Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students

Michael Truell explains how Cursor went from failed CAD and messaging pivots to $100M ARR in one year by betting all of software development will flow through AI models.

• Cursor hit $100M ARR in one year, growing from $1M; the team was still under 10 people at end of 2023.
• Truell and co-founders spent most of 2022 on a failed CAD co-pilot and an end-to-end encrypted messaging app before pivoting to coding.
• They avoided coding tools initially because GitHub Copilot was already doing ~$100M revenue and the space seemed too competitive.
• The conviction to proceed: no one in the space was seriously building for a world where all software development flows through models.
• Original Cursor was a from-scratch editor; they switched to forking VS Code after realizing matching 12 years of VS Code development was unrealistic.
• Growth was almost entirely word of mouth; growth-engineering sprints in 2023 consistently underperformed product improvements.
• YC batch Cursor adoption jumped from single-digit percent in 2023 to ~80% in 2024 in one batch cycle.
• Truell’s view: programming remains essential like math — AI becomes a colleague and advanced compiler, but engineers will still read and review logic.

2025-09-03 · Watch on YouTube