In many ways, Cursor CEO Michael Truell is Gen Z’s Patrick Collison.
It’s something I’ve heard a few people say and it’s fitting: Truell’s a 25-year-old red-haired coder, known for his technical chops and intellectual bent. When I spoke to Truell, he even had a framed photo of legendary biographer Robert Caro looming over him. I thought about this, as I was writing the feature I just published on Cursor:
Not many 25-year-old CEOs have a photo of Robert Caro over their desks. Michael Truell does. As Truell takes a Zoom call, the image of Caro—legendary biographer of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, known for his exhaustive, decades-long research—looms over his shoulder, sweatered, bespectacled, writing intently.
They make an incongruous pairing. Truell, the CEO of $29.3 billion AI coding company Cursor, is just a few years out of MIT and widely viewed as a rock star coder’s coder. Soft-spoken with a spine, Truell is unnervingly young and looks perhaps even younger, but he’s guided Cursor to a rapid-fire rise. Today, Cursor is used by 67% of the Fortune 500, with its platform every day generating 150 million lines of enterprise code.
I would have expected Truell to admire Apple’s Steve Wozniak, or Jensen Huang. But it’s Caro who Truell wants to watch over him.
There’s an irony here: Truell admires work that takes decades, but he runs a quintessential startup of the AI era—a world defined by compressed, vertiginous speed. Slow down for even a week, and you might get left behind. And right now, that could be happening to Cursor.
Truell’s living in the vortex of one of tech’s biggest questions: Who will survive the AI bubble? And Cursor, if the tweets of the last few weeks are to be believed, is “dead.”
“I’ve been terminally online all my life, I’ve been a VC who’s been terminally online for ten years, and I’ve never, ever seen X so disconnected from reality as I have in the last year,” Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz general partner and Cursor board member, told me in the reporting process. “There’s nothing in the Cursor numbers that would suggest there’s anything but total success right now. If we use X for truth, we’re starting from the wrong spot.”
Social media, I happen to agree, is a terrible starting place for truth. But the X-fueled ruckus of the last few weeks does, if you peel back the layers, show that Cursor’s rise and fragile future is nuanced. And it’s a tale entirely specific to the whirling dervish of the AI era.
My hope is that the story is a time capsule, one we can all dig up in a few years, knowing the answers to the questions it raises.
Read it here, and catch it on newsstands soon.
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Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
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