"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..."

"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 ex..."

"you got into this role? Many people you hear hired too fast. I think we actually hired too slow to begin with. You guys went from $0 to 100 million ARR in a year and a half, which is historic. Was the..."

"with. What do you think is the secret to your success? I think it's been Today my guest is Michael Tru. Michael is co-founder and CEO of Any Sphere, the company behind Cursor. If you've been living un..."

"software. It's also one of the fastest growing products of all time, hitting 100 million ARR just 20 months after launching and then 300 million ARR just 2 years since launch. Michael's been working o..."

"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. Michael does not do m..."

"app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Perplexity, Linear Superhuman, Notion, and Granola. Check it out at lenny'snewsletter.com and click bu..."

"analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily troubleshoot is..."

"for diving deeper into performance and out- of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. EPO also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sp..."

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"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 like lay out that into a format that a computer can the..."

"days? Carer kind of started as a solution search of a problem. um and uh a little a little bit where it very much came from reflecting on um how AI was going to get better um over the course of the ne..."

"and better just by pulling on simple levers like scaling up the models and also scaling up the the data that was going into the models. And so at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, this got us excite..."

"technological capabilities and the myth step at at the beginning for sure is we actually worked on you know we sort of did this whole grand exercise uh and we decided to work on you know uh an area uh..."

"to dedicate our lives to and we looked around and uh in the area of programming it felt like you know despite you know a decent amount of time ensuing uh not much had changed and it felt like the peop..."

"path to to building Kersia. Okay, so interesting. Okay, so first of all, I love that there's this this is advice that you often hear of go after boring industry because no one's going to be there and ..."

"come back to the ID question. So there's kind of a few routes you could have taken and other companies are doing different routes. So there's building an ID for engineers to work within and adding AI ..."

"smart person here and so must be better than a smart person there. But these things have massive issues. And um we uh from the from the very start our our product development process was really about ..."

"application. I know that you guys today have an IDE and uh and that's probably the bias you have of this is maybe where the future is heading, but I'm just curious, do you think a big part of the futu..."

"staring at is going to change a lot. Um and you know we just mostly think of an ID as the place where you are building software. I think something people don't talk enough about with with talking abou..."

"fairly that sounds less less terrible. I'm I'm glad there's a solution here. I want to go back to you guys building cursor for the first time. What was the point where you realized this is ready? What..."

"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 you know from the get- go there there was kind of an immediate crush of i..."

"of the tool and just making the tool consistently better. Was there an inflection point after those three months where things just started to really take off? To be honest it felt fairly slow to begin..."

"difficult things you know I think focus and kind of strategically picking the right things to build and prioritizing effectively is tricky I think another thing that's tricky about this um this domain..."

"I'm excited to have Andrew Luo joining us today. Andrew is CEO of OneKema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Welcome Andrew. Thanks for having me Lenny. Great to be here. So, what is new with One ..."

"oneskeema.co. What is the most counterintuitive thing you've learned so far about building cursor building AI products? I I think one thing that's been counterintuitive for us uh hinted at at it a lit..."

"you know powers a very core part of cursor and then uh you know another set of places where user models are to to help things like sonnet or gemini or gbt and those sit both on the input of those big ..."

"again we try try to be very pragmatic about the places that we're going to do this work and we don't want to reinvent the wheel and so um starting from the the very best um you know uh pre-trained mod..."

"or, you know, at the end of the the '90s and beginning of the 2000s. I think another market that comes to mind that resembles this market in many ways, it's actually just like the development of um th..."

"things like that where they're just for like Salesforce where it's just contracts with the entire company and you have to use this product. Yeah. And I think the the important thing to note is, you kn..."

"conclusion was it was going to look like that in the future. And I think that the thing that people missed was that you know there was only so much you could do building an editor in the 2010s for cod..."

"generally one winner there and and it will be a very big business. juicy. Uh along those lines, it's interesting that Microsoft was actually like right at this like at the center of this first with an..."

"its abilities. So generally biasing towards chopping things up and making things smaller but like to discover the limits of what you can do there like explicitly just kind of try to go for broke in a ..."

"everything and we're not yet in a place where you can kind of do that end to end on a professional tool you know working with tens hundreds of other people within a long codebase and then the senior e..."

"tools. That makes absolute sense. Uh I love that it's like two ends of the spectrum like expect too much don't expect enough. And it's like the uh the three bears. Is that the allegory? Yeah. Yeah. Ok..."

"group of engineers and researchers to work on on cursor with us was going to be incredibly important. Also getting people who fit, you know, a sort of mix of, you know, intellectual curiosity and expe..."

"took us a bit of time. What are some of those learnings for folks that are you know hiring right now? What's something you missed or or learned? I think you know to start with uh we maybe we actually ..."

"would not scale past a few people, has been has had surprising staying power. And the great thing about it is it lets someone go end to end on like a real project. It's it's not, you know, work that w..."

"that one was unexpected not exactly an interview question but kind of like a you know a formative interview. The ultimate interview question. So just to be very clear about what you're describing, it'..."

"you know we've you know since 2021 2022 been professionally working on on this and been working on AI and we've just seen a sea change of the comingings and goings of um various technologies and ideas..."

"um you know to get to a world where computers can increasingly do more and more and more for us. There's all of these independent problems that need to be knocked down and progress needs to be made on..."

"you know other companies like that in other areas I know you guys are hiring uh for folks that are interested in hey I want to go work here and build this sort of stuff. What kind of roles are you loo..."

"say yeah especially always on the hunt for for folks uh who excellent engineers, designers, researchers um but then folks in uh all across the business side too. I can't help but ask this question now..."

"demand for engineers. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to mention? any last nugget of wisdom you wanted to leave listeners with. You could also say no because we've done a lot. W..."

"incredible. Wonderful. Thank you. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also,..."