YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Truell

lines on the record: 82
first: 2025-05-01
most recent: 2025-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, if folks are interested in working on this stuff, we'd love to speak. And they can find, if they go to Chris.com, they can kind of both find the product and find out how to reach us.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot about how You set up a team to be able to make new stuff in addition to continuing to improve the stuff that you have right now. And I think if we were to be successful, IDEs can have to change a ton, what looks like it's going to have to change a time going into the future. And if you look around the companies we respect, there are definitely examples of companies that have continued to really ride the wave of many lead frogs and continue to kind of actually push the frontier. But they're kind of rare too. Like it's a hard thing to do. And so, you know, part of that is just kind of thinking about the thing and trying to reflect on it in our days and the first principal side of things. Permit is also, you know, trying to get in and study past examples of greatness here. That's something that we think about a lot, too.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early jobs actually was working for a biotechnology company, and it was building internal tools for them. And the off-the-shelf tools that existed were horrible and did not fit their use case at all. And then the internal tools I was building, there was definitely a ton of demand there for things that could be built. And that far outstripped just the things that I could build on the time that I was with them. But yes, I think that it's still so, you know. The physics of working on computers are so great. It should be able to kind of basically just move everything around, do everything that you want to do. There's still so much friction. I think that there's much more demand for the software then, for software than what we can build today with things costing like a blockbuster movie to make kind of simple productivity software. And so I think long into the future, yes, there will actually be more demand for engineers.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we think even in the end state, that's giving folks control over everything is really important. And you will need professionals to do that and kind of decide what the software looks like. So both I think that, yes, engineers are definitely needed. I think that engineers will be able to do much more. I think the demand for software is very lasting, which is not the most novel thing. But I think it's kind of crazy to think about how expensive and labor intensive it is to build things that are pretty simple and easy to specify or it would look like it to the outside observer. And just how hard those things are to do right now. And so if you can, you know, all of the stuff that exists right now that's justified by the cost and demand that we have now, if you could bring that down by order of magnitude, I think you'd have tons and tons and tons of more stuff that we could do at our computers, tons more tools. And I've felt this where one of my”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, we kind of have the view that there's this both long, messy middle of it not dropping to a just like you step back and you ask for all your stuff to be done and you have your engineering department. And very much you want to evolve from programming as it exists today Want humans to be in the driver's seat”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many things that this group of people need to do that we are not yet equipped to do. And so Kind of generic across the board, first of all. And so if you don't think we have a role for something, maybe if you reach out, that won't actually be the case. And maybe we can actually learn from you and kind of decide that we need something that we weren't yet aware of. But by and large, I think that two of the most important things for us to do this year have the best product in the space and then grow it. And we're kind of in this land grab mode where almost everyone in the world is either using no tool like ours or they're using one that's maybe developing less quickly. And so growing cursor to a big goal. And I would say, yeah, especially always on the hunt for folks who excellent engineers, designers, researchers, but then folks all across the business side too.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pushing forward the technology because I think they'll be able to build the most testful of them. We'll be able to build very, very big businesses. And yeah, so excited to see the rise of other companies like that in other areas.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then some of it's on like how we're going to work with them. What's the experience that humans should actually be seeing and controlling on a computer and working with these things? But I think it's going to take decades. I think that there's going to be lots of amazing work to do. I think that also one of the most a pattern of a group that I think will be especially important here, not to talk our own book, but I think the company that works on automating and augmenting a particular particular area of knowledge work builds the both the technology under, you know, under the surface for that, integrating the best parts from providers, sometimes doing it in-house, and then also builds the product experience for that. I think people who do that and we're doing it and trying to do it in software, people who do that in other areas, I think those folks will be really, really, really consequential, not just for like, you know, the end value that users see, but then I think as they get to scale, they'll be really important for.