We are in a market that's had an iPod moment,

and it's going to have an iPhone moment.

And I think that they're definitely more in the future.

And we've tried to build a company that can continually build those things.

I don't think the API providers really knew what to make of us,

these four 20-somethings, and their thing now comprises

like a really high double-dig digit percent of their API revenue,

and now they're going to have to make capacity planning decisions, maybe financing decisions.

I think that there's a big multi-product opportunity in our space where there's a whole AI coding bundle to be built.

And we want to be for many of our customers, like the AI coding provider for them.

Today, you'll hear from Michael Truel, CEO Cursor, on building the fastest growing developer tool we've ever seen, from taking down major cloud providers with their scale to becoming

double-digit percentages of API providers' revenue while still just being four 20-somethings.

We discuss why Focus beats science fiction in the AI coding wars, how they maintain their

infamous two-day work trials even at 200 plus people, and the strategic art of hunting all the

sonnet tokens in the world. Plus, the Oroboros question. What happens when the tool disrupting

software is itself made of software? Let's get into it. Thanks for being here, Michael. Glad to be here. Yeah. Appreciate it. He very, very rarely does these things I had to beg. So I really appreciate you coming up. No, I wouldn't miss this. Yeah. Okay, so as everybody knows, Michael's CEO of Cursor. It's one of the fastest growing company, certainly we've ever seen. It's everywhere. It's crazy. You have to hire, operate through that. So actually what I want to do is dig into not the typical kind of founder journey. What brought you here that'll be a little bit of that. But like, how are you handling the mayhem? Is that cool? Sure. Yeah. No, that sounds great. Great. Okay, great. So to start off with off with, we'll just do a little bit of history. So I met with a company recently, and they came in and they said, we are the 3D of Cursor. And I said, funny story, because Cursor was once a 3D company. Is that right? Yes. Do you mind talking about kind of a bit of the origin story? Of course. So there's a bunch of different ways you could actually peg the start date, but effectively

the way the company got started was my co-founders and I, we were close colleagues from school

and some other places, and two moments got us really excited about building a company. One was trying

some of the first useful AI products. And in particular, trying GitHub co-pilot, the incumbent in our

space. And the reason this got us excited about starting a company is these products were actually

useful. And this was the first existence proof of we shouldn't be working on AI in a lab. It's time to actually build systems out in the real world.

And there's real useful things that you could be doing.

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