Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students

**Michael Truell** (0:00)
We realized we were really inherently excited about the future of coding, and I think we took a step back and realized that if we were being really consistent with our beliefs, there was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years, and for all of software development to flow through models. It felt like no one working on the space at the time was really taking that seriously. Felt like they had great products and they were making them a bit better, but they weren't really aiming for a world where, all of coding as we know it today gets automated and building software ends up looking very, very different. Then with that in mind, we set out to work on that.

**Diana Hu** (0:36)
Let's start with this talk with sort of the origin story of your journey as a founder. You kind of have to go way back to middle school when you were reading the essays from PJ, right?

**Michael Truell** (0:48)
So early on, I think, you know, had been interested in starting a company for a long time, had been interested in a bunch of other things too. I think actually originally got into programming, being interested in starting something kind of commercial, where the first time that I ever saw code, it was over some winter break, and my brother and I, we wanted to create a hit mobile game. We didn't really know how to do that. We looked on Google, how do you create a game? We heard that you need to download this application called Xcode. We did that, and we were hit with these weird, colorful esoteric symbols, which were Objective-C, which is still around, but maybe a little bit less popular than it was then for good reasons. And stared at this kind of impenetrable wall of Objective-C, and my brother promptly ejected, didn't move on with programming. He now is on a very different career path. He's kind of trying to paint or something like that. But I kept going and bought a book on Objective-C, and then eventually started working on mobile games. That was the genesis of me getting into programming. And then along the way also, yes, I was a big fan of PG's Essays and Sam's Essays too also, and a bunch of the folks in YC. And that was definitely a big inspiration even from the very early stages of high school.

**Diana Hu** (2:09)
I think the wildest thing about Cursor is that right now, you're just 24 and build this monster of a company in a really short amount of time. To a lot of people, it could seem that it's a bit out of nowhere. But this was really in the making for more than a decade. You've been working and shipping a lot of different projects, right? You were working in AI even when you were in high school, right? Tell us a bit about the projects and how you got started with that.

**Michael Truell** (2:36)
I was lucky enough to find programming early on. I was also lucky enough to be interested in AI early on, and have some great collaborators to work on AI projects with. Soon after the foray into mobile games, which also turned into I wasn't very good at mobile games. One of the things that I built and actually one of the things that got most popular, which was kind of the technically easiest thing to build, which was maybe a lesson in startups of the code is and everything, was this mobile game or this mobile app where you could spoof high scores in things like piano tiles and Flappy Bird, and then send them to your friends. That was kind of the thing that went viral. It wasn't the painstakingly hand crafting the game engine yourself type thing. But soon after that, got interested with a friend in the idea of building a robotic dog, where we thought it would be really great to have a robot that you could teach to do things without programming it. Instead, you could give it positive and negative feedback, like you give a dog. So you could give it a treat if it does some, quote, treat if it does something good. You would say bad if it does something bad, and then maybe you could teach it to play fashion, things like that. That idea really animated us. We had no idea how to build it. Again, started the place where one would start, which is Google, and went down a lot of rabbit holes, and took us into a place of learning about genetic algorithms, and maybe that was going to be helpful for building this robot dog that we wanted to build. Then we eventually learned about this neural network stuff, because some people were playing with taking genetic algorithms and using them to evolve neural networks at the time with work like NEET. Then eventually it took us to RL, reinforcement learning, which was even back in 2015, people had been working on it for a long time. In the end, my friend and I, we did eventually build a couple of robots.