#23 - Cafe Cursor

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

Ben, thank you for coming on The Network State Podcast. So, you are with Cursor, and you're organizing the Cursor pop-ups, which have been pretty cool. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Tell us about yourself.

Ben Lang (0:10)

Yeah, sure, thanks for having me. So, I'm Ben, I've been working at Cursor for a little less than a year now. And yeah, the pop-ups, well, actually the idea started off with pretty simple concept, which was Cursor's office in San Francisco is adjacent to a local cafe called Cafe Francisco. And I think I was just chatting with someone on the team and we just thought it'd be cool to like rent it out for a day and invite users to come work from there and meet the team, meet each other, just build stuff, get some Cursor credits, get some coffee while they're there. And we did that and I think people just got really excited about it. And then we did another one in New York and then we opened it up for people to host these as well themselves. And so I think about a thousand people reached out within like a couple of days of us posting about that. And now they're really popping up all over the world, which has been cool to see.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:11)

That's awesome. And actually, how many places have you held Cursor pop-ups?

Ben Lang (1:14)

I think so far in about ten cities. But it's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But the pipeline, like there's a much, much bigger pipeline now, which is cool to see.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:22)

That's great. And logistically, is it just that you take over a cafe for a day? What do you exactly do?

Ben Lang (1:28)

Yeah. Yeah.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:29)

Signage.

Ben Lang (1:30)

Yeah. Yeah. We book out a cafe like usually like a local neighborhood cafe. We book it out for for the day and we'll we'll invite our users to come and and come, you know, come work for there for half the day. The whole day, some folks just want to come by and drop in and and yeah. And so it's like it's pretty temporary, but I'm hoping to do it like on a recurring basis and in some places and, you know, make it a place for for for Cursor users to meet each other, for our team to come by and have kind of easy access to like getting feedback and meaning more of our users and customers.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:06)

Yeah, actually, you know, we have a term for that's going from pop up to permanent. And when you do that, like, it's actually, I don't know if you if you agree with this, but it's surprisingly logistically complicated to do one of these pop ups, right? Like, I mean, you can, the simplest is you've just got a restaurant or a cafe. And, you know, you just say we're renting it out for the day. But then when people come, actually, you know, I have a guess, but I assume it's some fraction of support requests, some fraction of just, you know, feature requests or what have you, and some fraction of, I want to just hang out with other people who are interested in use Cursor and get tips and get better at it. How would you say that breaks down or is it going to be like, you know, what kinds of things people do?

Ben Lang (2:52)

Yeah, I'd say all those things are pretty accurate. I think a lot of people definitely have ideas for ways they want to improve Cursor and they definitely want to share that, share that with the team, which is great. I was surprised by how much folks also want to connect with each other and see what other people are building. And it ended up being a great place for people to just hang out outside and kind of form these little block parties, like even after the event, people staying for hours, which is really cool to see. I think it was just attracting a certain type of person, people that are obviously very hardcore Cursor power users. And so I think those people tend to be interested in meeting each other and have common interests, which has been fun to see.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:38)

Yeah, I think, I mean, if you know somebody else is also using Cursor and is interested enough to come to an in-person meetup, then they're probably somebody who is interested in a bunch of the other technologies that you're also interested in and so on. So even if you, Cursor is only ancillary, like maybe 90% of the time that they're there, they're just hanging out with people who share their interests, because they share interest A and they share interest B, C, D and E as well, right? And tell me about the logistics of it. How far in advance do you have to plan these? Is it just as simple as getting a restaurant? Because for one day, at least in my experience in doing these, a one-day thing is not so bad. You can get a restaurant, put up some signage and so on. It's kind of built to do that. Once you start going multi-day, especially if there's expectations for the kinds of things people want, especially if people are sleeping there, that becomes way more complicated, right? And if you've got a permanent establishment, now you have to have real estate lease, you have to do all the kind of stuff and whatnot. So I'd love to know your thoughts on the logistics of it, and maybe you have some ideas there.