Inside Cursor

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Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a series of Company Dispatches, in which a member of Colossus or Positive Sum temporarily embeds with a company—either as an employee, investor, or informal observer—and reports back on their impressions.

I was first introduced to the Cursor team through a former colleague who said the company was looking to meet people with “interesting perspectives on marketing.” We had a 30-minute chat followed by an invitation to drop by Cursor’s San Francisco headquarters, which rolled into a handful of informal (I thought) conversations with team members. I followed up with some reflections from my conversations and went about my week.

The next thing I knew, I was getting texts from former colleagues about the Cursor team “backchanneling” me about a paid role to which I was not aware of having applied. This was somewhat irritating but also flattering, and in what I’ve now learned is typical Cursor fashion, within two weeks I had a Cursor laptop at my Seattle doorstep, an invitation to Slack in my inbox, and another trip to HQ planned to officially begin my work with the team. The scope and term of my role was left intentionally fuzzy, but it rounded to “help Cursor tell its story” through my own idiosyncratic impressions.

With the support of my team at Colossus and Positive Sum, I took on the project for two reasons. Number one, after visiting Cursor’s office and spending more time with the team, I felt like I had to. I worked at Stripe and Figma in each company’s early days and felt a version of that magic in the air at Cursor. Those who have experienced this feeling know how addictive it is. Number two, no generational company has ever been started in the AI era, and I think Cursor has a shot at becoming one. It was immediately obvious to me that the company’s leaders are enthusiastic about establishing a new playbook for company-building. I wanted to see, and help shape, the culture that would require.

There’s a lot of mystique about Cursor. Over the last two months, some things matched my expectations; many did not. This is what surprised me about the company and its culture so far.

To truly understand Cursor’s culture, you have to visit the office in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, where it is the only startup around. It feels like a college common room/dining hall, and if you didn’t know already, it would be difficult to guess where exactly you are. There’s no Cursor logo outside, no corporate posters on the wall, no one wearing Cursor swag, and very few Cursor stickers on laptops. 

Instead, the office mainly features a bunch of people working at desks or huddled in groups of two or three. There are chalkboards instead of whiteboards (company president Oskar Schulz will tell you all about where he sources the best chalk), and the furniture is a hodge-podge procured from a retired techie in the East Bay with a European vintage furniture obsession. The walls are stacked with books—many of them textbooks, and even more with creased spines and other signs of actual use.

During one of my early visits to the office, a group of three prospective customers from a Japanese bank were visiting. They were dressed in suits and high heels and trying their hardest to be very polite as the 20-something salesperson showed them around the office and offered them a snack from the Jenga tower of protein bars, bags of chips, and containers of pretzels and popcorn stacked precariously on top of one another. It can all feel very chipmunks in trenchcoats. But it is undeniably unpretentious.

Cursor is a largely in-person culture—86% of the company works from SF HQ or its new office in New York. As far as I can tell, if you want someone’s help with something, it’s best if you tap them on the shoulder. Slack messages and meetings are less reliable, and much of the company’s collaborative work occurs in impromptu gatherings around a chalkboard or someone’s desk. There are very few scheduled meetings—the company is very conscious about protecting time for deep work and staying nimble with what happens throughout the day. When I inquired about helpful documents, it was suggested to me that “Cursor has more of a spoken-word culture.”

Since early September, I’ve been visiting the office every other week. It’s hard to deny how much easier work flows when I’m in person. When I’m at home, I often lament this reality. When I’m in the office, it feels like there is no better way to work than physically alongside your colleagues.

It can all feel very chipmunks in trenchcoats. But it is undeniably unpretentious.

There is talk about a third office before too long. I suspect some new communication norms will evolve to satisfy an increasingly distributed workforce, but in the meantime, the in-person magic is pretty intoxicating.

At 1pm, six days a week, lunch is served by Fausto, the company’s beloved chef, and everyone gathers around the communal tables to enjoy it. The rumor about Fausto is that at one point he tried to quit because it was too stressful to come up with the menu every day for a team that was doubling in size every few weeks. To hold him over while he got used to the pace of things, someone on the Cursor team created an AI menu generator for him to lean on. Now, he’s in Slack with the rest of the team, sharing the new dishes he’s making, enjoying praise for classic favorites, and taking requests for things to try. At Cursor, even the chef is high-agency.