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are still a little bit occupied too much. End of a spectrum of You know, it's all going to happen very fast. And this is all bluster and hype and super snake well. And I think we're in the middle of a technology shift that's going to be incredibly consequential. I think it's going to be more consequential in the internet. And it's going to be more consequential than any shift in tech that we've seen since the advent of computers. And I think it's going to take a while. And I think it's going to be a multi-decade thing. And I think many different groups will be consequential on pushing it forward. And to get to a world where computers can increasingly do more and more and more for us, there's all of these independent problems that need to be knocked down and progress needs to be made on them. And some of those are on the science side of things of getting these models to understand different types of data be faster, cheaper, smarter, conform to the modalities that we care about, take actions in the real world.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And only a very small number of these things really kind of affect the business. So I think we've kind of just built up a little bit of an immune system and kind of know when an event comes around that actually is really going to matter for us. And this is this dynamic too of there being lots and lots and lots of chatter. But then maybe only a few things that really matter, I think has been mirrored in AI over the last decade where there have been so many papers on deep learning in academia, so many papers on AI in academia. But then the amazing thing is there are really a lot of, I mean, a lot of the progress of AI can be attributed to some very simple elegant ideas that have stayed around in the vast majority of ideas that have been put out there haven't had staying tired and haven't mattered a ton. And so the dynamic is a little bit mirrored in kind of the evolution of deep learning as a field overall.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ton of process yet on the engineering front, and I think we need a little bit more process, but for our size, not a ton of process by hiring people who I think are really excellent. You know, one is hiring people who are level-headed. I think two is just talking about it a lot. I think three is hopefully leading by example. And yeah, for us personally, we've since 2021, 2022, been professionally working on this and working on AI. And we've just seen a sea change of the comings and goings of various technologies and ideas of if you're to transport yourself back to end of 2021, beginning of 2022. This is GPD3. Instruct GPT is an example. There's no DALE. There's no stable diffusion. And then we've gone through all of those image technologies existing, ChatGPT in that rise. And before all of these new models, all these different modalities, all the video stuff.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think hiring is a big part of it. And if you get people with the right attitude, and all of this should be asterisk and I think we're doing well there. I think that we'd probably be doing better there too. And something that we should probably talk more about as a company. But I think that hiring people with the right disposition, people who are less focused on external validation, more focused on building something really great, more focused on doing really high quality work and people who are just generally kind of level-headed and maybe like the highs run very high and lows aren't very low. I think hiring can get used to a lot here. And I think that's actually a learning throughout the company is that for any unique process, you need hierarchy. You need lots of things. But for any kind of organizational tool that you're introducing into a company, the result”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the thing that's more than anything, and to be clear, you know, a big part of the work ahead of us is building a group of people that is bigger and awesome and can continue to make the product better and the service we give to customers better. And so you don't plan to stay that small for longer, wouldn't hope so. But yeah, part of the reason that that number is small is the percentage of engineering and research and design is very high within the company. So many software companies, when they have roughly 40 engineers, would be over 100 people because there's lots of operational work and often they're very, very sales led from the get-go. And that's just quite labor intensive. And we started from a place of being incredibly lenient product led. And like, you know, we now serve lots of well, our good customers and it built that out. But there's much more to do there.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So we don't use the IP, not should end to end. But yeah, it's like a mock, like very often in our code base, here's a real mini two-day project. You're going to do it end-to-end, largely being left alone. There's collaboration too. And then we're a pretty improving company. So in almost all cases, yeah, it's actually just sitting in office with us, Jip.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It helps you enforce Do you want to be around this person type test because you are around this person for two days. And so a bunch of meals with them. And so that one, we didn't expect that one to stick around, but that has been really, really important to our value process. And then also important to getting people excited at the, especially the very early stages of the company, because before people are using the product and know about it, and when the product is comparatively not very good, really the only thing you have going for you is a team of people that some people find special and want to be around. And the two days would give us a chance to just like have this person meet us and in some cases hopefully get convinced that they want to throw in with us. And so, yeah, that one, that one was unexpected. Not exactly an interview question, but kind of like a form of interview.