This article is a firsthand account by a member of the Colossus (or Positive Sum) team who spent time embedded at Cursor, documenting their experiences and observations. It covers various aspects in depth, including Cursor's unique culture, talent recruitment approach, immersive work environment, and product development philosophy. The author assesses that Cursor has the potential to become a defining company of the AI era and provides a detailed look at their distinctive approach to running a company.

1. First Encounter with Cursor and Motivation for Joining

The author was first introduced to the Cursor team through a former colleague, as they were looking for someone with an interesting perspective on marketing. After an initial 30-minute conversation, the author was invited to visit the San Francisco headquarters for informal conversations with various team members. After sharing some brief impressions and returning to daily life, the author was surprised to learn from former colleagues that the Cursor team was backchanneling -- gathering information about them. It was somewhat startling given it was for a paid position they hadn't applied for, but also flattering.

Remarkably, in true Cursor fashion, within two weeks a Cursor laptop appeared on the author's doorstep in Seattle, a Slack invitation arrived by email, and plans were made to visit headquarters to officially begin working with the team. The scope and duration of the role were intentionally left vague, but it boiled down to telling Cursor's story through the author's personal impressions.

The author accepted this project, supported by the Colossus and Positive Sum teams, for two reasons. First, after visiting Cursor's office and spending time with the team, they felt a strong pull that they simply had to do it. They had experienced a similar magical atmosphere in the early days of Stripe and Figma, and felt that same addictive energy at Cursor. Second, they believed that a truly "generational" company had yet to emerge in the AI era, and Cursor might be the one. It was immediately clear that the company's leaders were passionate about building a new model for how companies are built, and the author wanted to witness and help shape that culture firsthand.

There were many mystifying stories about Cursor, and over the past two months, some matched expectations while many did not. Here is what surprised the author about Cursor and its culture.

2. The San Francisco Office: The Heart of an Immersive Work Environment

To truly understand Cursor's culture, you need to visit their office in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. It's the one spot in the area with no other startups around. The office feels like a university common room or cafeteria -- without prior knowledge, you'd struggle to guess exactly what this place is. There's no Cursor logo outside, no corporate posters on the walls, and hardly anyone wearing Cursor-branded clothing. You'd be hard-pressed to find a laptop with a Cursor sticker on it.

Instead, the office is filled with people working at desks or gathered in clusters of two or three, deep in conversation. They use chalkboards instead of whiteboards (company president Oscar Schultz can tell you in great detail where to source the best chalk), and the furniture was collected by a retired tech enthusiast in the East Bay who had fallen deeply in love with European vintage pieces. The walls are lined with books, mostly textbooks, many showing clear signs of dog-eared pages and actual use.

During one early visit, three potential clients from a Japanese bank came by. They arrived in suits and heels, trying their best to be formal, while a twenty-something sales rep gave them an office tour and offered snacks from a Jenga tower of precariously stacked protein bars, chips, pretzels, and popcorn. The whole thing might feel like young squirrels hiding inside a trench coat, but there's an undeniable unpretentiousness to it all.

"The whole thing might feel like young squirrels hiding inside a trench coat, but there's an undeniable unpretentiousness to it all."

Cursor is fundamentally an in-person culture. Eighty-six percent of the company works from the San Francisco headquarters or the new New York office. In the author's observation, tapping someone on the shoulder is the most effective way to get help. Slack messages and meetings are less reliable, and much collaborative work happens through spontaneous gatherings around chalkboards or someone's desk. There are very few recurring meetings -- the company places great importance on protecting deep work time and staying flexible with what comes up during the day. When asked about useful documentation, the response was, "Cursor has a stronger culture of oral communication."

Since early September, the author has been visiting the office every other week, and it's hard to deny that things go much more smoothly when physically present. At home, they sometimes complain about this reality, but in the office, nothing beats working alongside colleagues in person. Talk of a third office is already emerging, and new communication patterns will likely develop as the workforce becomes more distributed, but for now the magic of being in-person remains quite compelling.

