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Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

cursor.com

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Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#41

Post by wongarsu »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #5

The average series D is 50-100M. This is 2.3B. I'm wondering if AI coding companies almost NEED to be this capital heavy to pay for the massive LLM costs.

Being this capital heavy also "justifies" their valuations. New shares issued in each funding round are typically around 10% of total shares, so to get to a valuation of $30B you have to raise something around $3B

Of course you could also just spend your money wisely and not do another funding round, but then how are people supposed to know how much you are worth? And how are investors supposed to know they made a great investment?

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#43

Post by swyx »

bouk wrote: post #34
jebarker wrote: post #25

> We’ve grown to a team of over 300 engineers, researchers, designers, and operators That last word, operators, I have seen used multiple times over the past couple of weeks to refer to managers and politicians. Is that the usage here too? If so, is this a new trend in the tech world? I’ve certainly heard of “political operators” in TV shows about Washington DC, but the usage in tech is new to me.

HR, finance, sales any non engineer is called an operator these days basically

i think its a bit of a VC lingo that i dislike seeing adopted by actual... operators. it casts the world into two: either you own a business, or you operate one. that makes it look like a 50-50 choice that is usually a valid option for a privileged few. also if the world actually looked like that then we'd have a lot less building going on and there are too many VCs already.

instead I propose to call VC's "non-operator characters" and see how they feel about that

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#45

Post by swyx »

nr378 wrote: post #6

> Today, we’re pleased to announce a new round of financing: our Series D of $2.3B at a $29.3B post-money valuation. > We’ve also crossed $1B in annualized revenue A 30x revenue multiple on (presumably) relatively low-margin revenue is certainly punchy. One wonders how much of their $1bn of ARR they're paying straight through to Claude/Anthropic.

fwiw the current going rate for frontier agent labs and model labs is 50x. 30x is actually a discount presumably for size. obviously that can go down, but if you avoided investing based on multiples you were an absolute fool for the last 3 years.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#46

Post by swyx »

CactusBlue wrote: post #8
garettmd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they have built their own model: https://cursor.com/blog/composer And presumably they'll use the funding to build more than just a modified VSCode.

most likely a finetune of existing model

yeah its not fair to call it a finetune because finetune carries connotation of "there wasnt that much extra compute and data added". RLFT has a lot more added to it as Sasha alluded in his talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md8D8eNj5JM - the x axis is log scale, think about that

the framing here is more about "why would you start from random weights when perfectly good starting weights exist" https://www.latent.space/p/fastai

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#47

Post by swyx »

nowflux wrote: post #44

"Our in-house models now generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world" How do they know how much code is generated by other LLMs outside Cursor?

can pretty much triangulate across openrouter x feedback from the top 3 model labs to compare with internal usage and figure that out

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#48

Post by CuriouslyC »

camdenreslink wrote: post #31
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they delivered something that is usable and useful for me and my team, and a lot of people I know, and I guess that’s what counts in business?

That is all well and good, but I think it's a fair question in terms of valuation. What is their moat other than momentum?

They don't have one. People have been calling this out for a while.

They're also royally screwed since the IDE is going to cease being the place this work is done soon. Your VCS and org chat will be the new IDE.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#49

Post by swyx »

david38 wrote: post #26
bko wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

300 employees, let's say average salary of 300k? $90m in employee expenses so that's neglible. Prob burning through 200% of revenue which I've seen elsewhere. But they also probably spend a fair amount training their own model. I don't think it's foundation model. But it's pretty fair to assume that $1bn revenue is about $2bn to Anthropic/GPT/Grok

$300k most def too high

its higher

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#50

Post by hashim-warren »

nowflux wrote: post #44

"Our in-house models now generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world" How do they know how much code is generated by other LLMs outside Cursor?

It's a vanity metric. And if it had any basis in reality, they would have mentioned it in the sentence.
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