Highly Recommended Watch: Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters
(youtube.com)
Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written.
From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Chapters (Powered by https://ChapterMe.co):
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - A new way to build software
02:00 - Cursor’s mission
03:40 - The downside of vibe coding
04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs
05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents
08:30 - New approaches to coding UI
09:40 - Why taste still matters
12:15 - Niche software opportunities
13:30 - Cursor origin story
16:00 - The first problem they tried solving
17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea
21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor
23:00 - Following the scaling laws
24:30 - Early product decisions
25:20 - The GitHub Copilot origin story
27:00 - Getting to PMF
30:00 - “Dogfooding”
31:00 - First 10 hires
32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers in age of AI
33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset as you grow
35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools?
37:00 - Looking ahead
From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Chapters (Powered by https://ChapterMe.co):
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - A new way to build software
02:00 - Cursor’s mission
03:40 - The downside of vibe coding
04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs
05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents
08:30 - New approaches to coding UI
09:40 - Why taste still matters
12:15 - Niche software opportunities
13:30 - Cursor origin story
16:00 - The first problem they tried solving
17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea
21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor
23:00 - Following the scaling laws
24:30 - Early product decisions
25:20 - The GitHub Copilot origin story
27:00 - Getting to PMF
30:00 - “Dogfooding”
31:00 - First 10 hires
32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers in age of AI
33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset as you grow
35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools?
37:00 - Looking ahead