The conversation at the lunch and dinner table is mostly about work, broadly defined. People seem to enjoy getting to know each other through the way they think about stuff—Cursor projects they’ve been working on, ideas or work they’re untangling, or musing about the future of the product or industry. I spend a good part of my visits to the office just sitting at the table. I don’t often feel I have much to contribute by way of good ideas, but asking questions is an engaging pursuit. Thirty minutes at the table is a revolving door of interesting ideas as people get up and new people sit down. I felt this way often at Stripe through 2015–2017, but the main difference at Cursor is there are always people I don’t recognize at the table, because everyone’s always inviting their smart friends to “drop by.”

When I asked co-founder Sualeh Asif what he’s most concerned about when it comes to company-building, he responded, “People start talking about the weather at meals.” I haven’t seen any evidence he has much to worry about.

Cursor’s secret to recruiting is to treat the atomic unit of the hiring process as a person, not a job spec. Let me explain.

At most companies, the recruiting process looks something like this: identify a hole in the company’s ability to execute on some function, open up a job, source a list of people, interview some of those people, hire one, start them a couple months out.

At Cursor, the recruiting process looks like this: post the name of someone really, really good in the #hiring-ideas channel in Slack, swarm that person with attention, conduct team interviews (wide range of “process” here), and if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday.

The team is growing fast. This time last year, the company was under 20 people; today it’s pushing 250. I probably spend about a quarter of my time recruiting, and that’s celebrated. There’s a constant stream of names flowing through the #hiring-ideas channel. Sourcing doesn’t consist of searching for relevant job titles or companies on LinkedIn and adding names to a spreadsheet for a recruiter to reach out to; it looks more like genuine curiosity about who the best people are.

The team found Eric Zakariasson because he was leading Cursor workshops in Stockholm. Ian Huang was an outlier in customer telemetry because he was coding so much with Cursor into the wee hours of the night. Whenever a potential pool of talent might be opening up, like New Computer shutting down or Meta layoffs, the Cursor team collectively searches for their most talented. Any time someone at Cursor comes across an impressive product release, tweet, or blog post, they drop the creator’s name in the channel accompanied by a “should we hire?”

If there’s consensus that a prospect is good, another Slack channel gets spun up where people strategize on approaching them. Common questions the group will pose include: “What does this person most love working on?”, “What are they best at?”, and “What would be the optimal setup with Cursor?” They then strategize about which exciting challenges Cursor is facing that they can dangle, on the assumption that the best people love a good challenge. Ideas for who to backchannel with are floated with no awareness or permission from the prospect (on this, I have mixed feelings).

When I asked co-founder Sualeh what he’s most concerned about when it comes to company-building, he responded, “People start talking about the weather at meals.”

Next, someone from Cursor will volunteer or get nominated to be the point person for communicating with the prospect and lead the swarm of outreach. This point person anchors the process, but prospects enjoy the 360-degree attention from several Cursor team members. (Zero shade to recruiters, but from a candidate perspective, something hits very differently about not explicitly talking to one). “Not looking right now? No problem. Let’s just do a little project together,” is a common refrain.

Another go-to tactic is to suggest “just dropping by HQ some time,” on the accurate assumption that time in the office is often a magical moment for recruits. It’s also a chance for relevant folks at Cursor to evaluate—I mean meet!—them. (As one person described it, the “bam surprise interview loop.”) Whenever I’m in the office, I spot talented operators I have met over the years; some of them play it off as “just meeting a friend for a coffee!”, while some have texted me afterwards to say, “please don’t tell anyone you saw me there.”

Still, despite all the outbound, the acceptance rate at Cursor makes elite colleges look like summer camp. Every leader says that talent is king, but few companies actually commit to it. Cursor does. Choosing not to hire someone when the to-do list of important problems is as long as it is at Cursor is not easy. But as a smart founder friend put it, “they’re pulling the pain forward.” Cursor’s leadership team signs off on every hire, and I suspect that will be the case for a long time. 

