The rise and uncertain future of $29 billion AI coding startup Cursor

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........

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