Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he’s betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written.
From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor’s breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.
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Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
01:00 – A new way to build software
02:00 – Cursor’s mission
03:40 – The downside of vibe coding
04:50 – Two ways to view LLMs
05:50 – Bottlenecks to superhuman agents
08:30 – New approaches to coding UI
09:40 – Why taste still matters
12:15 – Niche software opportunities
13:30 – Cursor origin story
16:00 – The first problem they tried solving
17:20 – Why they abandoned the CAD idea
21:00 – Pivoting to Cursor
23:00 – Following the scaling laws
24:30 – Early product decisions
25:20 – The GitHub Copilot origin story
27:00 – Getting to PMF
30:00 – “Dogfooding”
31:00 – First 10 hires
32:50 – How to evaluate great engineers in age of AI
33:45 – Maintaining the hacker mindset as you grow
35:00 – What are the moats for AI coding tools?
37:00 – Looking ahead