Six days a week at 1 PM, the company's beloved chef Fausto serves lunch, and everyone gathers at communal tables. Rumor has it that Fausto nearly quit at one point because planning daily menus for a team that was doubling every few weeks became too stressful. Until he adjusted to the pace, a Cursor team member built him an AI menu generator. Now he shares new dishes with the team on Slack, enjoys praise for popular menu items, and takes requests for new experiments. At Cursor, even the chef has high agency.

Conversations at lunch and dinner are mostly filled with wide-ranging talk about work. People seem to enjoy getting to know each other through their ideas -- Cursor projects, problems they're mulling over, or thoughts about the future of the product or industry. The author spends a significant portion of office visits sitting at the table. They don't feel they contribute much in terms of generating good ideas, but asking questions is quite an entertaining activity. Sitting at the table for 30 minutes means a constant rotation of people and an endless flow of interesting ideas. It felt similar to Stripe in 2015-2017, but a key difference at Cursor is that there are always strangers at the table, because everyone is always inviting their smart friends to "drop by."

When asked what co-founder Sualeh Asif worries about most regarding building the company, he answered:

"People starting to talk about the weather at meals."

So far, the author has seen no evidence to justify his concern.

3. Cursor's Unmatched Hiring System

The secret to Cursor's hiring lies in treating the atomic unit of the hiring process as a person, not a job description. Let me explain further.

At most companies, the hiring process works like this: identify a gap in the company's ability to execute a specific function, post a job listing, source a candidate list, interview some candidates, hire one, and onboard them months later.

Cursor's hiring process works differently: post the name of a truly exceptional person in the Slack #hiring-ideas channel, lavish focused attention on them, run team interviews (which vary widely), and if both parties are interested, start work the following Monday.

The team is growing rapidly. What was a sub-20-person company at this time last year is now approaching 250. The author spends about a quarter of their time on hiring, which is a point of pride. Names flow constantly through the #hiring-ideas channel. Talent sourcing isn't about searching LinkedIn for relevant titles or companies and adding names to spreadsheets for recruiters -- it stems from genuine curiosity about who the very best people are.

The team discovered Eric Zakariasson because he was running Cursor workshops in Stockholm. Ian Huang appeared as an anomaly in customer telemetry data because he was coding with Cursor into the late hours. Whenever potential talent pools emerge -- New Computer shutting down, Meta's mass layoffs -- the Cursor team goes all-in to find the very best talent. Whenever someone encounters an impressive product launch, tweet, or blog post, they drop the author's name in the channel with the question, "Should we hire them?"

When consensus forms that a promising candidate looks good, another Slack channel is opened to discuss strategy for approaching them. Common questions in the group include: "What would this person most enjoy working on?", "What would they be best at?", "What environment at Cursor would be optimal for them?" They strategize around which interesting challenge Cursor faces to present, under the assumption that the best talent loves a good challenge. Ideas sometimes also emerge about who to backchannel with -- without the candidate's knowledge or permission (the author has mixed feelings about this).

When asked what co-founder Sualeh worries about most regarding building the company, he answered: "People starting to talk about the weather at meals."

Next, a Cursor team member volunteers or is nominated to be the point of contact with the candidate, leading outreach that orchestrates interest from multiple team members. This person drives the hiring process, but candidates enjoy receiving 360-degree attention from various Cursor team members. (No disrespect to recruiters, but from a candidate's perspective, it's a very different experience not to be talking directly with them.) "Not looking for a job right now? That's fine. Let's just do a small project together!" is a commonly heard phrase.

Another common tactic is suggesting candidates "stop by HQ anytime" -- based on the accurate assumption that time in the office often becomes a magical moment for new hires. It's also an opportunity for relevant Cursor people to evaluate -- no, meet! -- them. (As one person described it, "ambush interviews.") Every time the author visits the office, they see talented professionals they've met over the years. Some claim to be "just meeting a friend for coffee," while others later text, "Please never tell anyone I was there."

Despite all this outreach, Cursor's acceptance rate makes elite university admissions look like summer camp. Every leader says talent is the most important thing, but few companies actually commit to it. Cursor does. When you have a to-do list of important problems as long as Cursor's, it's not easy to decline to hire someone. But as a wise founder friend put it, "They're pulling the pain forward." Cursor's leadership team approves every hire, and the author expects that to continue for a long time.

