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Michael Truell

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2025-05-01
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2025-05-01
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  1. “To be honest, they felt fairly slow to begin with. And maybe it comes from some impatience on our part. But one I think there's the overall speed of the growth, which is, you know, continues to take us by surprise. I think one of the things that has been most surprising too is that the growth has been fairly just consistent on an exponential of just consistent month over month growth accelerated at times by launches on our part and other things. But an exponential to begin with feels fairly slow when the numbers are really low. So it didn't really feel off to the races to begin with.”

    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

  2. “The first version was not the three month version wasn't very good. And so I think it's been a sustained paranoia about there are all of these ways in which this thing could get better. The end goal is really to invent a very new form of programming that involves automating a lot of coding, as we know today. And no matter where we are with cursor, it feels like we're very, very far away from that end goal. And so there's always a lot to do. But I think it's been kind of a lot of it hasn't been over rotated on kind of that initial push, but instead is like the continued evolution of the tool and just making the tool consistently better.”

    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

  3. “Like a couple of months that we just, you know, it was after maybe five weeks that we were living on the editor full time and had thrown away our previous editor and we're using a new one. And then once it got to a point where we found it a bit useful, then we put in another people's hands and I had this like very short beta period. And then we launched out to the world within a couple of months from the first line of code. I think it was probably three months. And it was definitely like, let's just get this out to people and build in public quickly. The thing that took us by surprise is we thought we would be building for a couple hundred people for a long time. And from the get-go, there was kind of an immediate crush of interest and a lot of feedback too. And that was super helpful. We learned from that. And that's actually why we switched to being based off of VS Code instead of just this handwritt thing. A lot of that was motivated by kind of the initial user feedback.”

    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

  4. “So, when we started building cursor, we were fairly paranoid about spinning for a while without releasing to the world. And so to begin with, too, we actually, the first version of Kirchher was hand rolled. Now we use VS Code kind of as a base, like many browsers use Chromium as a base. And for top of that, to begin with, we didn't and built a prototype of cursor from scratch. And that involved a lot of work. We had to build our own. There are a lot of things that go into a modern code editor, including support for many different languages and navigation support for moving amongst the language, error checking support for things. There's things like an integrated command line, the ability to use remote servers, the ability to connect to remote servers, to view and run code. And so we kind of just went on this blitz of building things incredibly quickly, building kind of our own editor from scratch, and then also the AI components. And it was after.”

    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

  5. “Bit sounds like review, specify a little bit AI rate something review. And that's kind of autocompletes all in the way of that spectrum. And still we see often the most successful people using these tools are chopping things up right now and keeping them fairless.”

    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

  6. “Yeah, 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 our Next Act, edit prediction, where your coding is normal and we're predicting the next student's actions you're going to do. And then they also really lean on like scoping down the stuff that you're going to hand off to the bot. And there's for a fixed percent of your time spent reviewing code, you could, from an agent or from an AI overall, you could, you know, there's kind of two patterns. One is you could spend a bunch of time specifying things up front. AI goes and works. And then you then go and review the AI's work and then you're done. That's the whole task. Or you could really chop things up, right? So you can specify a little.”

    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

  7. “So I think that what the IDE is will totally change over and kind of our approach to having our own editor with Premison is going to have to evolve over time. And I think that that will both include you can spin off things from different surface areas like Slack or your issue tracker or whatever it is. And I think that will also include the pane of glass that you're staring at is going to change a lot. And we just mostly think of an IDE as the place where you are building software.”

    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

  8. “And I think the background stuff, there's like a segment of programming that it's especially useful for, which is type of programming tasks where it's very easy to specify exactly what you want without much description and exactly what correctness looks like without much description. And often bug fixes are kind of like are a great example of that. But it's definitely not all of programming.”

    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

  9. “Think you'll want the ability to move between all of these things thoroughly effortlessly. And sometimes I think you will want to have the thing kind of go spin off on its own for a while. And then I think you'll want the ability to pull in the AI's work and then work with it very, very, very quickly, right? And then maybe have it go spin off again. And so these like kind of background versus foreground form factors, I think you want that all to work well in one place.”

    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

  10. “And I think that that instills realism in you around where the tech is right now. And so that definitely made us think that we need the humans to be in the driver's seat. The AI cannot do everything. We were also interested in giving humans that control too for personal reasons. And so that gets you away from just you're a model company that also gets you away from just kind of this end-to-end stuff without the human having control. And then the way you get to an IDE versus maybe a plug into an existing coding environment is the belief that programming is going to flow through these models and the programming is going to change a lot over the course of the next few years. And the extensibility that existing coding environments have is so, so, so limited. So if you think that the UIs may change a lot, if you think that the form factor program is going to change a lot, necessarily need to have control over the entire application.”

