Company Culture
This is a detailed look inside Cursor from Brie Wolfson, who embedded with the company for 60 days. She previously worked at Stripe and Figma in their early days and recognized that same magic at Cursor.
"No generational company has ever been started in the AI era, and I think Cursor has a shot at becoming one."
Cursor's San Francisco headquarters is in North Beach, the only startup around. It feels like a college common room/dining hall. No Cursor logo outside, no corporate posters, no one wearing Cursor swag, very few Cursor stickers on laptops.
There are chalkboards instead of whiteboards (company president Oskar Schulz will tell you all about where he sources the best chalk), and the furniture is a hodge-podge procured from a retired techie in the East Bay with a European vintage furniture obsession. The walls are stacked with books—many of them textbooks, with creased spines and other signs of actual use.
It can all feel very chipmunks in trenchcoats. But it is undeniably unpretentious.
86% of the company works from SF HQ or the new New York office. If you want someone's help with something, it's best to tap them on the shoulder. Slack messages and meetings are less reliable. There are very few scheduled meetings—the company protects time for deep work. When asked about helpful documents: "Cursor has more of a spoken-word culture."
At 1pm, six days a week, lunch is served by Fausto, the company's beloved chef, and everyone gathers around communal tables. The rumor about Fausto is that at one point he tried to quit because it was too stressful to come up with the menu every day for a team doubling in size every few weeks. To help, someone on the Cursor team created an AI menu generator for him to lean on. Now he's in Slack with the rest of the team, sharing new dishes and taking requests.
The conversation at lunch is mostly about work, broadly defined. People enjoy getting to know each other through the way they think about stuff—Cursor projects, ideas they're untangling, or musing about the future of the product.
When asked what he's most concerned about when it comes to company-building, co-founder Sualeh Asif responded: "People start talking about the weather at meals."
Cursor's secret to recruiting is to treat the atomic unit of the hiring process as a person, not a job spec.
At most companies: identify a hole, open a job, source a list, interview, hire one, start them a couple months out.
At Cursor: post the name of someone really, really good in the #hiring-ideas channel, swarm that person with attention, conduct interviews, and if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday.
"Not looking right now? No problem. Let's just do a little project together" is a common refrain. Another go-to tactic: suggest "just dropping by HQ some time," on the accurate assumption that time in the office is often a magical moment for recruits.
As one founder friend put it, "they're pulling the pain forward." The acceptance rate at Cursor makes elite colleges look like summer camp. Cursor's leadership team signs off on every hire.
Compelling Mission + Hardcore Technical Problems + Winning + Excellent Recruiting = Off-The-Charts Talent Density
A seemingly silly but non-trivial example: the office staircase is quite steep, yet has no railing. When asked about this oddity, the response was: "People know how to walk up stairs."
Michael often says he wants Cursor to be a "haven for self-motivated individual contributors." IC is genuinely the highest-status position at the company. Co-founder Aman Sanger remains a proud IC—the enduring image is of him tucked away in a corner of the office coding, mostly uninterrupted, all day long.
One new hire on sales remarked: "At my last company, it took 30 days before I was allowed on the phone with a customer. Here it took less than 30 hours."
When enthusiasm started bubbling up over what Cursor could do in the browser, a small group raised their hands to tackle the challenge over a weekend. The team: Ian Huang (tenured engineer, recent-ish graduate), Andrew Milich (former founder, creator of Notion Mail), Lukas Möller (built most of the Cursor CLI in 10 days), and Baltazar Zuniga (known to "settle decisions in code versus meetings").
"We put everything down, went into full focus and accountability mode, and worked together in the office until it was done. It was one of the most fun experiences I've ever had at work in my life." — Andrew Milich
Despite a young average age, the team is warm, well-dressed, keen on eye contact, clear and respectful in communication, and assiduous about replacing empty toilet paper rolls on the dispenser of the shared bathrooms.
Many team members create "brain" channels in Slack where they publish personal musings. Recent examples include musings on whether "CMSes are an artifact of the pre-AI era," deeply considered readouts from customer visits, and exacting friction logs on still-nascent Cursor products.
You won't see much LFGGGGGG, talk of being "cracked," or overuse of emojis or memes. The most used reaction emoji is a heart. No one ever breaks character. No one raises their voices, gets angsty or flustered, or visibly panics when things go sideways. It all feels very...adult.