Just as everyone scouts for candidates, everyone participates in closing. Sometimes extra persuasion is needed after an offer is made. (Remember: "looking for a job" is not a prerequisite for receiving a job offer from Cursor.) The team is persistent. Ryo Lu, an early designer at Stripe and Notion and an Apple fanboy, received a vintage Macintosh computer as a gift. Lukas Moller impressed the founders with a cold email expressing his love of coding and appreciation for what the team was building. Despite the founders flying from California to Germany on a recruiting trip, Lukas declined the offer. But as Oscar told the author with a grin:

"'No' is often just the beginning of a conversation."

A year later, the founders flew to Germany again, and this time Lukas came back to San Francisco with them. Jordan MacDonald was very happy in her job when Cursor came knocking. Despite six months of casual coffee meetings and impressive people from her network joining the company, she didn't change her mind. During one coffee meeting, the Cursor team learned that Jordan had just moved into a new house. As a closing tactic, they contacted her interior designer to ask what piece of furniture might seal the deal. An espresso machine was delivered directly to Jordan's new home, and she started at Cursor in October.

One area where Cursor is notably lacking in hiring is women in product and engineering. This is a known issue and a top priority to address. (If you're reading this and nodding along, let's talk!)

4. Compelling Mission + Hard Technical Problems + Success + Exceptional Hiring = Overwhelming Talent Density

Typically, top talent doesn't easily gather during a company's early stages. But because Cursor has all of these magical elements, it has been able to hire exceptional people from the start.

On the product and engineering side, Cursor is being built at the intersection of the most interesting challenges in UX and machine learning. (The Cursor 2.0 work -- a new UI purpose-built for custom models and agent workflows -- is recent evidence of this.) On the go-to-market side, Cursor is one of the fastest-growing companies in history by revenue. It went from $0 to $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) without a sales team, and the subsequently built sales team has committed to adding another zero before the end of 2025. The #closed-won channel, where a Slack bot announces new sales wins, has a never-ending stream of notifications.

All of this unifies into a deeply compelling mission in a world where every stage of the software development lifecycle will be connected with intelligence. Beyond that, the task of "building software" is rapidly expanding beyond software engineers to include designers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and domain experts. The total addressable market (TAM) is growing enormously!

Cursor has 50(!) former founders across the company. That's more than one-fifth of the entire workforce. Nearly 40% attended MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, or Yale, but nobody talks about which school they went to. For some, Cursor is their first job; for others, they started their careers at companies like Figma, Stripe, Segment, Plaid, Notion, Vercel, Dropbox, GitHub, and Uber. A true melting pot of talent.

How does this manifest? The best way the author can describe it is that everyone radiates competence, but not in a show-off way. Put differently, there is zero visible incompetence at Cursor. People simply do their jobs exceptionally well and act with confidence. A somewhat absurd but telling example: the office stairs leading to the desks are quite steep and have no railing. When asked about this peculiarity, the answer was, "People know how to climb stairs."

Michael often says he wants Cursor to be "a haven for self-motivated individual contributors." And so far, it is. In a "home for ICs," people generally accomplish things through their own passion and initiative rather than following manager directives. IC is genuinely the highest-status position in the company. Co-founder Aman Sanger remains a proud IC. The author's lasting image of him is coding in a corner of the office all day, almost never interrupted. There's a healthy culture of taking on work that gives you the most energy (or frustrates you the most!), giving ambitious assignments to a single person with full ownership regardless of title, org structure, or team.

A new hire on the sales team said:

"At my previous company [note: a very well-known startup], it took 30 days to get on a call with a customer. Here it took less than 30 hours."

A recent engineering example: excitement was building about what Cursor could do in the browser. A small group volunteered to tackle the challenge over a weekend. The team consisted of Ian Huang, one of Cursor's longest-tenured engineers and a relatively recent graduate; Andrew Millich, a former founder and developer of Notion Mail; Lukas Moller, who built most of Cursor's CLI in 10 days; and Baltazar Zuniga, another seasoned engineer known for "making decisions through code rather than meetings." As Andrew described it:

"We dropped everything, went fully focused and accountable, and worked together in the office until it was done. It was one of the most fun experiences I've ever had working."

