No logo, no recruitment JD, no root of all evil KPI.
On the contrary, everyone takes the initiative to work 996, writing code to find fault with each other, and even the most stressed person in the company is not the programmer, but the cook
I have been reborn, reborn in the grassroots era of Cursor.
To know the cursor at this stage, it is necessary to identify the star companies:
In less than two years since its establishment, its valuation has exceeded billions of dollars. Once it was launched, it ignited “atmosphere programming” across the entire network, not only making coding faster, but also redefining the concept of coding.
But it was this AI programming unicorn that changed the world, and no one expected that the early working atmosphere would be completely unconventional.
And these pieces of information all come from someone who has been undercover in the cursor for two months.
1、 Not hiring positions, only hiring the strongest people
The recruitment process of cursor is different from that of typical Silicon Valley recruitment. Their logic is to first recruit the strongest people and then decide what to let them do.
The traditional recruitment process may be like: discovering job vacancies → opening recruitment → interviewing → hiring → onboarding → END.
But at cursor, every employee is a headhunter who also serves as HR.
They did not have a clear job description for JD, but instead focused on discussing on Slack’s internal recruitment channel who is the most talented person they have ever met.
For example, when they are excited to discover that a client has personally held a cursor seminar or is still writing code with cursor at night, they will offer an olive branch: Family, come and work at cursor!
For example, when a new company goes bankrupt or Meta lays off employees, employees of cursor will flock to it, or they will surf and come across interesting new products or blogs. They will post the creator’s name on the channel and add a sentence: Should we hire this person?
Once everyone thinks the candidate is good, the next step will be to develop a strategy and approach them.
The member of the team who is most familiar with this person will be appointed as the temporary HR and will attempt to communicate with him. If the other party expresses the same idea, then Zhou will continue to join the job.
If the other party does not want to change jobs temporarily, then Plan B: attract them to do some small projects first, or Plan C: welcome to visit the headquarters.
And as long as one is successfully “tricked” into coming to the headquarters, it’s like a rabbit entering a wolf’s den, directly conducting a surprise interview
By the way, the undercover agent herself was captured by the cursor. At first, she just wanted to talk to the cursor team about marketing strategies, but by a twist of fate, the cursor team took a direct eye on her and handed her an offer.
However, not all big shots will gladly accept an offer. At this point, Cursor will use their cash power to give first generation Macs to Apple fans and coffee machines to newly moved ladies. If it doesn’t work, then the founder will have to go back and forth.
In just two years, relying on unconventional recruitment methods, the team members quickly expanded from 20 to 250, with one-fifth of them having founder experience. Nearly 40% of them came from Ivy League universities such as MIT and Harvard, and the rest mostly came from companies such as Figma and GitHub.
A group of talented individuals gather together, but there won’t be any difficult management issues because cursor doesn’t care at all… Compared to a standardized company with clear division of labor and strict management, cursor is more like a harbor for individual contributors (IC).
IC is the highest position in the company, and even the founder hides in the corner programming every day. The promotion of work relies entirely on personal enthusiasm, and even the most difficult tasks are only assigned to the most suitable people to complete them.
After all, in cursor, ability comes first.
2、 No KPI, but spontaneous 996 work schedule
Do you want to talk about the cursor roll? Roll up!
But it’s not mandatory 996 by the company, it’s up to the employees themselves.
No one asked them to work overtime, but they generally spontaneously come to the company on weekends. For example, recently when they wanted to implement the cursor function in their browser, some people took the initiative to come and say that they would come to conquer it on weekends.
And similar things happen all the time in Cursor company.
During lunchtime, they gathered together to chat about their work, including the projects they were working on, the ideas they were trying to clarify, and their thoughts on the future of their products and industry.
As long as you stay at the dining table for 30 minutes, you will see new people sitting down and old people leaving, filled with various interesting ideas.
The founder of the company, Sualeh Asif, is pleased with this phenomenon. According to him, he is most concerned about people starting to discuss the weather during meals, as it indicates that the company is not far from decline.
Indeed, there are also some people who have some reservations about this – the chef of cursor. The fast-paced environment of the company put a lot of pressure on him. In order to retain him, Cursor also developed an AI menu generator specifically for him to alleviate his burden.
Now, even the chef of cursor is a senior agent.
However, despite the overall fast pace, the company’s internal culture appears quite old-fashioned.
Emphasizing face-to-face communication, almost all employees work in the office. If there is any difficulty that needs help, then walking up to the other person and patting their shoulder is much faster than working from home or remote meetings.
So when you walk into Cursor’s office, you will always see two or three people forming a group, discussing fiercely at their desks, and the blackboard next to them is filled with formulas written in chalk.
