The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO)

**Michael Truell** (0:00)
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 being a logic designer, and really it will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:16)
What is the most counterintuitive thing you've learned so far about building Cursor?

**Michael Truell** (0:19)
We definitely didn't expect to be doing any of our own model development, and at this point, every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom model in some way.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
What's something that you wish you knew before you got into this role?

**Michael Truell** (0:29)
Many people you hear hire too fast. I think we actually hired too slow to begin with.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
You guys went from $0 to 100 million ARR in a year and a half, which is historic. Was there an inflection point where things just started to really take off?

**Michael Truell** (0:42)
The growth has been fairly just consistent on an exponential. An exponential, to begin with, feels fairly slow when the numbers are really low, and it didn't really show off to the races to begin with.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:51)
What do you think is the secret to your success?

**Michael Truell** (0:53)
I think it's been...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
Today my guest is Michael Truell. Michael is co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor. If you've been living under a rock and haven't heard of Cursor, it is the leading AI code editor, and is at the very forefront of changing how engineers and product teams build 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 two years since launch. Michael has been working on AI for 10 years. He studied computer science and math at MIT, did AI research at MIT and Google, and is a student of tech and business history. As you'll soon see, Michael thinks deeply about where things are heading and what the future of building software looks like. We chat about the origin story of Cursor, his prediction of what happens after code, his biggest counter-intuitive lessons from building Cursor, where he sees things going for software engineers, and so much more. Michael does not do many podcasts. The only other podcast he's ever done is Lex Friedman, so it was a true honor to have Michael on. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting 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 lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Michael Truell. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep 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 issues and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at getepo.com/lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's vanta.com/lenny.