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this two day work test, which we thought would not scale past a few people, has had surprising staying power. And the great thing about it is, Lets someone go end to end on it like a real project. It's not work that we use. It's kind of a candle list of projects. But it gives you two days of seeing like a real work product Doesn't have to be incredibly time intensive on the team. You can take the time you would spend in like a half day or one day on site, you kind of spread it out over those two days and give someone a lot of time to do work on their project. And so that can actually help it scale. And then it really helps you.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another lesson is just like we very much evolved our interview loop. And so now we have like a handwritted set of interview questions and then kind of core to our interview too is actually we have people on site for two days and do a project with us, a work test project. That is worked really well, but you're increasingly refining that. And then, yeah, I think how to learn about what people are interested in and put our best foot forward and letting them know about the opportunity when they're really not looking for anything and have those conversations. There's definitely been gotten better at that over time.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think to start with, 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 high credential in those well-known school environments. And actually, I think we're lucky early on to find a lot of fantastic people who are willing to do this with us, who were later careered. And so, yeah, I think we kind of spent a bunch of time on maybe a little bit of the wrong profile to begin with. And part of that was the seniority thing. Part of that was like, you know, kind of an interest and experience thing too. We have hired people who are excellent, excellent, excellent, and very young, but they maybe look in some cases slightly different from, you know, being straight out of central casting.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ended up working for us in the end, but I don't think we were very good at it to begin with. And so I think that there were hard won lessons around both who was the right profile, like who actually made sense on the team, like what did greatness look like, and then how to talk with someone about the opportunity and get them excited if they really weren't looking for anything. There were lots of kind of learnings there about how to do that well. And that took us a bit of time.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that maybe more than anything else apart from building the product, we really, really fussed over. And we actually waited a long time to grow the team because of that. And I think that most people you here hired too fast. I think we actually hired too slow to begin with. I think it could have been remedied. I think we could have been better at it. The method of recruiting that we ended up eventually falling into and working really well for us, which isn't that novel of going after people that we think are really world class and like recruiting them over the course of, in some cases, many years.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really important to us that both for personal reasons and also for, I think, actually for the company's strategy, having a world-class group of engineers and researchers to work on cursor with us was going to be incredibly important. Also getting people who fit a sort of mix of intellectual curiosity and experimentation because there can be so many new things we need to build. And then also kind of an intellectual honesty and maybe micropessimism and bluntness because if all the noise and, you know, especially as the company's grown and the business has grown, keeping a level ahead, I think is incredibly important too. But getting the right”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tough thing with this is feels like so much of the hard-won knowledge is tacit and a bit hard to communicate verbally. The sad fact of life feels like for some areas of human endeavor, like you kind of do need to fall under face to either need to fall under you to be kind of around someone, who's a great example of kind of excellence in the thing. And one area where we have felt this is higher. I think that we actually were, so we tried to be incredibly patient on the hiring of rent.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like we've seen people who are on the front lines of really trying to adopt the technology as much as possible there. But by and large, I would say on average as a group, the senior engineers underrate what AI can do for them and stick to their existing workflows. And so the relative ranking is a little hard. I think they both have, they fall into different anti-patterns, but they both by and large get big benefits of these tools.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the senior engineers, for many folks, is not true for all. And we actually often, one of the ways these tools are adopted is there's developer experience teams within companies. Often those are staffed by incredibly senior people because often those are people who are building tools to make the rest of the engineers within an organization more productive. And we've seen some very, very boundary pushing kind of”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think across the board, both of these cohorts benefit in big ways. It's a little hard to say on the relative ranking. I will say they fall into different anti-patterns. So the junior engineers, we see going a little too wholesale, relying on AI for everything. And we're not yet in a place where you can kind of do that end-to-end on a professional tool, you know, working with tens, hundreds of other people within a long-lived code base.