The CEO behind the AI tool Cursor says he used to hire too slowly — and focus too much on brand-name schools

Michael Truell said he made several early hiring mistakes at Anysphere.

The CEO and cofounder of the startup behind Cursor, an AI-powered coding tool, said the team initially fussed over hiring in the hopes of assembling a high-performing team.

“We tried to be incredibly patient on the hiring front,” Truell said in an episode of Lenny’s Podcast that aired Thursday.

The goal was to build a world-class group of engineers and researchers — “a certain mix of intellectual curiosity and experimentation,” he added.

But looking back, Truell said they may have been too patient. “Many people you hear hired too fast. I think we actually hired too slow,” he added.

The San Francisco-based company is one of the leaders in vibe coding, or the practice of using AI to generate code quickly and build software. It has closed a new round of funding that more than triples its valuation to about $9 billion, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. OpenAI backer Thrive Capital led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz and Accel among the other investors, per the FT.

The startup has been doubling its valuation every eight weeks since August, per PitchBook.

Truell partnered with MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger to start building Anysphere in 2022, according to TechCrunch. Cursor is Anysphere’s first product.

Truell said another one of his early hiring missteps was relying too heavily on conventional markers of talent, such as brand-name schools.

The hiring team leaned toward people who fit the archetype of “well-known school, very young, had done the things that were high credential,” Truell said.

But the hires who stood out — and stuck around — didn’t always fit that mold. Some were later in their careers or looked “slightly different from being straight out of central casting,” he added.

Truell said his early hiring lessons were “hard-won.” It took time to refine what “greatness” looked like, how to spot it, and how to persuade someone to come on board.

“We kind of spent a bunch of time on the wrong profile,” he said. “We were lucky early on to find fantastic people willing to do this with us, who were later-careered.”

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