Ali Partovi posted on X about the pre-history of Cursor, explaining the untold story behind the success of Michael Truell and Arman Sanger. I find these stories fascinating, not just because I’m at a relatable age in my life, but because great pre-history stories often get eclipsed by the vanity of net-worth and fundraising headlines.
You don’t become a billionaire at 25 by getting lucky, regardless of how many four-leaf clovers lay flat beneath your pillow. Success that early has to be predicated on years of mentorship. The ancient proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” feels right here.
Take Zuck for an example. The entire gen-z world only views him as the 19-year old founder who built Facebook from his dorm, and not the young experimentalist that had an acquisition offer from Microsoft at 18 for his Synapse music player (which he co-built with Quora’s Adam D’Angelo). They declined the million dollar offer, released the software for free, and went to college. They probably saw a higher ROI to keep the company independent, which is an awesome decision to make straight out of school. Not just any school either, Phillips Exeter Academy was a preparatory school which is an important detail. Perhaps that guided him in his early years to discover extreme discipline.
How many people aspire to be like Zuck and still don’t know the story beyond The Social Network movie? Refusing to start working in your late teens is different to turning down job offers. One is a gift, the other is siloing yourself around confirmation bias.
Similarly, Michael’s mentors discovered him quite young, he was only 18. As an MIT undergrad and mathematician he was clearly very intelligent and possessed great problem solving skills. You’re going to need these when you’re in the idea maze (the first year or so) of building the next thing, it’s one problem after another, forming a chain of entangled problems. Even better, it’s a tower of Hanoi of problems, where the diameter of the disks correlates to the size of the problem. If the largest disk is formal verification, the smallest might be an AI physiotherapist, or something like that. It’s surprisingly difficult to solve that Tower of Hanoi with zero confirmation or anchor bias.
Untangling complex ideas is a solid strategy to finding the right problem to work on. The gnarly and hairy problems are often the ones with the least competition, and in turn the most opportunity (if tractable). AI coding might seem like an easy problem on the surface, since apparently anyone can fork VSCode and build their own Cursor. There can only be a handful of winners, because capitalism concentrates power. The Hanoi disk for AI coding might not be the largest when it comes to getting started, but scaling and competing internationally, that disk doesn’t fit on the Hanoi board. Only a few months ago Michael said he’d keep the company private as long as possible, but he made the right decision to join Elon. When one of your biggest competitors is raising a 12 figure round, and your entire industry is their sub-market… well it doesn’t give you a lot of options.
That’s to say Michael had Ali Partovi, Zuck had Sean Parker and Peter Thiel — all in their teens. Every young successful entrepreneur struck out early because they started early.
I’m still on my search. I’ve been very lucky to be surrounded by some amazing folks here in Australia, who are the best in their respective fields but I’m hungry and I want to keep learning. It’s not just about intelligence, having a good heart sounds cliche but it’s something you start to value more as you mature.
Right now I feel trapped between ego and vanity.
Those who talk about the raise before the impact on humanity.
Those who talk about the money before the team.
Those who think about the Lex Friedman interview before they’ve even built a product.
My search must continue, and hopefully never end.