Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO turned a Discord server into a talent pipeline to build his $60 billion SpaceX-backed AI company

When Space X agreed to buy Cursor for $60 billion, it cemented Michael Truell’s status as one of Silicon Valley’s youngest breakout CEOs. The 25‑year‑old founder had already turned an AI coding project into a staple for enterprise developers and built a hiring funnel out of the community that grew up around it. That wasn’t obvious when he and three fellow programmers first started Anysphere (Cursor’s parent company) in early 2022, which Truell called the “prehistoric times” of AI in a keynote speech at Cursor’s inaugural Compile conference published Monday. At the time, Big Tech companies and well-funded labs were already developing AI coding tools, and the four founders, all in their early 20s, were wary of entering such a crowded field. “We thought, there’s just, there’s no room, there’s not much to do, people have got that covered,” he said. “And we kind of went about our way during 2022, worked on a series of projects.” But eventually they caught “the bug” and returned to the product they actually wanted to build themselves: an AI-powered development environment they liked enough to use every day. They went heads‑down to build it. Truell has described the team as “in a cave,” coding the prototype “in our underwear” for roughly two weeks to get it together at the end of 2022. The first version of Cursor, released at the beginning of 2023, was something the founders finished by “cobbling together” the program in about two weeks. The initial feedback was rough. Truell says the first user didn’t like the product, and the second didn’t either. Some early testers “ran away from us kicking and screaming.” But a few developers stuck with Cursor and began “daily driving” it, which was enough to start a tight feedback loop in which the team iterated constantly on the product for themselves and for that small community. The next phase of Cursor’s community was on Discord. “We actually hired many members of [the] Discord server,” Truell said. The Disc