Just as everyone sources candidates, everyone closes. Occasionally, someone needs a little more coaxing post-offer. (Reminder that “looking for a job” is a notable non-requirement for being offered a job at Cursor). In this respect, the team is relentless. Ryo Lu, former early designer at Stripe and Notion, and an Apple fanboy, was gifted an early edition Macintosh computer. Lukas Möller impressed the founders with a cold email about his love for coding and appreciation for what the team was building. Despite the founders making a recruiting trip from California to Germany, Lukas declined the offer. But as Oskar told me with a smirk, “‘No’ is often the start of the conversation.” A year later, the founders were on a plane to Germany again, and this time Lukas came back with them to SF. Jordan MacDonald was very happy in her job when Cursor knocked; after six months of casual coffee chats, and impressive people from her network joining the company, she wasn’t budging. During one such coffee chat, the Cursor team learned that Jordan had just moved into a new house. As part of their closing tactics, they contacted her interior designer to inquire about what piece of furniture might seal the deal. An espresso machine was eventually hand-delivered to Jordan’s new home. She started at Cursor in October.

One notable place Cursor is falling short in the recruiting department: women in product and engineering. This is a known bug and an explicit p0 to fix. (If that’s you and you’re nodding your head along as you read, let’s talk.)

Normally, the best talent doesn’t readily accrue to a company so early in its life. But because Cursor has all the magic ingredients, it could hire exceptional people from the outset.

On the product and engineering side, Cursor is building at the intersection of the most interesting challenges in UX and machine learning. (The work on Cursor 2.0, including its own custom model and a new UI dedicated to agent work flows, is a recent testament). On the go-to-market side, Cursor is one of the fastest growing companies of all time from a revenue perspective—it went from $0 to $100mn ARR without a sales team, and the one that’s since been installed is determined to add another zero before the end of 2025. The #closed-won channel, in which a Slack bot alerts the company to newly closed sales victories, is a near-constant stream of notifications. 

This is all rolled into a very compelling mission in a world where every phrase of the software development lifecycle is about to be rigged up to intelligence. And beyond this, the task of “building software” is quickly expanding beyond software engineers to include designers, product managers, founders, and industry experts. Bring on the TAM!

Across Cursor there are 50(!) former founders—more than a fifth of the company. Nearly 40% went to either MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, or Yale, and yet no one talks about where they went to school. For some, Cursor is their first job; for others, they got their start at companies like Figma, Stripe, Segment, Plaid, Notion, Vercel, Dropbox, GitHub, and Uber. A true melting pot.

How does this manifest? The best way I can describe it is that everyone here exudes competence, but not in a performative way. Phrased alternatively, there is effectively no obvious incompetence on display at Cursor. People are simply very good at their jobs and confidently operate this way. A seemingly silly but non-trivial example of this is the office staircase you have to take to get to your desk. It’s quite steep, yet has no railing. When I inquired about this oddity, the response was: “People know how to walk up stairs.”

Michael often says he wants Cursor to be a “haven for self-motivated individual contributors.” And so far, it is. In the House of ICs (individual contributors), people generally just make things happen through their own enthusiasm and force of will rather than rely on managers to do their bidding. IC is genuinely the highest-status position at the company. Co-founder Aman Sanger remains a proud IC—my enduring image is of him tucked away in a corner of the office coding, mostly uninterrupted, all day long. There’s a healthy culture of grabbing the work that most energizes (or annoys!) you combined with giving ambitious tasks to one person, regardless of title or org structure or team, and just letting them be owner, full stop.

One new hire on sales remarked, “At my last company [note: very hot stuff startup], it took 30 days before I was allowed on the phone with a customer. Here it took less than 30 hours.” In another recent example on engineering, enthusiasm started bubbling up over what Cursor could do in the browser. A small group raised their hands to tackle the challenge over a weekend. The team was comprised of Ian Huang, one of Cursor’s most tenured engineers who also happens to be a recent-ish graduate; Andrew Millich, former founder and creator of Notion Mail; Lukas Möller who built most of the Cursor CLI in 10 days; and Baltazar Zuniga, another tenured engineer who is known to “settle decisions in code versus meetings.” In Andrew’s words, “We put everything down, went into full focus and accountability mode, and worked together in the office until it was done. It was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had at work in my life.” This kind of thing is happening all over Cursor all the time.