This kind of thing happens all the time at Cursor.

This is possible not only because of high talent density but because the ratio of important problems to people is very high. The author recalls a 2018 incident at Stripe where a tiny corporate sign in a bathroom prompted Patrick Collison to immediately inquire about unnecessary headcount on the learning and development team. As far as the author knows, Cursor has no such unnecessary headcount.

5. Young People with Old Souls

When people describe someone as "young" in a professional setting, the author usually interprets it as meaning either "somewhat incompetent" or "good at their job but annoyingly unprofessional." At Cursor, knowing the former wouldn't be an issue, they at least expected some of the latter.

Despite the young average age, the author was pleasantly surprised to find team members who are warm, well-dressed, maintain good eye contact, communicate clearly and politely, and diligently replace empty toilet paper rolls in the shared bathroom. They were also struck by how such young people communicate ideas by referencing Silicon Valley history, world history, pop culture, art, lessons from seemingly unrelated industries, and patterns observed in the work of people they've long admired. The range of references is broad, but what's clear in every example is that Cursor's people don't rely solely on their own experience for all context and idea generation (a common trap for "young" people) -- they study the world. This makes the team particularly adept at finding elegant solutions to problems of all shapes.

To share their observations and learnings, many team members create their own "brain channels" on Slack where they post their thoughts. There's no expectation of responses or engagement, but people with good ideas can accumulate quite a following. The most popular brain channels contain content that has little to do with "proof of work" or "managing up" and is closer to pure ideas and thinking. Recent examples include reflections on whether CMS (content management systems) are relics of the pre-AI era, deep analysis gathered from numerous customer visits, and very precise friction logs for early-stage Cursor products.

Most importantly for the author, there's almost no overuse of expressions like LFGGGGGG, "cracked" (meaning extremely talented), excessive emojis, or memes. The most memorable recent non-work messages include an invitation to Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the San Francisco Symphony, photos from 9 PM running clubs in New York and San Francisco, friendly ribbing about a bad AI take in The New Yorker, a dedicated #laundry channel featuring a weekly "laundry standup" Slack bot, a debate about how to fold fitted sheets, and a poll about which humanoid robot would first make the bed. Nobody breaks character. The most-used reaction emoji is hands-down the heart. Nobody shouts, fidgets, panics, or visibly spirals when things go wrong. The whole thing feels very... grown-up.

Not long ago, an incident caused a fairly serious service outage. The person responsible posted in the company-wide #general Slack channel:

"I'm sorry everyone. I thought I had prepared enough and tried to make the change as safely and systematically as possible, but I made a mistake."

Many people reacted with heart emojis. The first reply read:

"Good that we were ready to roll back quickly! We'll do a postmortem, but this type of change is inherently risky and let's discuss how we can do better going forward."

It's not that people are indifferent. Everyone takes their work seriously and is remarkably self-reflective. It's simply that deep trust in colleagues' abilities and intentions means that minor mistakes or malfunctions don't spiral into the kind of dramatic anxiety seen at other startups. There's generally no backstabbing about company issues or leadership conflicts at Cursor. Despite fierce market competition, discussions about rival products are very respectful and primarily product-focused rather than consumed by existential fear.

Many visitors to the office remark on how "calm" the atmosphere is. Employees laugh at this. One said, "It's like a duck on water." Team members appear calm and sound composed on the surface, but underneath they're paddling constantly.

6. 9-9-6 Is Beside the Point. They Just Love the Work!

From conversations with many Silicon Valley professionals, what people think they "know" best about Cursor is how hard the employees work. Some mention "9-9-6 (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week)." But this is far from how the company thinks about work. There is no 9-9-6 mandate. Rather, there is a significant number of team members who truly work a lot because they love and care deeply about what they do. The pace and volume of work is entirely self-imposed.

The author was never once asked to work late evenings or weekends. But have they worked late evenings and weekends? Of course! (This very sentence was being written on a Saturday while a 10-month-old baby slept upstairs.) Have the most productive collaborative sessions happened during off-hours when Slack, email, and calendars go quiet? Absolutely. Many people do this every week. When deeply immersed in something, the author tends to push through partly because they want to, but also to impress impressive colleagues.

