"Cursor is Dead" is Total BS: Here is Why | Miles Clements

Miles Clements of Accel defends Cursor at $27B valuation and explains why the ‘Cursor is dead’ narrative misreads agent-era growth metrics.

• Cursor agent product grew 15x last year; 90% of users are daily active on agents; cloud agents now drive 35% of merged PRs.
• Accel’s first Cursor investment was at $9.5B; Clements and Andrew Braccia haircut Michael Truell’s $500M ARR target to $300M — company ended the year in the billions.
• Clements frames Cursor as the first-ever platform company for engineering, a vertical that has never had a dominant owner despite Atlassian and Datadog owning pieces.
• 50% of developers switch model families daily; 95% switch models daily — multimodel flexibility is Cursor’s structural advantage, not a weakness.
• Accel missed Rippling partly due to Parker Conrad’s prior reputation slowing their process; Clements calls Conrad a generational founder and regrets not breaking ownership rules.
• Accel invested in Anthropic starting at a $180B valuation round, underwriting it as a potential trillion-dollar company; Clements respects Dario’s Pentagon refusal as principled, not calculated.
• Clements reversed a prior belief that all generational AI investments had already been made — now sees the innovation flywheel as just starting.
• ElevenLabs named as the biggest miss of the last 12 months; Accel also regrets not investing in Anduril (Shiv Siddarth cited as a generational founder).

2026-03-09 · Watch on YouTube