The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO)

Our goal with Cursure 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 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. What is the most counterintuitive thing you've learned so far about building cursor? We definitely didn't expect to be doing any of our own model development. And at this point, every match moment in cursor involves a custom model in some way. What's something that you wish you knew before you got into this role? Many people you hear hire too fast. Too slow to begin with. You guys went from zero dollars to a hundred million ARR in a year and a half, which is historic. Was there an inflection point where things just started to really take off? The growth has been Barely just consistent on an exponential. An accidental to begin with feels fairly slow and the numbers are really low and it didn't really feel off to the races to begin with. What do you think is the secret to your success? I think it's been

Today my guest is Michael Trul. Michael is co-founder and CEO of AnySphere, the company behind Cursor. If you've been living under a rock and haven't heard of Cursor. It is the leading AI code editor, and is at the very forefront of changing how engineers and product teams build software. It's also one of the fastest growing products of all time. Hitting one hundred million ARR just twenty months after launching.

And then three hundred million ARR just two years since launch. Michael's been working on AI for ten years, he studied computer science and math at MIT, did AI research at MIT and Google, and is a student of tech and business history. As you'll soon see, Michael thinks deeply about where things are heading and what the future of building software looks like. We chat about the origin story of Cursor, his prediction of what happens after code. His biggest counterintuitive lessons from building cursor. Where he sees things going for software engineers and so much more.

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