This works not only because of the talent density, but also because the ratio of important problems to people is very high. I recall a case of some very frivolous corporate signage in the Stripe bathrooms circa 2018 causing Patrick Collison to promptly inquire about bloat on the learning and development team. As far as I can tell, such bloat doesn’t exist at Cursor.

When people describe someone in a professional setting as “young,” I usually find this translates to either “somewhat incompetent” or “good at their job but gratingly unprofessional.” Knowing the former was not going to be an issue at Cursor, I was prepared for at least some of the latter.

Despite a young average age, I was pleasantly surprised to find the team instead to be warm, well-dressed, keen on eye contact, clear and respectful in communication, and assiduous about replacing empty toilet paper rolls on the dispenser of the shared bathrooms. I was also surprised to find people so young so often communicate their ideas by reference to Silicon Valley history, world history, pop culture, art, learnings from seemingly unrelated industries, and patterns they’ve observed in the work of others they’ve long admired. The range of references is wide, but what’s clear in every example is that people at Cursor study the world as they move through it, rather than rely exclusively on their own personal experience for all their context and idea-generation (a typical pitfall of “young” people). It makes the team particularly good at finding elegant solutions to many shapes of problems. 

To share what they’re observing and learning, many team members create “brain” channels in Slack where they publish their personal musings; there’s no expectation of a response or engagement, but people with good ideas can command quite a following. For the most popular brain channels, the content has little to do with “proof of work” or “managing up,” but rather ideas and reflections. Recent examples include musings on whether “CMSes are an artifact of the pre-AI era,” a deeply considered readout from a slew of customer visits, and a very exacting friction log on a still-nascent Cursor product.

Perhaps most importantly to me, you won’t see much LFGGGGGG, talk of being “cracked,” or overuse of emojis or memes. Recent favorite non-work related messages include an invitation to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons at the SF Symphony, a picture from respective NY and SF 9pm run clubs, friendly mockery at a bad take on AI in the The New Yorker, an entire channel dedicated to #laundry featuring a weekly “laundry standup” slackbot, debates about how to fold fitted sheets, and a poll about which humanoid robot will first make our beds. No one ever breaks character. By far, the most used reaction emoji is ♥️. No one raises their voices, gets angsty or flustered, or visibly panics when things go sideways. It all feels very…adult.

Somewhat recently, a mishap caused a relatively gnarly outage. The person responsible for the outage posted in the #general channel in Slack where the entire company convenes: “Sorry folks, I prepared a lot and made this change as safely and coordinated as I could think to do it.” Lots of people piled on with ♥️s. The first reply read, “It was great that we had the revert ready to go quickly! We’ll postmortem but this type of change is inherently risky and we’ll brainstorm ways to do better in the future.”

Not that people are nonchalant. Everyone takes their work seriously and is incredibly self-reflective. It’s just that when you deeply trust in the proficiency and intent of your colleagues, hiccups or misfires tend not to incite a dramatic angsty swirl like I’ve seen at other startups. In general, no one at Cursor is gossiping about company problems or leadership drama. While the market is very competitive, talk about similar products is very respectful and primarily product-focused rather than shrouded in existential fear. 

Many people who visit the office have observed how “calm” the vibe is. Employees laugh when they hear people say this; “It’s the duck under water thing,” one remarked. Team members look calm and sound measured on the surface, but underneath it’s go go go.

Based on conversations with many Silicon Valley operators, it seems like the main thing people “know” about Cursor is how hard people work. Some cite 9-9-6 (9am–9pm, 6 days a week). This is not reflective of how the company thinks about work. There is no 9-9-6 mandate. There is, however, a meaningful percentage of the team that loves what they do and cares about their work so much that they just work a lot. The pace and volume of work is entirely self-imposed.

