The Rise of Cursor The $300M ARR AI Tool That Engineers Can’t Stop Using Michael Truell

Michael Truell
Our goal with Kerser is to invent sort of a new type of programming, a very different way to build software that’s kind of just distilled down into you describing the intent to the computer For what you want in the most concise way possible, and really distilled down to you just defining how you think the software should work and how you think it should look. And yeah, with the technology that we have today, and as it matures, we think you can get to a place where you can invent a method of building software that’s legions higher level and more Productive, in some cases more accessible too.

Michael Truell
Think taste will be increasingly more valuable. And I think often people think about taste in the realm of software. They think about visuals or taste over smooth animations and coloring things, UI, UX, et cetera, on kind of the visual design of things. And I think more and more, and the visual side of things is an important part of defining you know, a piece of software. But then, as mentioned before, I think that the other half of defining a piece of software is the logic of it and how the thing works. And we have amazing tools for speccing out the visuals of things. And then when you get into the logic of how a piece of software works, really the best representation we have of that is code right now. You can kind of gesture at it with Figma and you can gesture at it with writing down notes. But it’s, you know, when you have an actual working prototype. And so I think that more and more being an 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. And it will less be about, it’d be more about the what’s and a little bit less about the how exactly you’re going to do things under the hood. And so, yeah, I think taste will be increasingly important. I think one aspect of software engineering, and we’re very far from this right now, and there are lots of funny memes going around the internet about some of the trials and tribulations People can run into if they trust AI for too many things that comes to engineering around building apps that have glaring deficiencies and problems and functionality issues. But I think we will get to a place where you will be able to be less careful as a software engineer, which right now is an incredibly, incredibly important skill. And yeah, we’ll move a little bit from carefulness and a little bit more towards taste.
Lenny Rachitsky
This makes me think of vibe coding. Is that kind of what you’re describing when you talk about not having to think about the details as much and just kind of going with the flow?
Michael Truell
I think it’s related.

Lenny Rachitsky
More question along these lines, you threw out this word taste. When you say taste, what are you thinking?
Michael Truell
I’m thinking having the right idea for what should be built. And then just, it will become more and more about kind of the effortless translation of, here’s exactly what you want built. Here’s how you want everything to work, here’s how you want it to look, and then you’ll be able to make that on a computer. And it will less be about this kind of 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 then execute and interpret.

Lenny Rachitsky
Really feel off to the races to begin with. To me, this sounds like build it and they will come actually working. You guys just built an awesome product that you loved yourselves as engineers. You put it out, people just loved it, told everyone about it.
Michael Truell
It being essentially all just us, you know, the team working on the product and making the product good in lieu of other things one could spend one’s time on. We definitely spent time on tons of other things. For instance, building the team was incredibly important. And doing things like support rotations are very important. But some of the normal things that people would maybe reach for in building the company early on, we really let those fires burn for a long time, especially when it came to things like Sales and marketing. And so just

Michael Truell
Another market that might be, you know, particularly helpful for incumbents is one where there’s, you know, from the get-go, it’s just like you have your stuff in one place and it’s Like really, really excruciatingly hard to switch. And, you know, for better or for worse, I think in our case, you can try out different tools and you can decide which product you think is better. And so that’s not super friendly to join comments and that’s more friendly to whoever you think is going to have the most innovative product. And then the specific historical reasons, like as I understand them, are the group of people that worked on the first version of Copilot have by and large gone on to do other things