Press Space to continue
Press Space to continue
Here is an easy way for founders who are overwhelmed or have too much on their plate: get the focus back on product. Most AI companies lean so heavily into research that the product work feels secondary. Remember that a product only improves as fast as the team can ship, measure, and adjust. The quality of that loop depends entirely on the people inside it and the standards they share. The founders at Cursor spend a large share of their time (30%-40%) on hiring and culture. This seemingly…
a16z@a16zAug 21
Martin Casado says Cursor's founders spend 30-40% of their time on hiring and culture, and that focus is how they iterate so fast: "A lot of these AI companies that I work with are so research-heavy. If you're not working on a new model architecture, it's kind of hard to actually interest the core teams." "They always kept the main thing the main thing, which is changing how you write software. They believed fundamentally it was a product problem... The model's very, very important, but it was a product problem." "There's actually not a lot of companies that are actually focused on product... There's a lot of research companies... But they were like, 'We are a product company.' And I think that's actually a key differentiator in this era." @martin_casado w/ @sophiadew and @theojaffee on MTS
