Saturday, May 16, 2026

16: Cursor

The Patriot For two decades, Shyam Sankar has been the most important but hidden figure behind Palantir. The question now is whether he will win his wars.

Inside Cursor Sixty days with the AI coding decacorn .......... I worked at Stripe and Figma in each company’s early days and felt a version of that magic in the air at Cursor. ............ 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. ............. There are chalkboards instead of whiteboards ........ The walls are stacked with books—many of them textbooks, and even more with creased spines and other signs of actual use. .......... 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. ........... ................. 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.” ......................

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.

................... 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. ................... 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.” ................ 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. ................... 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?” .................... 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.” .................. Cursor’s leadership team signs off on every hire, and I suspect that will be the case for a long time. ................ (Reminder that “looking for a job” is a notable non-requirement for being offered a job at Cursor). ............ 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.) .................

Compelling Mission + Hardcore Technical Problems + Winning + Excellent Recruiting = Off-The-Charts Talent Density

....................... On the product and engineering side, Cursor is building at the intersection of the most interesting challenges in UX and machine learning. .................... 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 phase 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. ................... 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.” ................ 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. ........................ and Baltazar Zuniga, another tenured engineer who is known to “settle decisions in code versus meetings.” ................... 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. .................... 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. ................ 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. .................. 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. .................. 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. ............. 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. ...................... 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. .............. 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. ................... 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.

................ 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. ................................... Beloved Cursor features like Tab, CmdK, Agent, Bugbot, and Background Agent were all built this way. ................. 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. .......................... 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. .................. “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.” .................... The result of the hour is usually a very, very long list of things to do before the product ships (usually the next day). ................ 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. .............. 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). ........... 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.” ...................... 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. ................. Cursor is adamant about its ideal customer profile being the best professional software developers. ..................... Cursor explicitly wants to be pulled in the direction of the people at the peak of their craft. ............... “Democratize x” would make for an easy marketing win, but Cursor is willing to prioritize product precision over warm-and-fuzzy marketing. ....................... 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. ................... the prize of winning is fulfilling the mission. ............. 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. ................. 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. .................

close the gap between idea and reality.

.................. 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. .................... 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. .................... “growth can hide poor execution.” ................ 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.” ................. 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. ...................

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