AI in Automation, Product, and Growth
Coding just ate its own tail... and it tastes like rocket fuel.
Imagine building the tool that makes software engineers 10x faster… while your entire company is made of software engineers using that exact tool to build the next version. That’s the wild ouroboros Cursor is riding right now, and it’s growing faster than almost any company I’ve ever watched.
A few things that blew my mind:
- They once spent seven months trying to automate mechanical engineering (think CAD for rocket parts). Zero founder-market fit. They were blindly interviewing “mechies” and scraping 3D data while having no intuitive feel for the job. Lesson learned the hard way by Michael T.: if you don’t deeply get the pain, run. - So they pivoted to the problem they lived every day: writing code. In literally a few weeks the four co-founders had a brand-new IDE they dogfooded themselves. Public beta ~60 days later. While every other startup was raising $100M to build agents or foundation models, they just shipped a dramatically better autocomplete and chat inside VS Code. Focus won. - Growth got chaotic fast, so they did nuts recruiting stunts – like hopping on a plane and flying across the planet to sit in front of someone who’d already turned them down. - Their first real acquisition? SuperMaven – five people, led by the guy who invented Tabnine (the OG Copilot before Copilot) and did research at OpenAI. Cursor chased them for months. - The future plan is half build, half buy: spin up new products aggressively, but also roll up the best small teams and give them semi-independent pods inside Cursor.
Biggest gut-check moment: software engineering is still shockingly manual and inefficient. We’re nowhere near the end – there’s a long, messy decade+ of 10x leaps ahead. Copilot was the iPod. We haven’t seen the real iPhone(s) yet.
If you’re building in this space, the message is clear: move stupidly fast, stay painfully focused longer than feels comfortable, and when you get big keep acting like the scrappy kid who’s one missed leap away from being obsolete.
The snake is eating its tail… and somehow getting bigger every bite. Wild time to be a builder.