Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
01:08:01 · Roman Ugarte
[01:08:01] S0: I mean, a lot of this, and it's a fuzzy answer, a lot of this I think is downstream from culture and the culture that you set and the people that you bring in and the way that they approach these problems. And I think for us, exactly as you said, we have never been complacent. We've never felt like we've won, and it's always been about the next thing. And I think there's been a really deep belief across the company that AI is moving incredibly quickly. Our goal is to translate those capabilities into amazing products for customers, but those products are going to change and they need to meet the moment as the capabilities get stronger. And what met the moment two years ago is completely different than what's meeting the moment today. And if we as a company can't completely reinvent ourselves every six months, which recently it's felt even shorter than that, of complete very significant reinventions of our priorities, the core product, what users feel, we're going to lose. And I think it's that spirit of always pushing to be on the frontier, never thinking it's over or that we've won or that we've gotten it right and just constantly updating our beliefs that has gotten us to where we are now. And to your point on the competitiveness of this space, one thing that I think is important to point out is AI coding has always been competitive from when Cursor first came to be. And at the time the competitors were Microsoft and others and a handful of maybe 10 or 20 companies. And I think it's notable that none of those competitors are at the forefront of AI coding right now in large part, not because of any incorrect decisions that they made or any lack of resources on their part, but this cultural inability to move quickly and to change to meet the moment as the moment's changing. And so I think that's exactly what has led us to invest in things like Grok Bot, for example.
01:10:04 · Lenny Rachitsky, Roman Ugarte
[01:10:04] S1: Are there any core values, just specific ways you phrase this to kind of remind everyone of this is how we work? [01:10:10] S0: Yeah, two values that I find myself coming back to quite a bit. The first one is this idea of deleting the product. And I think it exactly ties back to what you're saying right now where when you look at every past iteration of Cursor, for example, but even I think when you look at every past iteration of Grok Bot, I think we will feel the same thing, is things going away, not new things getting added, but these scaffolding product overhang style things that get built in because the models have not yet gotten smart enough to just do it themselves, those things will get moved away over time and we need to feel comfortable making kind of hard decisions that might upset a small set of users or a small set of us internally to do the bigger thing of make the product simple, make the product powerful and adapt to where the future is going. So I think that's been very core. And then the second thing, which ties back to the pace of execution is just do the thing, which I find myself kind of repeating a lot even as we've kind of grown as a company is it's on you. We're all in this boat together, we want to win. And if you see something that you think needs to happen, this is not an ask for permission culture, you go out and you fix the thing and you pull in the resources that you need to make it happen. And I think that has made many people very successful here before, and I think it's something we really share with SpaceXAI as well.
01:11:39 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:11:39] S1: Agency, as you may have heard. So interesting. One of the big questions that comes up, and this might be my final question, is around moats. And a lot of people look at Cursor as a really interesting example of they're in a market with technically maybe no moats, but they've continued to win and succeed. The two moats you think about with Cursor is the data feedback loop of people auto completing, learning what they're doing and training models based on that. So that's unique. The other is just best in class experience and being a high daily active user product and finding over time what works and what people need. What have you just learned? And I guess any thoughts on moats in this space that might be helpful for folks that are trying to figure this out for themselves?
01:12:28 · Roman Ugarte
[01:12:28] S0: Yeah, there's a lot of talk about moats and it is a pretty interesting moment in time to be starting a company. So I can understand why so many founders are kind of asking themselves that and trying to project out 12 months from now, 24 months from now, it just feels like an eternity. I will say that I think if Cursor and many other successful companies of this kind of vintage, I think if they had thought about moats/kind of tried to work backwards from some strategy diagram or a maybe more abstract notion of how a company should work, I don't think that would've created this outcome or this product. I think what really created the magic of Cursor was an obsession with building a useful thing today. And I think it was constantly this exercise of you can kind of see where the world is going three months from now, six months from now, models are going to get smarter, a thing that isn't solvable now is finally going to be solvable. And I think Cursor was a little bit this recurring prompt of how could we pull that stuff to today, even if it requires a little bit of engineering on top to make it work or a lot of engineering on top to make it work, even it requires changing the product in a specific way so a user can interact with this new capability. How can we bring that forward? And then three months from now, we should delete all that stuff because it'll just be good and basic common bare minimum of the product and then we'll build the thing for three months from then. And then it was constantly just doing that over and over again that I think led to users really trusting us and placing their time inside of our product and trusting that we were kind of bringing things to this next frontier and to the next future. And so I would really encourage many founders or people starting out today to be more grounded in that perspective of how can I make something that is not possible now possible? Users are going to come to me to use that thing. I'm going to pull them to the next impossible frontier. And then through all of that, I'm going to gain a lot of distribution advantages. I'm going to gain data advantages. There will be value there, but I think that's really the place to play.