Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:58:42 · Roman Ugarte
[00:58:42] S0: Definitely. Yeah. I think there are three big pillars right now of SpaceXAI. So the first pillar is the coding product instead of products, and right now that's Cursor and Grok Build. And I think we're big believers that having a professional work surface for developers and for the engineering part of the organization is going to be really critical. And right now people use Grok Bot sometimes to kick off cloud agents or to merge PRs or to do QA, a bunch of engineering adjacent tasks. But ultimately when you're shipping production software, we're big believers that is going to require a product where every pixel is optimized for that end user. So we're making big investments there. The second category is general knowledge work, and we think bot is a really exciting step in that direction. I think there's a lot more work to do of making it more useful, extending it to new surfaces, it really feeling like an AI teammate that you can delegate work to, especially inside of companies and businesses. So that's kind of the second pillar. And then third is the general model effort. We want to train the smartest models in the world that are really capable. And I think one thing that somewhat distinguishes SpaceXAI from other AI labs is I think our goal is less to build, chase super intelligence or some kind of vague aspirational ideal. And the goal is actually very practical, which is to build useful AI. And we do that on the product side, we do that on the model side. And I think part of that is also just cultural of the group of people contributing to these models are engineers and people who came into the model training effort from a very applied mindset. And I think that's what gets this company going and I think is actually a slightly different direction from some of the other competitors out there.
01:00:43 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:00:43] S1: Super interesting. Okay, there's a couple directions I want to go. One is you have this tweet that is, I think you pinned it or maybe it's your last tweet. It's up there in your timeline if people check you out. So the tweet is, "An AI that does 100% of the job feels categorically different from one that gets you 90% there. I've significantly updated what I think AI is capable of." Say more about that.
01:01:06 · Roman Ugarte
[01:01:06] S0: I think for me, what made me so excited to work on Grok Bot and contribute to it is it was the first time for non-coding tasks that I felt like I could truly delegate work to AI and not have to think about it and I would come back and it's done. And I think engineers have been feeling this for quite some time, for maybe a year, a year and a half, things have been like that. I mean, the job of a developer has completely transformed. It is unrecognizable from what it was two years ago and many, many words have been said on that topic. But I think it's underrated how different that experience is from what most people are feeling about AI right now and the way that AI has changed their lives. And it looks quite similar to the way that people would use AI two years ago where you create a new thread for a task, you type it into an input box, you hit enter, you watch all of these steps happen, you get an output, it's not quite right, you keep working on it. And Grok Bot, I think short circuits a lot of that. When you first lay eyes on the first screen, you're like, "Whoa, this is clearly different. Let's see if it actually works, but this is different." And then you give it something and it kind of works to a surprising extent. And I think we're going to do a lot to make it work much better. And so I think what I was expressing in that was when you have a teammate that you only 90% trust and you give something to, which luckily I do not have the experience of here because I work with great people, but if you delegate something to someone and you're like, "I know I'm going to have to be thinking about this while you're doing it, and I know it probably is not going to be quite there and I'm going to have to intervene and steer it slightly," that's not 90% task completion. You're still doing the thing and it feels that way and it's weighing on you in the same way versus truly throwing a no look pass to a colleague and being like, "You got this, here's the context, go off and run. I'm excited to see what you do." That's a different category. And I think that's the type of thing that people feel with Grok Bot every day are these no look passes and you just trust that it can get it done and then it does and it's just a very magical experience.
01:03:26 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:26] S1: Yeah, I've had that experience consistently. Okay, so another element of how y'all operate that has really impressed me and I've not seen this before is how fast y'all move. So I got added to this Slack as I was giving feedback with some folks and it's just like, okay, how about, okay, tomorrow we're going to give you some free codes to give out. You could do it tomorrow. We'll do this tomorrow. Or we're going to launch a marketplace with templates, we're going to launch this in two days. It's just like, what? I don't have time for this. How do you guys, with all the things going on, all these things constantly shipping and also staying consistent and high quality and feeling clear that it's towards a specific vision. So there's kind of two parts of this question, just what's the secret to how fast you all have been moving and how do you stay aligned moving that fast towards a vision that you all believe in and where you want it to go versus just band-aiding it along the way?
01:04:25 · Roman Ugarte
[01:04:25] S0: Yeah. One thing I've been really happy has never changed is that startup feeling inside of the company. And for context, when I joined Cursor originally, we were about 15 people. We scaled to over a thousand. And then now we're a part of SpaceXAI, which is kind of an even bigger organization. And it's something that is just so fun to be a part of when you're around this group of incredibly talented people. Everyone's moving a hundred miles an hour. You trust, you deeply trust everybody to execute on their part of the equation. And there's a clear vision that everyone is fired up about and knows that they need to execute on. And as companies grow, and we've had the fortune of hiring really great people from other companies that have gone through hyper growth, things slow down and you kind of keep telling yourself, we're still a startup, we still move quickly, but you really don't and everyone knows that you don't and it's easier to say than to actually be. And fingers crossed, this continues to be true. I think it's really critical for our success if this continues to be true. But even as we scaled, it has always felt like that startup that I first joined. And I think if you define a startup by number of people or by the funding round, none of those things really make any sense. The core thing that defines a startup is exactly what you're describing, which is this kind of scramble energy of things are kind of chaotic and kind of disorganized. And for a lot of people, that's not a pleasant working environment to be in, but it has these amazing properties of you can make extreme impact in a particular direction in a short amount of time and you really do get out of the system what you put in. And so I think as a culture, I think as an organization and the way we construct ourselves, it's really been to enable that property in a way that I think some of our competitors and other AI labs have gotten much bigger and you can feel it. And I think us, even as we scale, there is that start-upy impulse that is quite important to move quickly on these things.
01:06:35 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:06:35] S1: Let me pull on this thread and let me ask you this big question that I've been looking forward to asking you. If you were to look at Cursor from the outside, it shouldn't have worked. It shouldn't have lasted because, one, it's in the most competitive market in the world competing against the fastest growing companies in history, OpenAI and Anthropic. So that's one. It's like the competition is unlike anything anyone's ever experienced. Two, it sits on top of those platforms to power it. And what I've seen as an outsider is what has allowed Cursor to win and have this massive exit and continue to succeed is how quickly you all adjust to the reality of the market. Started as auto complete and then things moved on to just talking to agents and then into the cloud and now Grok Bot. To me, that feels like a core part of the success is quickly adjusting to reality and also building the best in class experience for a thing that also exists other places. Grok Bot's a great example. You could do this other places, but it's the best in class experience, Cursor, the ID, the best way to code. So that's my question. Maybe I answered it, but what do you think has been core to Cursor's ability to not just survive in this crazy competitive market, but do so incredibly well consistently for so long?