No one has ever once asked me to work late into the evening or on a weekend. Have I worked late into the evening or on a weekend? You bet! (I’m writing this very sentence on a Saturday while my 10-month-old is asleep upstairs). Have some of my most productive collaboration sessions happened after-hours when Slack, email, and calendars quiet down? Definitely. Many people work like that every week. I work like that in fits and starts when I’m really cranking on something, primarily because I want to but also to impress my impressive colleagues.

In all honesty, for much of my first few weeks at Cursor, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Many things that seemed very important immediately made their way onto my to-do list. Extra hours didn’t seem to help on their own. I wasn’t sure whether I was working on the right things, producing good work, delivering enough impact, or who to ask about any of it. A lot of new hires describe some version of this. But once you internalize that this norm is reflective of high default confidence in your abilities (a perk of a rigorous recruiting process!) and you learn how the company operates, the panic transforms into confidence. It’s thrilling to work this way. 

I will also say from experience consulting several companies on their corporate culture that pace and work ethic are among the most contagious norms (in both directions): If your colleagues move fast, you do. If your colleagues are responsive on Slack, you are. If your colleagues go home for dinner, you do. If your colleagues come into the office on Saturday, you do. The default setting at Cursor is fast. And most people are happily, not begrudgingly, excited to meet the demand.

As one very early document on Cursor’s culture noted, “Cursor probably ranks the highest in the world in terms of the average number of hours using the company’s main product per employee per week. The only real contender might be Apple with their Macs and iPhones.” Everyone at Cursor is using Cursor all the time. 

As a result, the roadmap is surprisingly bottoms-up. A perfectly good reason to work on something (arguably the best reason) is you personally want a feature to exist. What’s more, Cursor users have lots of ideas for ways to make Cursor better, and frequently post about them on X, Reddit, LinkedIn, and HackerNews, and text and DM employees all the time. Team members say they can barely socialize without someone offering unsolicited product feedback.

Once someone reaches conviction that a feature should be built or updated, they may show it off at the weekly product demos meeting, or they might just start building it. (Sometimes two people end up working on similar things; the version that ships usually incorporates the best ideas from both).

Once the feature is ready, they’ll ship it to the internal version of Cursor to see if it gets internal traction, source feedback on how to make the feature better, or watch it descend into obsolescence. Because Cursor team members are Cursor’s ideal users, everyone is looking for product-market fit internally on the features and infrastructure they believe in. Beloved Cursor features like Tab, CmdK, Agent, Bugbot, and Background Agent were all built this way. 

One of my favorite Slack channels at Cursor is #braintrust, which includes everyone at the company. People use it to get feedback on what they’re building, often in the form of a vote using emojis. A real example to make this vivid: “cmd k – edit full file – = REMOVE and = ‘I use this and need it.’” This is in fact a very efficient and engaging way to get people to “pick sides,” and it often sparks productive debate.

The company’s stance is very much that other companies can focus on lowering the floor, while Cursor will focus on raising the ceiling.

Another interesting side effect of so much dogfooding and testing is that Cursor is very good at updating default settings and evolving features that aren’t used. Some recent questions posted in the primary hub for product discourse in Slack were: “Do we need this setting?”, “Could we get there in fewer clicks?”, “How can we streamline?”, “Does anyone use? Can we kill?” In my experience, most companies are quite bad at this. 

As a result of all this experimentation, the version of Cursor the team uses internally is about three months ahead of the one users see, while the team works out the kinks of new features.

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s not just product and engineering folks that use Cursor. The go-to-market team is surprisingly technical, and uses Cursor for website updates, dashboards, and other internal tools. The #built-with-Cursor Slack channel features projects like a pickleball court availability tracker, a team member’s wedding website, Cursor keyboard shortcuts visualization, a silly game in which you feed treats to the office dogs, and Metguessr, a geoguessr but with art objects from The Met’s collection. Once again, this is not a company mandate (like it was to make slides in Figma before Figma Slides existed). People just enjoy tinkering around in Cursor.

Fuzz is my favorite Cursor ritual. When a big ship is imminent (think a new client release or website update), everyone gets in a room and tries to break it.

