Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students

Michael Truell on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. At 24, Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding, hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu, he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders, why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code, and how Cursor is taking on GitHub Copilot with the conviction that all of software development will flow through models. Chapters: 00:38 – PG essays & first code 02:36 – Games, robots, and hacking ML as a teenager 06:54 – From Hemisphere to Cursor: first startup attempts 09:54 – Pivoting hard when nothing was working 12:04 – Taking on GitHub Copilot 13:10 – Shipping the first Cursor editor 15:24 – Early lessons: features, feedback, and VS Code shift 16:26 – Codex, custom models, and pragmatic bets 17:58 – Wandering in 2023 20:00 – Breakthrough: $1M → $100M in a year 22:46 – Word of mouth and wildfire growth 25:24 – The future of coding and advice for students