Honestly, the first few weeks at Cursor felt like barely being able to breathe. A flood of seemingly urgent tasks immediately landed on the to-do list. Extra hours alone didn't seem to help much. There was uncertainty about whether the right things were being worked on, whether the output was good enough, whether sufficient impact was being made, or even who to ask about all of this. Many new hires describe similar experiences. But once you internalize that these norms reflect a high baseline trust in your abilities (a perk of the rigorous hiring process!) and learn how the company works, the anxiety transforms into confidence. Working this way is genuinely exciting!

Drawing from experience consulting on corporate culture at multiple companies, work speed and work ethic are among the most contagious norms (in both directions). When colleagues move fast, so do you. When colleagues respond quickly on Slack, so do you. When colleagues go home for dinner, so do you. When colleagues show up at the office on Saturday, so do you. Cursor's default setting is "fast." And most people happily strive to meet that standard without complaint.

7. A Unique Internal Culture: Dogfooding

One of Cursor's early culture documents notes:

"Cursor is probably the company with the most hours per employee per week spent using the company's core product in the entire world. The only possible competitor is Apple, whose employees use Macs and iPhones."

Every Cursor employee is constantly using Cursor.

As a result, the product roadmap is remarkably driven bottom-up. The perfect reason (perhaps the best reason) to build something is that you personally want the feature to exist. Furthermore, Cursor users have many ideas for making Cursor better and frequently post on X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, LinkedIn, and Hacker News, as well as texting and DMing employees. Team members say they can hardly socialize without hearing unsolicited product feedback.

When someone becomes convinced a feature should be built or updated, they can showcase it at the weekly product demo meeting, or simply start building it right away. (Sometimes two people end up developing similar things, and the version that ships usually integrates the best parts of both ideas.)

When a feature is ready, it's deployed to the internal version of Cursor to gauge internal reaction, gather feedback for improvement, or watch it fade away. Since Cursor team members are the ideal users of Cursor, everyone is essentially seeking internal product-market fit for the features and infrastructure they believe in. Beloved Cursor features like Tab, CmdK, Agent, Bugbot, and Background Agent were all built this way.

One of the author's favorite Slack channels at Cursor is #braintrust, a company-wide channel. People use it to get feedback on what they're building, often in emoji-vote format. For example: "cmd k -- full file editing -- green circle = remove and red circle = 'I use this and need it.'" It's a remarkably efficient and engaging way to get people to "pick sides," and often sparks productive discussions.

"The company's position is that while other companies focus on lowering the floor, Cursor is focused on raising the ceiling."

Another interesting byproduct of extensive dogfooding and testing is that Cursor is very good at updating defaults and evolving underused features. Recent questions from the main product discussion hub on Slack include: "Is this setting necessary?", "Can we reduce clicks to get there?", "How can we simplify?", "Does anyone use this? Can we remove it?" In the author's experience, most companies don't do this well.

As a result of all this experimentation, the version of Cursor the team uses internally is about three months ahead of what users see, with the team spending time ironing out the kinks in new features.

It's worth noting that it's not only product and engineering staff who use Cursor. The go-to-market team is remarkably technical and uses Cursor for website updates, dashboards, and other internal tools. The #built-with-Cursor Slack channel features projects like a pickleball court availability tracker, a team member's wedding website, a Cursor keyboard shortcuts visualization, a fun game about feeding office dogs treats, and a geoguessr built using the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. Again, this isn't a company mandate (it's not like being told to make slides in Figma before Figma Slides existed). People simply enjoy tinkering inside Cursor.

8. Fuzz: A Special Ritual for Pre-Launch Product Stability

"Fuzz" is the author's favorite Cursor ritual. When a significant launch is imminent (a new client release, website update, etc.), everyone gathers in one room and tries to break the product.

Typically it starts when a product lead sends a Slack message to a public channel saying, "A fuzz session for X is happening now in the basement." Sometimes people are lured with donuts or bagels, but the team takes deep ownership in preventing buggy releases and willingly does the hard work that entails. An early "Welcome to Cursor" document states:

"You need to take ownership of bugs. Mistakes happen, but every bug you ship to users delivers disappointment. We're asking users to code in Cursor every day, all day, and bugs or performance issues are easy reasons for them to switch to another product."