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's not for the past few years. It hasn't been as big as like, I think the first kind of experience people have had with some of these big models. But yeah, this is also a problem we would hope to solve much better just for users and TBR off of them. But yeah, each of these things have slightly different courts and different personalities.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time, and it might make sense to do this on a side project and not on your professional work, I would encourage people to, especially developers who are kind of used to existing workflows for building software, I would encourage people to explicitly try to fall on their face and try to discover the limits of what these models can do by being ambitious and kind of a safe environment, like perhaps a side project and trying to kind of go end-to-end to give you say eye to the fullest because sometimes we do run, or a lot of the time we run into people who haven't given the AI yet a fair shake and are kind of underestimating its abilities. So generally biasing towards chopping things up and making things smaller, but like to discover the limits of what you can do there, like explicitly just kind of try to go for broke in a safe environment, get a taste for it. You might be surprised in some of the places where the model doesn't break.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And right now we don't do a good job in the product of educating people around that and maybe giving people some swim lanes, giving people some guidelines. But so to develop that taste would give kind of two tips. So one is, as mentioned before, would bias less toward like, hey, trying to have the model, trying in one go to tell the model, hey, here's exactly what I want you to do, then seeing the output. And then either being disappointed or accepting the entire thing for an entire big task. Instead, what I would do is I would chop things up into bits and you can spend basically 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 specifying a little bit, getting a little bit of work, and not doing as much the like, let's write a giant thing, telling Mal exactly what to do. I think that that will be a little bit of a recipe for disaster right now. And so Bay is seeing toward chopping things up.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think right now, and we'd want to fix this at a product level, a lot of being successful with Kursher is kind of having a taste for what the models can do, both what complexity of a task they can handle and how much you need to specify. Things to that model, but like having a taste for the quality of the model and where its gaps exist and what it can do and what it can't.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in that case, perhaps it doesn't make sense to buy the innovative solution. It makes sense to just kind of buy the thing Is one where there's from the get go, it's just like you have your stuff in one place and it's really, really cruciatingly hard to switch. And for better or for worse, I think in our case, you can try out different tools and you can decide which product you think is better. And so that's not super friendly to incomments. And that's more friendly to whoever you think is going to have the most innovative product. And then the specific historical reasons, like as I understand them, are the group of people that worked on the first version of Copilot have by and large gone on to do other things at other places. I think it's been a little hard to kind of coordinate among all the different departments and parties that might be involved in making something like this.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that there are specific historical reasons why Copilot might not have lived up so far, have kind of lived up to the expectations of some people had for it. And then I think that there are structural reasons. I think the structural reason is And to be clear, you know, Microsoft, in the co pallot case, obviously a big inspiration for our work. And in general, I think they do lots of awesome things. And we're users of many Microsoft products. But I think that this is a market that's not super friendly to incumbents in that a market that's friendly to incumbents might be one where there's only so much to do. It kind of gets commoditized fairly quickly and you can bundle that in with other products. And where the ROI between different products is quite small.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issues you can occupy in doing something for a particular segment of the market or for a very particular part of the software development life cycle. But the general programming shifts from just writing formal programming languages to something way higher level, this is the application you purchase and use to do that. I think that there will be generally one winner there and it will be a very big business.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having good debugging tools, but like, which were very useful. But I think that the set of things you can build for programmers, I think the set of things you can build for knowledge workers in many different areas just goes very far and very deep. And I think that really kind of like the problem in front of all of us is the automation of a lot of busy work and knowledge work and really changing all the areas of knowledge in front of us to be much reliable and more productive. So that was all a long-winded way to say. I think the market's really, really big that we're in. I think it's much bigger than people have realized than other building tools for developers in the past. And I think that there will be a bunch of different solutions. 