Cursor

“I'm obsessed with Cursor. I'm obsessed with Replit. These are tools I use all the time to just really build a prototype and try to understand myself what's possible.”

“Cursor is a fork of VS code that's made that has really awesome AI tools, but that's an editor. You still need run time. You still need a deployment environment.”

“17% of all people that read my newsletter use cursor already, which is absurd.”

“Our company wasn't doing AI stuff the six months ago, we had no AI products and just out of nowhere, we you know, From almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI co-gen app that's, you know,…”

“Sonnet was, you know, Sonnet was the, really the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and all cursor and all these other things. The rapid growth started the second sauna went online, right? Like we actually tried building bull like…”

“We are using cursor. We've tried all the different tools. We were using Devon as well, which is another, you know, that's more advanced, I guess, you know, it's kind of solving bugs for you.”

“I did the survey recently where I asked my readers, what tools do you use most in your day-to-day work as a product builder, as a product manager? And in the category of engineering tools vZero came in right below cursor and GitHub for people's most used AI bu…”

“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.”

“I think that there will be one company and to be determined if it's going to be us, but I do think that there will be one company that builds the general tool that builds almost all the world's software. And that will be a very, very generationally big busines…”

“The extensibility that existing coding environments have is so, so, so limited. So if you think that the UI is going to change a lot, if you think that the form factor program is going to change a lot, you necessarily need to have control over the entire appli…”

“So the customers we've seen have most success with AI, I think are still fairly conservative about some of the ways in which they use this stuff. And so I do think today that the most successful customers really lean on Things like you know, our next edit pred…”

“It's kind of a new form of product building where it's very interdisciplinary in that we are something in between a normal software company and then in between a normal software company and then a foundation model company in that you know we want to develop a,…”

“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…”

“At this point, every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom model in some way.”

“The first version of Cursor was hand rolled. We now we use VS Code kind of as a base, like many browsers use Chromium as a base and it worked off of that. To begin with, we didn't, and built the prototype of Cursor from scratch, and that involved a lot of work…”

“And then we launched it out to the world within a couple of months from the first line of code. I think it was probably, probably three months.”

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

“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”

“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…”

“There was a period of, you know, four months to begin with, where we were actually working on a very different idea, which was helping to automate and augment mechanical engineering and building tools for mechanical engineers.”

“So I think that, you know, what the IDE is will totally change over time. And kind of our approach to, you know, having our own editor with premise non, it's gonna have to evolve over time. And I think that that will both include, you can spin off things from …”

“Some of the normal things that people would maybe Reach for in, in building the company early on we really let those fires burn for a long time, especially when it came to things like sales and marketing.”

“So we are going on 60 people.”

“And I think the, yeah, the idea again is that, you know, code generation as a tool will unlock lot more products. I mean, they're not all competitors to the fact of they're not all kind of you know doing the same job. I think when you're at the end of the day,…”

“I just saw that Cursor hit three hundred million ARR in two years.”

“I don't think we're gonna buy a cursor. Cursor's very big but we love working with them.”

“We're just going to see these things get deployed and they're going to be broken. So there's a lot of like AI coding agents out there. There's Cursor, there's, I guess, Windsurf, Devon, Copilot. So all of those tools exist and they can do things right now Like…”

“If you think about coding as a overall category, like you know, back in the day with GitHub, everyone, they started with a seed based model, right? They've now moved to like the hybrid based pricing model with cursors and everyone else, but the natural move wo…”

“So I think cursor will be in its current form is a transition product.”

“So we have an engineer at CIRA who exclusively focuses on the model context protocol server serving our cursor instance.”

“There's multiple ways to hit that escape velocity, but this is gonna be one of, this is one of the major ways to do it, is to basically hit yourself To a new platform.”

“Cursor is very clear, like cursor's on the path to also probably create some type of agent platform, right? For developers. So that'll be like a smaller ecosystem to play in for some products.”

“And so it's amazing to see something like cursor overtake market share of something like GitHub co-pilot in nine months or less, right? Like that, that's how fast it happened.”

“I think about cursor, maybe the fastest, maybe the second fastest growing company behind ChatGPT.”

“The PMs are mostly using vZero. The designers love Figma, so they're using Figma Make. The engineers are using a combination of tools right now. So Cursor, Cloud Code, GitHub Copilot. Marketing teams use all sorts of tools for translation, subtitles, you know,…”

“He was like, okay, here's more like currently like best performing, average performing, and lowest performing. And then there's a randomized trial. So like they give like half of each group, like access to like cursor. And then he was noticed like over time, I…”

“And at the end we update the docs. So this is updating documentation and everything so that agents can write better code later on.”

“I think if you see this where I'm working like in Claude or in cursor, you might be excited to start using those, but I would really recommend starting slow with a GPT project. Beautiful UI, super simple, then maybe graduate to like a bolt or a lovable. And th…”

“The main difference between all these tools is basically the harness. So the models are all the same models. You know, I I'll run Claude within cursor. I'll run it within Claude code. And it's also the models that Claude is also the model that is underlying Bo…”

“Lovable, Cursor, Cloud Code, you name it, all these tools are good enough today to fix any problem they're aware of.”

“What's the layer that we are adding on top of code where people don't need to worry about code anymore. And at that point, it was like a year ago that we chatted, and it feels like this is the layer Is the agent conversation of what it is, what it's thinking a…”

“Because even in February when we released it was writing maybe, I don't know, like, 20% of my code, not more. And even in May, it was writing maybe 30%. I was still using, you know, Kurtzer for most of my code. And it only crossed a hundred percent in November…”

“You get a free year of cursor, and lovable, and bolt, and replet, and v-zero. I think that's five. And so that was way too good an offer. People came for it. Bad people. So I just had so many fraudsters, mostly in China, it turned out. Just like all these frau…”

“Like, I think that Cursor's cloud implementation is better than either OpenAI or Anthropix and is more advanced.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One thing that we didn't talk about, which I think is happening, I'm seeing more of is reneges on offers, and so I think a lot of companies get to the yes of the offer acceptance, and there's often like a gap of time.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“There was a world where the models were coming out every three or four months. We're down to a number of days between models”

“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…”

“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?”

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

“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…”

“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 thing they try to do is do this silver bullet hire which is a first, like, head of talent, and they kind of collapse two, can keep competing skill sets into one. Okay, so when you are, generally as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first re…”

“My warm take, not a hot take, my warm take is like every recruiter should be a talent engineer. Like the things that recruiters now have at their fingertips that they could build in cursor or other tools is really phenomenal.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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