An account of working at Cursor for 60 days: a largely in-person culture, few scheduled meetings, aggressive recruiting, heavy internal product testing, more
Sixty days with the AI coding decacorn — Editor's note: This is the first installment in a series of Company Dispatches …
ColossusBrie Wolfson
Context & Ripple Effects
This account adds operating detail to coverage of Cursor’s scale-up: it portrays a company using in-person work, sparse formal meetings and intensive dogfooding while it recruits. That matters alongside Cursor’s subsequent report of more than $1B in annualized revenue and 300-plus employees, where execution discipline becomes harder to preserve.
The emphasis on engineers working with AI coding tools also fits reporting from another software workplace where developers used tools such as Cursor while shipping code. Cursor’s internal product testing makes its own staff an especially important source of feedback on the product.
First-order effects
Cursor employees are immediately affected by a work model centered on in-person collaboration, few scheduled meetings and heavy use of the company’s own product.
Aggressive recruiting and internal testing concentrate pressure on hiring and product teams to add people without weakening the rapid feedback loop described in the account.
Second-order effects
A larger hiring push raises competition for engineers and AI-product talent, particularly among companies building coding agents and developer tools.
Heavy dogfooding can speed identification of product friction, but it also makes internal workflows and product quality more tightly coupled as the organization grows.
Third-order effects
If this operating model persists, AI coding companies may increasingly compete on organizational speed and product-learning loops, not only on access to underlying models.
The pattern could favor developer-tool vendors able to turn their own engineering organizations into continuous test environments; whether that advantage scales beyond an early growth phase remains unclear.
The trend: AI coding vendors are treating their internal engineering workflow as both an operating model and a live proving ground for increasingly agentic developer products.
“When I asked co-founder Sualeh Asif what he's most concerned about when it comes to company-building, he responded, “People start talking about the weather at meals.” I haven't seen any evidence he has much to worry about.” ~@zebriez
I read @zebriez's incredibly well written piece on Cursor's culture, over breakfast this morning. Take some time out of your day to read it today. https://joincolossus.com/... [image]
what a beautifully written piece about a very cool company! it captures the texture of how great teams actually work. no ego, no mythology, no performative genius. just a group of people building something ambitious with care, precision, and taste. highly recommend giving it a [i…
a taste of what building Cursor feels like - it's intense, chaotic, but extremely fun and rewarding. enjoy the read, like visiting our office in North Beach:
This is the epitome of an excellent work culture: “the thing most of them would do if they could retire tomorrow would be whatever they're doing now at Cursor.”
This is our first in a series of essays bringing you inside the world's most interesting companies. @zebriez spent the past two months working at Cursor, the AI-powered code editor that became one of the fastest-growing startups in history. Here's what she found:
I've always wanted to publish these Company Dispatches — reports from someone inside one of the most important new companies. We have several more planned as a new Colossus format. You'll learn a ton from this first one, on Cursor.
After 15 years working in tech, I have come to view company walls as a semi-permeable membrane for talent. People work together at multiple companies over the course of their careers. We refer our favorite teammates to each other. We get feedback on new work from old colleagues.
No one studies & captures culture like @zebriez. ‘Inside Cursor’ is Brie Magic™️ in action: seeing and articulating the tiny things that are the essence behind the big thing. I join the chorus of the internet in my adoration for this spectacular write-up: https://joincolossus.com…
I spent the last 60 days working at Cursor. It's been one of the most thrilling phases of my professional life. There's a lot of mystique around the company. Over the last two months, some things matched my expectations; many did not. I wrote an essay for @joincolossus
brie has a unique way of gaining remarkable depth (on people, companies, ideas) quickly, and that's exactly what she's done in this piece definitely one to read, reread, screenshot, & share