First Block: Interview with Michael Truell, Co-Founder & CEO of Cursor

Welcome to First Block, a Notion series where founders from the world’s leading companies tell us what it was like to navigate the many firsts of their startup journey — and what they learned from that experience. In this episode, we spoke with Michael Truell, Co-founder and CEO of Cursor, an AI code editor that has gone from side project to one of the fastest-growing AI tools in the developer world in under a year. Michael shares why they started with a solution in search of a problem, ignored conventional advice, and focused obsessively on product over everything else. From a 4-person founding team to hiring just one person every few months, their unorthodox path laid the foundation for breakout growth. For video, transcripts, and custom Notion Cursor templates, please visit: ⁠ To learn more about how Notion is supporting startups, please visit: ⁠ Timestamps 00:00 : Intro 02:18 : The original spark and false start in mechanical engineering 05:53 : The pivot moment to developer tools 06:45 : The decision to fork VS Code 08:45 : Building AI-native coding tools and the balance between speed and control 12:24 : Cursor's explosive growth trajectory 13:41 : Early mistakes and lessons learned 14:16 : Hiring philosophy and building the first team 17:08 : Internal tools and operational philosophy 19:01 : Maintaining focus in a hyper-fast environment 20:53 : Advice for founders building in the AI era

You can listen to First Block: Interview with Michael Truell, Co-Founder & CEO of Cursor online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

First Block: Interview with Michael Truell, Co-Founder & CEO of Cursor is an episode from Tools & Craft Podcast by Notion.

This episode is 00:23:31 long.

This episode was published on Jun 17, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Tools & Craft Podcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.