The call usually begins with a Slack message from the product owner in a public channel that reads “Fuzz session on x happening now in the basement.” While people are sometimes lured with donuts or bagels, the team feels great ownership of preventing a buggy release and is willing to do the grunt work accordingly. As one early “Welcome to Cursor” document articulates, “Take responsibility for bugs. Mistakes happen, but every bug we ship to users is a disappointment. We are asking users to code in Cursor all day, every day, and bugs or performance problems are easy ways to make them switch.” 

Fuzz begins when a critical mass of developers convenes in a circle as large as the room will permit. While earlycomers grab seats, many people find themselves crosslegged on the floor, on edges of sofas, or on chairs (or arms of chairs) that have been dragged over from desks with laptops on laps. The product owner then sends a link and instructions out for the latest build and instructs the truffle pigs to get to work.

Aside from the clack of fingers on keyboards, “fuzz” is silent, as people spend 60 minutes identifying bugs, UI nits, unconsidered edge-cases, or unpolished corners worth fixing and post them in Slack. Occasionally a debate ensues about the most elegant implementation (maybe even some Slack voting). The result of the hour is usually a very, very long list of things to do before the product ships (usually the next day).

The product team then expresses their deepest gratitude for the time and consideration and settles in for a long night of fixing…often accompanied by the people who identified said fixes in the first place. 

At Cursor, people poke and prod each other’s work a lot. This can be quite jarring for folks who haven’t operated in that kind of culture before. Top builders know what great products feel like, so people can get very opinionated about how things should work. They’ll liberally offer feedback on what is missing to hit the bar, and extra hands to help get it there. 

Stripe had such a culture; my former boss/colleague/co-founder, Eeke, came up with the term “micro-pessimist, macro-optimist” to describe this way of operating. This also rings true at Cursor.  While people can be very critical of execution, they’re also quite optimistic that they’re going to build something consequential, and generally frame things in terms of potential success rather than potential failure.

Like most cultural norms, this one starts with the founders. Michael is always encouraging “spicy questions” during company Q&A, where he is in the hot seat. Sualeh is known to DM people the question: “What are you worried about right now?” 

This kind of culture can get toxic fast if it’s also coupled with ego, office politics, poor communication, or a propensity for emotional dysregulation. I’ve also encountered many (very talented) people that make poking holes a sport but don’t have any intrinsic desire to fill them. At Cursor, critics are also problem-solvers. The “friction” here works because everyone genuinely wants the best for the product and each other.

Relatedly, I once asked Michael what he wanted the company to feel like. He answered by asking me, “Have you ever seen that Beatles documentary?” (He’s always answering questions with questions).

If you haven’t seen the documentary Get Back the best way to summarize it is: the most famous band of all time locks themselves in a studio with a three-week clock ticking and iterates their way to the record-breaking album “Let It Be.” The film contains electric moments like Paul McCartney, sitting with his bass, half-mumbling nonsense syllables, and then seemingly accidentally stumbling onto the riff and structure of “Get Back.” And also tense moments, like George Harrison snapping at Paul as he attempts to direct a tired band through yet another cut at a song. All the while you can feel the specter of external pressure from fans and studio executives haunting the building, but the boys plod on. 

The vicissitudes of the creative process are on full display, and what’s so beautiful about the whole thing is we’re reminded that, when it comes to making something wonderful, the magic is in the mundane. Greatness is created through the collision of little sparks, ignited by people at the peak of the craft who care a lot and won’t stop working until it gets there. There’s not much talk or strategy, there’s just feeling your way through it—fingers are on instruments the whole time, playing until it works. He didn’t say it in these words, but this is what I think Michael wants Cursor to feel like. I’d say so far it’s working.

Cursor is adamant about its ideal customer profile being the best professional software developers. This is somewhat controversial, because there are many people that do not have the word “developer” in their job title but use and (loudly) love Cursor.

Cursor is in no way dismissive of these users or the general ambition to democratize coding. But the company’s stance is very much that other companies can focus on lowering the floor, while Cursor will focus on raising the ceiling.