A fuzz session begins when enough developers gather in the largest circle the room allows. Early arrivals grab seats, but many sit cross-legged on the floor, perch on sofa edges, or balance laptops on their knees in chairs (or chair armrests) pulled from desks. The product lead then sends a link to the latest build with instructions, telling the "truffle pigs" to get to work.

Except for keyboard clicks, "fuzz" is a quiet affair. For 60 minutes, people identify bugs, UI issues, unconsidered edge cases, or rough spots and post them in Slack. Occasionally debates break out about the most elegant implementation (sometimes even with Slack polls). The output of one hour is typically a very long list of items to address before the product ships (usually the next day).

The product team then expresses deep gratitude for the time and thought, and dives into fixing things late into the night -- often joined by the very people who originally spotted the issues.

9. Constructive Friction

At Cursor, people direct a lot of critique and questions at each other's work. This can be quite disorienting for those who haven't worked in that kind of culture. The best developers know what great products feel like, so they can hold very strong opinions about how things should work. They freely provide feedback on anything falling short of the bar and are willing to roll up their sleeves to help meet it.

Stripe also had that kind of culture. The author's former boss, colleague, and co-founder Eeke described this operating model as "micro-pessimist, macro-optimist." The same applies at Cursor. People can be very critical of execution, yet simultaneously they hold an optimistic belief that they'll build something important, generally framing situations in terms of potential upside rather than likelihood of failure.

Like most cultural norms, this starts with the founders. Michael always encourages "spicy questions" during the company Q&A sessions where he fields tough questions. Sualeh is known for DMing people the question, "What are you worried about right now?"

This kind of culture can quickly become toxic when combined with ego, office politics, poor communication, or difficulty with emotional regulation. The author has also seen many (very talented) people treat finding flaws as a sport without the intrinsic desire to actually fix them. At Cursor, critics are also the problem-solvers. The "friction" here works because everyone genuinely wants the best for the product and for each other.

On this topic, the author once asked Michael what he wanted the company to feel like. He responded with a question: "Have you seen the Beatles documentary?" (He always answers questions with questions.)

If you haven't seen the documentary Get Back, here's a summary: the most famous band in history, locked in a studio with a three-week deadline, iteratively creating the record-breaking album Let It Be. The film contains electrifying moments where Paul McCartney holds a bass and mumbles meaningless syllables, accidentally discovering the riff and structure of "Get Back." There are also tense moments when George Harrison gets frustrated as Paul tries to rally a tired band through another song rehearsal. Throughout, the specter of external pressure from fans and studio executives haunts the building, but the members press on steadily.

The creative process's ups and downs are laid bare, and the beauty of it all is the reminder that when making something wondrous, the magic is in the mundane. Greatness is created through the collision of small sparks -- people at the top of their craft caring deeply and refusing to stop working until they reach the goal. Not much talking or strategizing -- just feeling their way forward. Hands on instruments, playing until the playing becomes. Michael didn't use these exact words, but the author believes this is what he wants Cursor to feel like. So far, it seems to be working.

10. "Raising the Ceiling" as a Virtue

Cursor is firm in targeting its ideal customer profile as the best professional software developers. This is somewhat controversial because many people who don't hold the title of "developer" use and (passionately) love Cursor.

Cursor is by no means dismissing these users or taking lightly the general ambition of democratizing coding. But the company's position is that while other companies focus on lowering the floor, Cursor is focused on raising the ceiling.

As is commonly said in product development, "Be careful who your users are -- they'll pull your product in a certain direction." Cursor explicitly wants to be pulled in the direction of people at the top of their craft. They believe this is the approach needed to transform how software is built, rather than settling for incremental improvement. The author admires this stance. "Democratize X" can be an easy marketing win, but Cursor prioritizes product precision over warm, emotive marketing.