    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

  11. “Our product development process was really about dog fooding and using the tool intensely every day. And we never wanted to ship anything that wasn't useful to us. And we had the benefit of doing that because we were the end user spart of our product.”

    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

  12. “The folks sure from the get-go working on just a model or working on end-to-end programming, I think They were trying to build something very different from us, which is me care about giving humans control over all of the decisions in kind of the end tool that they're building. And I think those folks were very much thinking of a future where end-to-end whole thing is done by AI. And maybe the AI is making all the decisions too. And so one, there was kind of like a personal interest component. Two, I think that always we try to be intense realist about where the technology is today, very, very, very excited about how AI is going to mature over the course of many decades. But I think that sometimes people, there's an instinct to see AI do magical things in one area and then kind of anthropomorphize these models and think it's better than a smart person here. And so it must be better than a smart person there. But these things have massive issues. And we from the very start.”

    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

  13. “That totally resonates. I think it's Part of it is you need there to be leapprogs that can happen. You need there to be things that you can do. And I think the exciting thing about AI is in a bunch of places. And I think this is very much still true of our space and can talk about how we think about that and how we deal with that. But I think that just the ceiling is really high. And yes, if you look around, probably even if you take the best tool on kind of like any of these fields, there should be a lot more that needs to be done over the next few years. And so that space, having that space, having that high ceiling, I think is unique amongst areas of software, at least the degree to which it is high with AI.”

    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

  14. “From the sources that have them is like also a tricky process, too. But eventually, what happened was we came to our senses, we realized we're not super excited about mechanical engineering. It's not the thing we want to dedicate our lives to. And we looked around in the area of programming, it felt like despite a decent amount of time ensuing, not much had changed. And it felt like the people that were working on the space maybe had a disconnect with us and it felt like they weren't being sufficiently ambitious about where everything was going to go in the future and how kind of all software creation was going to flow through these models. And that's what set us off on the path to building Kersha.”

    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

  15. “And so there was a period of 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. There were problems from the get-go in that. We had me and my co-founders, we weren't mechanical engineers, we had friends who were mechanical engineers, but we were very much unfamiliar with the field. So there was a little bit of a blind man in the elephant problem from the get-go. You know, there were problems around how would you actually take the models that exist today and make them useful for mechanical engineering. The way we net it out is you need to actually develop your own models from the get-go. And the way we did that was tricky. And there's not a lot of data on the internet of 3D models of different tools and parts and the steps that I'd like to build up to those three models. And then getting”

    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

  16. “End state of the work and it'll look like how are the tools that we use to do that work going to change? How are the models going to get need to get better to support changes in the work? And once scaling and pre-training right now, how are we going to keep pushing forward technological capabilities? And the mis step at the beginning for is we actually worked on, you know, we sort of did this whole grand exercise and we decided to work on an area of knowledge works that we thought would be relatively uncompetitive and sleepy and boring. And no one would be looking at it because we thought, oh, coding's great. Coding's totally interchange because AI.”

    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

  17. “And that got us really excited. Another moment that got us really excited was the series of scaling ons papers coming out of OpenAI and other places that showed that even if we had no new ideas, AI was going to get better and better just by pulling on simple levers, like scaling up the models and also scaling up the data that was going into the models. And so at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, this got us excited about how AI products were now possible. This technology was going to mature into the future. It felt like when we looked around, there were lots of people talking about making models. And it felt like people weren't really picking an area of knowledge work and thinking about what it was going to look like. Is AI got better and better? And that set us on the path to like, you know, kind of an idea generation exercise. It was like, you know, how are each of these areas of knowledge work going to change in the future as this tech gets more mature? Like, what is the, you know,”

    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

  18. “Kind of started as a solution in search of a pro ball and a little bit where it very much came from reflecting on how AI was going to get better over the course of the next 10 years. And there were kind of two defining moments. One was being really excited by using the first beta version of the co-pilot, actually. This was the first time we had used an AI product that was really, really, really useful and was actually just useful at all and wasn't just a vaporware kind of demo thing. And in addition to being the first AI product that we use that was useful, Gab Copel is also one of the most useful, if not the most useful dev tool we had ever adopted.”

    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

  19. “King having the right idea for what should be built. And then just it will become more and more about kind of effortless translation of here's exactly what you want built, here's how you want everything to work, here's how you want it to look. And then you'll be able to meet that on a computer. And it will less be about this kind of translation layer of like you and your team have a picture of what you'd want to build. And then you have to really painstakingly labor intensive layout that into a format that a computer can then execute and interpret. And so, yeah, I think less than the UI side of things. Maybe taste is a little bit of a misnomer, but just about having the right idea for what should be built.”