There is no obvious cursor logo in the office area, no one is wearing a cursor culture shirt, and there are even no company promotional posters posted. The furniture is also antique, and the walls are filled with used books… It’s like a common room in a university, not the classic appearance of a startup company.
So the cursor is more like a group of extremely intelligent and curious people, in the same kitchen, eating while creating the future.
They are able to fully devote themselves to their work without being affected by KPIs or 996.
3、 Cursor’s product philosophy: Raise the ceiling, not lower the threshold
Unlike other AI programming tools on the market, cursor has its own set of logic for product development:
We don’t want more people to write code, but to make the strongest developers stronger.
They hope that the product is intended for professional software developers, who can completely change the traditional paradigm of software construction through their use.
Phrases like ‘lowering the threshold’ and ‘allowing everyone to write code’ may be appreciated by the market, but they are not the focus of cursor. What cursor really wants to do is to increase the upper limit of AI programming products.
It is precisely because of this that when interviewing candidates, they directly drag the written test to hellish difficulty. They feel that the questions are too simple and it is difficult to show their advantages.
In addition, they have always adhered to the Dogfooding culture within the company: from bottom to top, making employees the most core testing group.
Almost everyone uses Cursors to write Cursors every day, for example, marketing teams use Cursors for internal tasks such as website updates and dashboard creation; Less serious, they will use Cursor to create wedding websites for team members and fun games for feeding snacks to office dogs.
From the perspective of ordinary users, employees will be able to provide better product feedback and modification suggestions. Then they will prioritize sending the new features they need to Cursor’s internal version testing (usually, the internal version is three months ahead of the public version).
Once the functionality is collectively recognized internally, the next step will be to promote it to the market, such as Tab, CMDK, Agent, and other highly acclaimed features developed in this way.
Before each new version release, Cursor also holds a ceremony called “Fuzz”: dozens of people squeeze into a small room and spend an hour frantically searching for bugs.
Everyone will ruthlessly nitpick and criticize each other’s work, openly point out what the project still lacks to meet the standards, and actively lend a helping hand to provide assistance. Among them, they are both critics and problem solvers.
In the words of the founder, the output environment of Cursor is “micro pessimism, macro optimism”, and the pickiness at the execution level is to create something of great significance.
After the argument, an extremely lengthy to-do list will be compiled and handed over to the product team, followed by an endless night of bug fixes waiting for them. Usually, the person who first discovers these bugs will also accompany them. (Touching colleagues’ emotions)
4、 The Magic of Cursor Driven by Mission
So what supports them to do so? Fundamentally, it is still for the sake of the mission.
Everyone in cursor truly cares about code and the code generation that serves as the foundation of the world.
Unlike other companies in Silicon Valley, there is hardly anyone discussing stock options, cash out, or buying a house here. They only talk about products, code, and how to do better.
The pure research environment makes the mission particularly real in Cursor. Their aspirations are to create practical, reliable, and aesthetically pleasing software, to give every developer high precision control at all levels, to bridge the language barrier between humans and AI, and to make the development process more artistic and aesthetically pleasing.
It is precisely because of the same mission that cursor has become a dark horse in the industry in just two years.
In terms of products, it captures the real pain points of AI programming, not just the traditional completion of code, but truly integrating into the development process, understanding context, and actively collaborating.
It can help read documents, generate tests, understand bugs, and also call different models and manage knowledge bases, similar to a fusion of “GitHub+VSCode+GPT”.
So even netizens say:
After using cursor, I felt for the first time that AI really understands code.
Supporting natural language commands and emphasizing direct coding experience, the cursor team quickly captured the market through rapid iteration and timely response to user needs.
From a revenue perspective, cursor is one of the fastest-growing companies in history.
Without a sales team, the annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased from $0 to $100 million, and the subsequently formed sales team is determined to increase this number by another zero by the end of 2025. The total valuation of the company has also reached the billion dollar mark.
But commercial success is just a floating cloud for cursor.
An employee recalled that on the day when the company’s ARR reached $100 million, everyone’s reaction was ordinary, at most sending some love on the company channel ❤️ Or 100 emojis, and then work as usual.
At cursor, financial benefits are far less important than mission, and this is the source of cursor magic.
Not valuation, not financing, but a culture of redefining work from first principles. When chasing after scale, models, and valuations blindly, cursor chose another path:
First make the product, then talk about the revolution.
Perhaps this is the most likely appearance of the ‘next generation of great companies’ in the era of generative AI.
Reference link: [1] https://x.com/zebriez/status/1986510506199556395 [2] https://joincolossus.com/article/inside-cursor/ [3] https://x.com/dotey/status/1986985829701484563?s=46&t=fzKJptGJMpr -yj3MUXd6HA
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