Rio Lu

Head of Design, Cursor · 1 appearance on the record.

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Ryo Lu is the Head of Design at Cursor, where he advocates for prototyping directly in code. He previously worked on product and systems design at Notion, Stripe, and Asana.

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1 assertion · 2 opinions · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

What they said7 Episodes1

Everything Rio Lu said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Open · timeframe Nov 2026

Lu Catches Startup Slashy Stealing an Image From Notion

“Oh wow, they're actually stealing, like, a Notion picture here.”

Rio Lu Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 22:07 Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator

Insight

Lu: Design Tokens Prevent AI-Generated Interface Slop

“You want to avoid, say all the typical AI slop, say like massive shadows, purple gradients, bad typography, just clean the basics up, then with like a really robust like, foundational set of tokens and components, AI is able to compose them pretty well.”

Rio Lu Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 4:58 Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator

Insight

Lu: Limit Landing Pages to One Main CTA Per Scroll

“Kill all the distractions. Make sure that like every single scroll, there is only one main CTA. There's always like a priority, your main message, what the hell is it, the CTAs, and then it's like the proofs.”

Rio Lu Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 9:31 Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator

Opinion

Lu: Startups Alienate Visitors by Using Invented Internal Jargon

“The thing I hate for like a lot of companies, what they do is like, they love talking in their own words and with their own concepts that they came up that nobody else understands. Like you just throw these like big words there, but then they don't really mean…”

Rio Lu Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 11:49 Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator

Insight

Lu: AI Apps Should Display Execution States, Not Generic Spinners

“But you do want to control, like you don't want to show too many things at once where, Like it just becomes like a wall of text. You want to control like, ah, the things that are running, you show them in the more like focusable spot. And as it progresses, it …”

Rio Lu Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 31:37 Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator

Opinion

Lu Roasts VibeFlow's UI as Raw, Disjointed AI Generation

“This is almost like a vibe coded VS code. That's just pure AI generated. You know, there's not even like a, like not even say you're not using chassis or whatever. Like it's just raw AI.”

Rio Lu Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 33:05 Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator

Insight

Lu: Standardize Mixed Headshots Using White Backgrounds and B&W Filters

“One trick you can do is like, maybe like you knock down all their backgrounds, but keep them like white. Maybe you add a filter so that they're all like black and white. Then it kind of standardized the thing without like butchering the picture too much.”

Rio Lu Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 16:50 Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator	Nov 20, 2025	12m

Rio Lu

Appearances (1)

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