Somewhat recently, a mishap caused a relatively gnarly outage. The person responsible posted: "Sorry folks, I prepared a lot and made this change as safely and coordinated as I could think to do it." Lots of people piled on with hearts. The first reply: "It was great that we had the revert ready to go quickly! We'll postmortem but this type of change is inherently risky and we'll brainstorm ways to do better in the future."
Many people who visit the office observe how "calm" the vibe is. Employees laugh when they hear this: "It's the duck under water thing."
The main thing people "know" about Cursor is how hard people work. Some cite 9-9-6 (9am–9pm, 6 days a week). This is not reflective of how the company thinks about work. There is no 9-9-6 mandate.
There is, however, a meaningful percentage of the team that loves what they do and cares about their work so much that they just work a lot. The pace and volume of work is entirely self-imposed.
Pace and work ethic are among the most contagious norms: If your colleagues move fast, you do. If your colleagues are responsive on Slack, you are. If your colleagues go home for dinner, you do. If your colleagues come into the office on Saturday, you do. The default setting at Cursor is fast.
"Cursor probably ranks the highest in the world in terms of the average number of hours using the company's main product per employee per week. The only real contender might be Apple with their Macs and iPhones."
A perfectly good reason to work on something (arguably the best reason) is you personally want a feature to exist. Beloved features like Tab, CmdK, Agent, Bugbot, and Background Agent were all built this way.
The #braintrust Slack channel includes everyone at the company. People use it to get feedback on what they're building, often in the form of emoji votes. A real example: "cmd k – edit full file – green = REMOVE and red = 'I use this and need it.'"
The version of Cursor the team uses internally is about three months ahead of the one users see, while the team works out the kinks of new features.
When a big ship is imminent (a new client release or website update), everyone gets in a room and tries to break it.
The call begins with a Slack message: "Fuzz session on x happening now in the basement." While people are sometimes lured with donuts or bagels, the team feels great ownership of preventing a buggy release.
"Take responsibility for bugs. Mistakes happen, but every bug we ship to users is a disappointment. We are asking users to code in Cursor all day, every day, and bugs or performance problems are easy ways to make them switch."
Aside from the clack of fingers on keyboards, fuzz is silent, as people spend 60 minutes identifying bugs, UI nits, unconsidered edge-cases, or unpolished corners worth fixing.
People poke and prod each other's work a lot. Top builders know what great products feel like, so people get very opinionated about how things should work. They'll liberally offer feedback on what is missing to hit the bar, and extra hands to help get there.
Michael is always encouraging "spicy questions" during company Q&A. Sualeh is known to DM people the question: "What are you worried about right now?"
Asked what he wanted the company to feel like, Michael answered with a question: "Have you ever seen that Beatles documentary?" referring to Get Back, where the most famous band of all time locks themselves in a studio with a three-week clock and iterates their way to "Let It Be."
Greatness is created through the collision of little sparks, ignited by people at the peak of the craft who care a lot and won't stop working until it gets there.
Cursor is adamant about its ideal customer profile being the best professional software developers. The company's stance: other companies can focus on lowering the floor, while Cursor will focus on raising the ceiling.
"Democratize x" would make for an easy marketing win, but Cursor is willing to prioritize product precision over warm-and-fuzzy marketing.
On engineering interviews: "it's hard to show off how good you are on something too easy," and they're "willing to accept false negatives to avoid false positives."
The company's product story is all about developer productivity. But the thing the people at Cursor actually care about is code, and code generation as the fabric of the world.
Until working at Cursor, Wolfson hadn't fully internalized to what extent progress is bottlenecked on our ability to build excellent software.
While there is acknowledgement around the company's gobsmacking revenue, growth, and sales victories, what really gets people going are developments in the product, healthy performance, reliability, and elegant UI.
One very early employee reflected on the day the company hit $100mn ARR. People reacted with hearts, some added a 100 emoji, "but conversation in the office was business as usual."
During my fall at Cursor, I overheard zero chatter from employees about getting rich. At Stripe and Figma (and most other startups), this was a favorite lunch table topic. I think it's because the thing most of them would do if they could retire tomorrow would be whatever they're doing now at Cursor.