularly, like, a high-profile, high-caliber, there are often daily stand-ups Around that candidate about what we're doing to get them to yes.”

“So when you are thinking about a hundred candidates for every role, then this is, that does not scale. But when you're narrowing that down to a small percentage of people that you've been kind of laying groundwork with over time, It comes because now people ar…”