As the saying in product development goes, “You should be careful who your users are, because they are going to pull your product in a particular direction.” Cursor explicitly wants to be pulled in the direction of the people at the peak of their craft. This, they believe, is the approach required to transform the way we build software, vs. make incremental improvements. I admire them for this. “Democratize x” would make for an easy marketing win, but Cursor is willing to prioritize product precision over warm-and-fuzzy marketing.

I’ve also observed the virtues of “designing for the ceiling vs. the floor” play out in the engineering interviewing process. Cursor interviews are known to be very difficult for candidates, particularly the coding challenges. When I asked the team about this, they insisted that “it’s hard to show off how good you are on something too easy,” and that they were “willing to accept false negatives to avoid false positives.”  

Through my time at Cursor, I’ve found myself wanting to look at more things through the lens of, “What is the ceiling-raising version of this?” It generally leads to much more ambitious thinking.

So what is all of this intensity, focus, and momentum for? One of the more encouraging aspects of Cursor is that the prize of winning is fulfilling the mission. 

When it comes to Cursor’s aspirations, there’s certainly a gap between what you’d see on cursor.com or read about in the press and what people in the building are talking about. The company’s product story is all about developer productivity. This is a very effective and lucrative stance. But the thing the people at Cursor actually care about is code, and code generation as the fabric of the world.

It’s a truism, for good reason, that everything runs on software—and not just B2B SaaS companies. The stoplights governing our streets; the analysis underpinning scientific discoveries; the editing tools that sculpt our films, television shows, and music; the medical records that ensure our doctors can provide care in context; the inventory management system that gets groceries to our supermarkets; the flight control systems that make air travel safe; and so on. Until working at Cursor, I don’t think I had fully internalized to what extent progress is bottlenecked on our ability to build excellent software.

If you believe, like I do, that what we build is a function of how it feels to build it, what Cursor does has a real shot at meaningfully shaping the future world we experience. What happens when the right tool is put into the hands of people that want to build impactful, enduring software? Actually close the gap between idea and reality. Many companies claim this mission, but it feels more true at Cursor.

I think it’s because the thing most of them would do if they could retire tomorrow would be whatever they’re doing now at Cursor.

During a walk, I asked one particularly soulful colleague how he thinks about Cursor’s mission. He started talking about how to build useful, reliable, and beautiful software; about needing tools that give builders very precise control at every level of abstraction; about how we have to bridge the language barrier between humans and AI in one tool that feels natural to anyone who wants to build software; and about how building could be more like sculpting and painting. In the past I have experienced this kind of thinking as a bit head-in-the-clouds, and perhaps I have been drinking too much Cursor Kool-Aid, but I feel it now.

With this lens, the company is more of a moonshot. The biggest existential risk to Cursor may very well be that its early commercial success could distract from continuing to take the biggest swings possible. 

Michael sends some explicit reminders in this department; at all hands, he’ll repeat things like “growth can hide poor execution.” (It reminds me of one of the most repeated operating principles at Stripe: “We haven’t won yet.”) Not that these reminders seem necessary. While there is acknowledgement and light excitement around the company’s gobsmacking revenue, growth, usage, and sales victories, what really gets people going are developments in the product, healthy performance, reliability, elegant UI, and all the other product virtues the team cares so much about. To the extent people get excited about adoption and revenue, it’s more in the vein of satisfaction that the company’s vision for a better way to code is playing out. 

One very early employee reflected on the day the company hit $100mn ARR; a bot in the popular #numbers channel in Slack notified the company. People reacted with the typical ♥️ emoji, some added a , “but conversation in the office was business as usual.”

Perhaps my best evidence that the prize is the mission is that during my fall at Cursor, I overheard zero chatter from employees about getting rich. At Stripe and Figma (and most other startups), this was a favorite lunch table topic among the first few hundred employees at a decacorn. Yet at Cursor, as the valuation goes up and up, I haven’t heard a peep about the second homes people will buy, the great-great-grandchildren that will be put through college, or the time they’ll take off traversing the world. If people have dollar signs in their eyes, they’re not talking about it much. And I think it’s because the thing most of them would do if they could retire tomorrow would be whatever they’re doing now at Cursor.

Brie Wolfson is the chief marketing officer of Colossus and Positive Sum.