Comment by mattnewton
17 days ago
Congrats to the Cursor team!
When I first saw the company built on top of vscode in such a crowded field way back at the end of 2022, I thought "forget having a moat, they are renting their castle from the invaders!" - I couldn't see how see how a single team could execute well enough to effectively muscle their way in between Microsoft and OpenAI, who at that point looked destined to control the developer ecosystem between GitHub, VsCode and the then-best coding models. I think it's easy to forget how insane this seemed even just a few years ago.
But every year since then they managed to simply ship a better product on the axis that mattered to the most users. And now they are sitting between a huge user base and a massive stream of valuable tokens, they can sell to SpaceX. Incredibly impressive.
I am out of the loop with Cursor. Did they make their own LLM model or do you mean they just capture what is being sent to other models and that is valuable?
They have a few in models that powered the app, including one that applied edits. Recently they also started fine tuning Kimi models under the “composer” brand, and Composer 2.5 is a very cost effective coding model. But I suspect that the real value is in the distribution they have, which is what I primarily meant.
they probably just stole all private codebases cursor ever saw. That + the ARR more than justifies the valuation even without any internal model.