This "designing for the ceiling rather than the floor" virtue is also evident in the engineering interview process. Cursor's interviews are famously difficult for candidates, particularly the coding challenges. When asked about this, the team argues that "it's hard to show how exceptional you are on something too easy," and that they would rather "accept false negatives than risk false positives."

During their time at Cursor, the author found themselves wanting to view more things through the lens of "What is the 'raise the ceiling' version of this?" This generally leads to a much more ambitious way of thinking.

11. The Mission Is the Reward

So what is all this intensity, focus, and drive for? One of the most inspiring aspects of Cursor is that the reward for success is the completion of the mission.

When it comes to Cursor's aspirations, there's a clear gap between what you see on cursor.com or read in the press and what people inside the company talk about. The company's product story is all about developer productivity. This is a very effective and profitable position. But what Cursor people truly care about is code -- the generation of code that underpins the world.

That everything runs on software is a truism that extends far beyond B2B SaaS companies. Traffic lights on our streets; the analysis underlying scientific discoveries; the editing tools that create movies, TV shows, and music; the medical records that ensure doctors provide contextual care; the inventory management systems that stock our supermarkets; the flight control systems that make air travel safe -- and on and on. Before working at Cursor, the author didn't fully appreciate how much progress is bottlenecked by our ability to build excellent software.

If you believe, as the author does, that what we create depends on what it feels like to create, then what Cursor does has a genuine opportunity to meaningfully shape the future world we experience. What happens when the right tools end up in the hands of people who want to build impactful, enduring software? Actually closing the gap between idea and reality. Many companies claim this mission, but at Cursor it feels more true.

"I think most of them, if they could retire tomorrow, would keep doing what they're doing at Cursor right now."

During a walk, the author asked a particularly thoughtful colleague about how they think about Cursor's mission. He began talking about building software that is useful, reliable, and beautiful. About the need for tools that give builders extremely precise control at every level of abstraction; about breaking down the language barrier between humans and AI with a single tool that feels natural to anyone who wants to build software; and about how the act of building could become more like sculpture or painting. In the past, the author might have considered such thinking somewhat pie in the sky, and perhaps they've drunk too much of the Cursor Kool-Aid, but now they can feel its meaning.

From this perspective, the company is closer to a kind of "moonshot" project. Cursor's greatest existential risk may be that its early commercial success could become an obstacle to continuing to pursue its grandest challenges.

Michael sends clear warnings about this. At all-hands meetings, he repeats phrases like "Growth can mask poor execution." (This recalls one of Stripe's most repeated operating principles: "We haven't won yet.") These warnings don't seem strictly necessary. There is recognition and some excitement about the company's enormous revenue, growth, usage, and sales success, but what truly moves people is product development, sound performance, reliability, elegant UI, and all the product virtues the team holds so dear. The degree to which people get excited about adoption and revenue is closer to satisfaction that the company's vision for "a better way to code" is being realized.

One early employee recalled the day the company reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). When a bot announced it to the company in the popular #numbers Slack channel, people reacted with the typical heart emoji, some added the 100 emoji, but "the conversations in the office were the same as any other day."

The author's strongest evidence that the reward is the mission is that during their fall at Cursor, they didn't hear a single word of chatter from employees about getting rich. At Stripe and Figma (and most other startups), this was a favorite topic at the lunch table among the first few hundred employees of a decacorn. But at Cursor, despite the company's valuation continuing to rise, the author heard not a single word about second homes to buy, great-grandchildren to send to college, or time to spend traveling the world. If there are dollar signs in people's eyes, they hardly talk about it. And the author believes that's because most of them, if they could retire tomorrow, would keep doing exactly what they're doing at Cursor.

Conclusion

Cursor is not simply a fast-growing startup -- it is a company with a deep vision and distinctive culture that aims to redefine the future of software development in the AI era. From how it hires talent to how it develops products and how team members communicate with each other, the attitude of "pursuing the best and immersing in the mission" stands out at every level. From the outside, it's known as a "hard-working" company, but beneath the surface are passionate "young people with old souls" who love the work itself and are constantly learning and growing. Their goal extends beyond revenue to a grand dream of building a better world through "code generation." Cursor's story points the way for the next wave of successful companies in the AI era, and delivers an important message to all of us: the mission is the reward.