Cursor courted top engineers by flying across the world to meet them and making up dinners — even after they said no

• Cursor's CEO said the team flew across the world and made up dinners to court top engineers.
• The startup will "do anything possible to get the most talented people," Michael Truell said.
• Truell also said that Cursor uses a two-day on-site work trial to test candidates' skills and fit.

When most companies get turned down by a job candidate, they move on.

Cursor flew across the world to win them over.

Cursor's CEO, Michael Truell, said on an episode of the a16z podcast published Monday that his team pulled off "crazy recruiting stunts" to build its first 10 hires.

That included "flying across the world to the person after they say no" — and even making up a dinner with researchers to lure them back into conversation, Truell said.

"They end up being one of the best people on the team," he added.

Cursor has also brought in talent through acquisitions, a strategy Truell said is consistent with the startup's approach to "do anything possible to get the most talented people."

"Sometimes, you know, either conveniently or inconveniently, those people are working on companies," he added.

Last year, Cursor acquired Supermaven, an AI coding assistant. Supermaven was founded in 2023 by Jacob Jackson, a former researcher at OpenAI.

"We have a lot to do, and it seems like we can build a more useful product, faster, together," Cursor said in a blog post last November announcing the deal. The company did not disclose the value of the acquisition.

Anysphere, Cursor's parent company, employs about 150 people, Truell said on the show "Decoder" in August.

Anysphere raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation, the company said in June. The company lists Stripe, Instacart, and Shopify as customers.

Truell's comments come as well-funded AI startups and deep-pocketed Big Tech companies sparked a hiring frenzy earlier this year.

Meta made headlines in June for shelling out $100 million signing bonuses to secure hires in the cutthroat AI race.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a June podcast that he found it "crazy" that Meta was willing to spend so much to acquire talent.

"I don't think that's going to set up a great culture," Altman said on the podcast.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on an episode of the "Decoder" podcast in June that the AI talent war feels "like an NBA."

"There's going to be a few individual stars who are having so much leverage," he added.

Cursor's two-day work trial

Truell said on the a16z podcast that every candidate who joins the engineering or design teams completes a two-day on-site work trial.

Instead of traditional whiteboard interviews, candidates are given a desk, a laptop, and a frozen version of the company's codebase — then told to work on projects.

"It really gives us a lot of signal on raw technical skills needed to be successful in our environment," Truell said.

He added that the trial also functions as a "cultural interview." Candidates spend meals with the team and get a feel for Cursor's environment, while the startup assesses whether both sides would actually want to work together.

Truell said on an episode of Y Combinator's podcast, published in June, that the two-day on-site helps the company spot people who are passionate about the "problem space," rather than just shopping around for a job.

"You're probably not going to be super willing to do that if you're maybe just viewing it as a job and you're applying to a bunch of technology companies at the same time," he said.

Truell added that Cursor hires engineers who are eager to experiment and that the company supports "bottom-up experimentation" — sometimes even sectioning off teams to build independently.