A 25-year-old ex-hedge fund intern made members of his Discord server AI millionaires
Cursor CEO Michael Truell is one of the youngest founders in the AI space, building Cursor shortly after graduating from MIT. Today, he's 25, and recently announced Cursor is being bought by SpaceX for $60bn. Cursor's earliest employees are presumably millionaires, although they joined in unconventional circumstances.
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In a keynote speech recently released by Cursor on YouTube, Truell said that, when looking to expand beyond its four person team, Cursor "actually hired many members of [a] Discord server" it created to grow the Cursor community. It was started in February 2023 and has grown to over 37,000 users, but presumably had far fewer at the time.
This doesn't mean Truell, an ex-Two Sigma intern, was just hiring his buddies. Business Insider reported last week that Cursor had an intense hiring process involving 'trial periods' of up to a month long. These involved completing projects on a frozen version of Cursor's codebase. Candidates had mixed success; one allegedly worked there for a month, met almost every member of the team, and still didn't get hired. Other startups like digibank Bunq operate similar programs, but theirs last for days, not weeks.
If you get in, there's no guarantee you'll survive. The culture at Cursor sounds intense. One ex-employee told Business Insider that they once received an email late into the night demanding that they prepare a series of coding projects for 9am the next morning.
Cursor listed the names of its early team last year, which included ex-Meta VR researchers, Cornell professors and Minecraft game-engine designers. It's not clear which of them were Discord members prior to joining. Business Insider said Truell would also search for top engineers on GitHub and Twitter.
How much did those early employees make? Data from cap table management platform Carta suggests that the first six employees at tech startups tend to earn ~0.3% of total stock or more. At a $60bn valuation, this would equate to $180m. Early Cursor hires may have earned less than this; the firm had a founding team of four, which is unusual and may have diluted stock offers for other early-stage hires. Cursor also received billions in VC funding before the acquisition, including a $2.3bn series D round, which can dilute earning potential even further. Still, it's likely that these early employees made multiple millions at least.
SpaceX is acquiring Cursor in an all-stock deal, meaning that those employees can't actually cash in for ~6 months. Despite a sizeable pop at its IPO, SpaceX stock is currently down ~4% from launch. Cursor employees are presumably among those hoping that the trajectory changes in the near future.
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