Michael Truell

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“And I think we took a step back and realized that if we were being really consistent with our beliefs, you know, there was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years and for all of software development to flow through models.”

“Of our early user base, if you just kind of followed the gradient of exactly what they wanted, you would get pulled in slightly different directions than we ended up in. You know, we had a really loud segment of users that didn't know how to code at all, and w…”

“You went from zero to one million around twenty-twenty-three, right? And it was, ah, it took a lot to get there, right? Yeah, it was a bit more than that, but sort of roughly that.”

“I think that there's a dearth of really good long context data available to the institutions that are training these models.”

“But so computer using is kind of, is going to be important for the future of code. Being able to run the code, being able to look at data dog logs and interface with those tools that humans use.”

“And then, you know, one thing I will note kind of harkening back to a last response is that even if you had something you could talk to that was human level at coding, Or faster and better, better than a human at coding, you know, sort of the skill of an entir…”

“We think that one thing that will be irreplaceable is taste. So just defining what do you actually want to build? People usually think about this when they're thinking about the visual aspects of software. I think it's also, there's a taste component to the no…”

“And so I think that more and more of that, like, human compilation step will go away, and computers will be able to kind of fill in the gaps, fill in the details.”

“And looking back on the time we spent on that, I think it would have been better up front to actually just go work at a company that was employing Mechanical engineers for three weeks.”

“Now in Cursor, we do over half a billion model calls per day on our own inference.”

“Is we did the back of the envelope math for what Codex, the first coding model, costed to train. From my memory, it only cost about 90 K or a hundred K by our calculations.”

“All of programming is going to flow through these models. It's going to look very different in the future. You're going to need to control the UI.”

“We actually initially started by building our own editor from scratch, obviously using lots of open source technology, but not, you know, basing it off of VS code, kind of like how browsers are based off of Chromium. It was a little bit more akin to building, …”

“I think that it was from lines of code to first public beta release, it was three months. But then there was this year of iterating in public at very small scale where we had, did not have lightning in the model.”

“Our goal with Cursor is to invent, ah, sort of a new type of programming a very different way to build software that's kind of just distilled down into you describing the intent to the computer for what you want in the most concise way possible, ah, and really…”

“Starting from the very best you know pre-trained models that exist out there. Often open source ones, you know, sometimes in collaboration with these big model providers that, that don't share their weights out into the world because the thing we care about le…”

“Instead, what I would do is I would chop things up into bits, and you can spend basically, you know, the same amount of time specifying things overall, but chopped up more. So you're specifying a little bit, you're getting a little bit of work, you're specifyi…”

“We maybe, we actually biased a little bit too much towards looking for people who fit the archetype of well-known school, very young, had done the things that were like, you know, high credential in those well-known school environments.”

“Core to how we interview, too, is, is actually we have people on site for two days and do, do a project with us, a work test project. And that has worked really well”

“I think it's gonna be more consequential than the internet. I think it's gonna be more consequential than, you know, any shift in tech that we've seen since, since the advent of computers. And I think it's gonna take a while. And I think it's gonna be a multi-…”

“I think long into the future, yes, there will actually be more demand for engineers.”