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 business. But I think that there will be a kind of”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the market is just so very big. And this is also one thing that you asked about the IDE thing early on. Thing that I think a trip up some people that were thinking about the space is they looked at the IDE market the past 10 years and they said who's making money off of editors like you know there's all these it's this super fragmented space where everyone kind of has their own thing with their own configuration and you know there's one company that commercially likes you know actually makes money off of making great great editors but like that company is only so big and uh you know then the conclusion was it was going to look like that in the future and i think that the thing that people missed was that you know there was only so much you could do building an editor in the 2010s for coders and you know the the company that made money off of editors was doing things like making it easy to navigate around a code base and you know doing some some error checking and type checking for things”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think the important thing to note is if you're in a space where you kind of run out of useful things to do very quickly, then that's not a great situation to be in. But if you're in a place where big investments and having more and more great people, working on the right path can keep giving you value, then you can get kind of these economies of scale of R&D. you can kind of have deeply work on the technology in the right direction and get to a place where that is defensible. But yes, it is, I think there's a consumer-like tendency to it, and I really think it's just about building the best thing possible.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then in search in particular, non-link computer case, adding distribution was helpful for making the product better too, in that you could tune the algorithms, you could tune the learning based off of the data and the feedback you're getting from users. And I think that all of those dynamics exist in our market too. And so I think that maybe the sad truth for people like us, but then like the amazing truth for the world is I think that there are many leafrogs that exist. There's many more useful things to build. We're a long way away from where we can be in five, ten years. And it's kind of incumbent on us to keep that infant going.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even be leapfrog. And I think that this resembles markets that are maybe a little bit different from normal software markets, normal enterprise markets of the past. I think one that comes to mind is the market for search engines at the end of 1999. Or at the end of the 90s and beginning of the 2000s, I think another market that comes to mind that resembles this market in many ways is actually just like the development of the peripheral computer in many computers in the 70s, 80s, 90s. And I think that, yes, in each of those markets, the ceiling was incredibly high. It was possible to switch. You could keep getting value for the incremental hour of a smart person's time, the incremental R&D dollar for a really long time, you wouldn't run out of useful things to build.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there are ways to build inertia and Traditional notes, but I think by and large, we're in a space where it is incumbent on us to continue to try to build the best thing. And everyone in this industry. And I truly just think that the ceiling is so high that kind of no matter what entrenchment you build,”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so again, we try to be. Pragmatic about the place that we're going to do this work, and we don't want to reinvent the wheel. And so starting from the very best pre-trained models that exist out there. Often open source ones, sometimes in collaboration with these big model providers that don't share their weights out into the world. Because the thing we care about less is the ability to read line by line, the matrix of weights that then go to give your string output. And we just care about the ability to kind of train these things, to post train them. And so by and large, by and large, yes, open source models sometimes working with the closed source providers too to tune things.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, like, you know, the high level thinking he's done by these smartest models, they spend a few tokens on doing that, and then these smaller specialty, incredibly fast models coupled with some inference tricks, then take those high level changes and turn them actually into full code disks. And so it's been super helpful for pushing on quality in places where you need specialty task. And it's been super helpful for pushing on speed, which is such an important dimension of product quality for us too.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We found a ton of success in training malls specifically for that task. So that's a place where no foundation models are involved. It's kind of our own thing. We don't have a lot of labeling or branding about this in the app that that cores of powers are a very core part of Kursher. And then another set of places where user-run models are to help things like Sonnet or Gemini or GPT. Those sit both on the input of those big models and on the output. On the input side of things, those models are searching throughout a code base, trying to figure out the parts of a code base to show to one of these big models. You can kind of think about this as like a mini Google search that's specifically built for finding the relevant parts of a code base to show one of these big models. And then on the output side of things, we take the sketches of the changes that these models are suggesting you make with that code base. And then we have models that then kind of fill in the detail.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And making models good at that use case. One, there's the speed component of those models need to be really fast. They need to give you a completion within 300 milliseconds. There's also this cost component of we're running tons and tons and tons of molecules. Every keystroke, we need to keep changing our prediction for what you're going to do next. And then it's also this really specialty use case of you need models that are really good not at completing the next token, just like a generic text sequence, but are really good at autocompleting a series of diffs, looking at what's changed within a code base and then picking the next sort of things that are going to change, both deleted and added and all of that.