Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…tle bit of a blind man and the elephant problem from the get-go. There were problems around, how would you actually take the models that exist to today and make them useful for mechanical engineering? The way we netted out is, you need to actually develop your own models from the get-go. And the way we did that was tricky, and there's not a lot of data on the internet of 3D models of different tools and parts, and the steps that I expect to build up to those 3D models, and then getting them from the sources that have them is also a tricky process too. But eventually what happened was, we came to our senses, we realized we're not super excited about mechanical engineering, it's not the thing we want to dedicate our lives to. And we looked around, and in the area of programming, it felt like despite a decent amount of time ensuing, not much has changed, and it felt like the people that were working on the space maybe had a disconnect with us, and it felt like they weren't being sufficiently ambitious about where everything was going to go in the future, and how all of software creation was going to blow through these models. And that's what set us off on the path to building Cursor. Okay. So interesting. Okay, so first of all, I love that... This is advice that you often hear of go after a boring industry because no one's going to be there, and there's opportunity. And sometimes it works, but I love that in this journey, it's like, "No, actually, go after the hottest, most popular space, AI coding, app building. " And it worked out. And the way you phrased it just now is, you didn't see enough ambition potentially, that you thought there was more to be done. So it feels like that's an interesting lesson. Even if something looks like, "Okay, it's too late, there's GitHub, Code Pilot's out there." Some other products. If you notice that they're just not as ambitious as they could be, or as you are, or you see almost a flaw in their approach, that there's still a big opportunity. Does that resonate? That totally resonates. A part of it is, you need there to be leapfrogs that can happen, you need there to be things that you can do. And I think the exciting thing about AI is, in a bunch of places, and I think this is very much still true of our space, and can talk about how we think about that and how we deal with that, but I think that just the ceiling is really high. And yes, if you look around, probably even if you take the best tool, any of these fields, there should be a lot more that needs to be done over the next few years. Having that space, having that high ceiling, I think is unique amongst areas of software, at least the degree to which it is high with AI.…

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