    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

  20. “I think that right now we kind of lack the ability to let the peacemakers actually have complete control over the software. And so one of the issues also with Vibe Coding and letting taste really shine through from people is you can create stuff, but a lot of it is the AI making decisions that are unwieldy and you don't have control over.”

    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

  21. “I think it's related. I think that vibe coding right anon describes exactly kind of this state of creation that is pretty controversial where you're generating a lot of coding, you aren't really understanding the details. That is a state of creation that then has lots of problems. Like you don't really by not understanding the details under the hood right now, you then very quickly get to a place where you're kind of limited at a certain point where you create something that's big enough that you can't change. And so I think some of the ideas that we're interested around how do you give people continued control over all the details? When they don't really understand the code, like, I think that solutions there are very relevant to the people who are by coding right now.”

    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

  22. “Building apps that have glaring deficiencies and problems and functionality issues. But I think we will get to a place where you will be able to be less careful as a software engineer, which right now is an incredibly, incredibly important skill. And yeah, we'll move a little bit from carefulness and a little bit more towards taste.”

    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

  23. “Really, the best representation we have of that is code right now. You can kind of gesture at it with Figma and you can gesture at it with writing down notes. But when you have an actual working prototype. And so I think that more and more being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer. And really it will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work. And it will less be about, it'd be more about the what and a little bit less about the how exactly you're going to do things under the hood. And so, yeah, I think case will be increasingly important. I think one aspect of software engineering, and we're very far from this right now and there are lots of funny memes going around the internet about kind of some of the trials and tribulations people can run into if they trust AI for too many things when it comes to engineering around”

    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

  24. “Think taste will be increasingly more valuable. And I think often people think about tastes in the realm of software. They think about visuals or taste over smooth animation, coloring things, UI, UX, et cetera, on kind of the visual design of things. And I think more and more, and the visual side of things is an important part of defining a piece of software, but then as mentioned before, I think that the other half of defining a piece of software is that is the logic of it and how the thing works. And we have amazing tools for specing out the visuals of things. And then when you get into the logic of how a piece of software works.”

    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

  25. “Yep, we think it ends up looking like that. And we're very opinionated that that path goes through kind of existing professional engineers. And it looks like this evolution away from code. And it definitely looks like the human still being in the driver's seat, right? And the human having both a ton of control over all aspects of the software and not giving that up. And then also the human having the ability to make changes very quickly, like having a faster rational loop and not just like having something in the background that's super slow and takes like weeks. Go do all your work for 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

  26. “In a form factor that's more precise than just change this about my app, you know, kind of in a text box removed from the whole thing. And then the version of the world where kind of nothing changes, we think we think is wrong because we think that the technology is going to get much, much, much better. And so a world kind of after code, I think it looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English, right? You have kind of written down. You can imagine end offering form. You can imagine in kind of an evolution of proving language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software and you can edit that at a high level and you can point at that. And it won't be kind of the impenetrable millions of lines of code. It'll instead be something that's much tercer and easier to understand and easier to navigate. But that world where, yeah, the kind of crazy hard to understand symbols start to evolve towards something that's a little bit more human readable and human editable is one.”

    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

  27. “I think that on the chatbot style end of things, and we think it's going to look weirder than both. Problem with it, the chatbot style end of things is that lacks a lot of precision. Want humans to have complete control over what the software looks like and how it works, you need to let them gesture at what they want to be changed.”

    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

  28. “And I want to contrast it with maybe the vision of what software looks like in the future that I think a couple visions that are in a popular conscious that we at least have some disagreement with. One is there's a group of people who think that software building in the future is going to look very much like it does today, which mostly means text editing formal programming languages like TypeScript and Go and C in Rust. And then there's another group that kind of thinks like you're just going to type into a bot and you're going to ask it to build you something and then you're going to ask it to change something about what you're building. And it's kind of like this chatbot slackbot style where you're talking to your engineering department. And we think that there are problems with both of those visions.”

    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

  29. “Our goal with cursor is to invent 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 watched in the most concise way possible and really distill down to you just defining how you think this software should work and how you think it should look. And yeah, with the technology that we have say and as it matures, we think you can get to a place where you can invent a method of building software that's legions higher level and more productive, in some cases more accessible too. And that process will be a gradual moving away from what building software looks like today.”

    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

  30. “The growth has been fairly just consistent on an exponential. An exponential to begin with feels fairly slow when the numbers are really low and it didn't really feel off to the races to begin with.”

    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

  31. “Definitely didn't expect to be doing any of our own model development. 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

  32. “Our goal with cursor is to invent a new type of programming, a very different way to build software. So a world kind of after code, I think that more and more being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer and really will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work.”

    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