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because often it's just really not clear what you're going to be writing just by looking at what you've written before. But in code, sometimes when you edit a part of a code base, it's just, you're going to need to change things and in other parts of a code base. And it's entirely clear how you're going to need to change things. So, one core part of cursor is this really soup-top autocomplete experience where you predict the next set of things you're going to be doing across multiple files, across multiple places for that file.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. So we definitely use the biggest donation models a bunch of different ways. The really important components of bringing the cursor experience to people, the places where we use our own models. So sometimes it's to survey use case that a foundation model wouldn't be able to serve at all for cost or speed reasons. And so one example of that is the auto complete side of things. And so this can be a little bit tricky for people who don't code to understand. But code is this weird form of work where sometimes really the next five, 10, 20, 30 minutes of your work is entirely grateful from looking at your shoulder. And I would contrast this with writing. So writing everyone, or lots of people are familiar with Gmail's autocomplete and kind of the different forms of auto with the show up when you're trying to impose text messages or emails or things like that, they can only be so helpful.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that was definitely counterintuitive and surprising. And it's been a gradual thing where there was an initial use case for training our own model where it really didn't make sense to use any of the biggest foundation models. That was incredibly successful, kind of moved to another use case that worked really well and had been going from there. And one of the helpful things in doing this sort of model development is picking your spots carefully, not trying to reinvent the wheel, not trying to focus on places. And maybe where the best foundation models are excellent, but instead kind of focusing on their weaknesses and how you can complement them.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internally, it's a big focus for us on the hiring front and have assembled a fantastic team there. And it's also been a big win on the product quality side of things for us. And at this point, every magic moment in cursor involves a custom model in some way.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one thing that's been characteristic for us hinted at it a little bit before. But we definitely didn't expect to be doing any of our own model development when we started. As mentioned, when we got into this, there were companies that were immediately from the get-go going and just focusing on kind of training model from scratch. And we had done the calculation for it to train GP4 and just knew that that was not convincingly we were going to be able to do. And it also felt a little bit like focusing one's attention in the wrong area because there were lots of amazing models out there. And why do all of this work to replicate kind of what other players have done, especially on the pre-training side of things, taking a neural network that knows nothing and then teaching it the whole internet? And so we thought we were going to be doing that at all. And it seems clear to us from the start that the existing models, there were lots of things that they could be doing for us that they weren't doing because there wasn't the right tool built for them. And in fact, though, we do a ton of model development.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of a new form of product building where it's very interdisciplinary in that we are something in between in normal software company and then in between a normal software company and then a foundation model company in that we want to develop a you know we're developing a product for millions of people and that you know that side of things has to be excellent then also one important dimension of product quality is doing more and more on the science and doing more and more on the model side of things in places where it makes sense. And so that element of things doing that well too has been tricky. But yeah, the overall thing would notice maybe some of these things sound simple to specify, but then like doing them well is hard and they're buffed in the ways you run in.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing things like support rotations is very important. But some of the normal things that people would maybe reach for 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. And so just working on the product and building a product that you liked your team likes and then also then adjusting it for a subset of users, that can kind of sound simple, but then it's hard to do that well. And there were a bunch of different directions one could have run in. a bunch of different product directions. And I think that one of the difficult things, I think focus and kind of strategically picking the right things to build and prioritizing effectively is tricky. I think another thing that's tricky about this domain.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It being essentially all just us, you know, the team working on the product and making the product good in lieu of other things one could spend one's time on, we definitely spent time on tons of other things. For instance, building the team was incredibly important.”
2025-05-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source