Truell: Cursor resisted vocal early user demand to target non-programmers
Michael Truell · Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students · Y Combinator · Sep 3, 2025 · at 18:58
Michael Truell, CEO and co-founder of Cursor, explains how Cursor avoided getting distracted by loud segments of early users who requested vertical tools or support for non-coders.
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“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 we talked about, you know, should we focus on those folks? We had a really loud segment of users that wanted us to do things that were very tech stack specific you know, just building for one technology and making it much less of a horizontal tool. And we resisted doing that too.”
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