#23 - Cafe Cursor

0:00Ben, thank you for coming on the Never See a Podcast. So you are with Cursor and you're organizing the Cursor pop-ups, which have been pretty cool. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Tell us about yourself. Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. So I'm Ben. I've been working at Cursor for a little less than a year now. And yeah, the pop-ups, actually the idea started off with a pretty simple concept, which was Cursor's office in San Francisco is adjacent to a local cafe called Cafe Francisco. And I think I was just chatting with someone on the team, and we just thought it'd be cool to, like, rent it out for a day and invite users to come work from there and meet the team, meet each other, just build stuff, get some Cursor credits, get some coffee while they're there.

0:50And we did that, and I think people just got really excited about it. And then we did another one in New York, and then we opened it up for people to host these as well themselves. And so I think about 1 ,000 people reached out within a couple days of us posting about that. And now they're really popping up all over the world, which has been cool to see. That's awesome. And actually, how many places have you held cursor pop-ups? I think so far in about 10 cities. That's a lot. Yeah, yeah. But there's a much bigger pipeline now, which is cool to see. That's great. And logistically, is it just that you take over a cafe for a day?

1:27What do you exactly do? Yeah. Put a signage? Yeah. Yeah. We book out a cafe, like usually like a local neighborhood cafe. We book it out for the day and we'll invite our users to come and come work for there for half the day, the whole day. Some folks just want to come by and drop in. And yeah. And so it's like, it's pretty temporary. but I'm hoping to do it like on a, on a recurring basis and, and, you know, in some places and you know, make it a place for, for, for cursor users to meet each other for, for our team to come by and have kind of easy access to like getting feedback and, and, and meeting more of our users and customers.

2:06Yeah, actually, you know, we have a, I have a term for that. It's going from pop-up to permanent. And when you do that, like it's actually, I don't know if you, if you agree with this, but it's surprisingly logistically complicated to do one of these pop-ups, right? Like, I mean, you can, the simplest is you've just got a restaurant or a cafe and, you know, you just say we're renting it out for the day. But then when people come, actually, you know, I have a guess, but I assume it's some fraction of support requests, some fraction of just, you know, feature requests or what have you. And some fraction of I want to just hang out with other people who are interested and use Cursor and get tips and get better at it.

2:47how would you say that breaks down or is it going to be like, you know, what kinds of things do people do? Yeah, I'd say all those things are pretty accurate. I think a lot of people definitely have ideas for ways they want to improve Cursor and they definitely want to share that and share that with the team, which is great. I was surprised by how much folks also just want to connect with each other and see what like other people are building. And it ended up just being a great place for people to just like hang out outside and kind of form these little block parties. is like even after the event, people staying for hours, which is really cool to see.

3:20Oh, it's interesting. Yeah. I think partially like I think it was just attracting like, you know, a certain type of person, people that are obviously like very hardcore cursor power users. And so I think those people tend to like be interested in meeting each other and have, you know, common interests, which has been fun to see. Yeah. I think, I mean, if you know somebody else is also using cursor and is interested enough to come to an in-person meetup, then they're probably somebody who is interested in a bunch of the other technologies that you're also interested in and so on. So even if you, cursor's only ancillary, like, you know, maybe 90 % of the time that they're there, they're just hanging out with people who share their interests because they share interest A and they share interest B, C, D, and E as well, right?

4:05And, you know, tell me about the logistics of it. How far in advance do you have to plan these? Is it just as simple as getting a restaurant? Because for one day, at least in my experience in doing these, a one-day thing is not so bad. You can get a restaurant, put up some signage, and so on. It's kind of built to do that. Once you start going multi-day, especially if there's expectations for the kinds of things people want, especially if people are sleeping there, that becomes way more complicated, right? And if you've got a permanent establishment, now you have to have real estate lease. You have to do all that kind of stuff and whatnot.

4:35So I'd love to know your thoughts on the logistics of it, and maybe you have some ideas there. Yeah. I mean, I would love to eventually experiment with longer than one day. I think that would be interesting and definitely challenging. I mean, part of – I think the most complicated part is we're trying to do this at, like, actual, you know, local neighborhood cafes. And so those places usually have, like, customers. And so actually a big part of it is convincing the cafes that this makes sense to do. Oh, interesting. But you guys can just book them out, right? Yeah, but a lot of places don't want to do that because they want their regulars to come.

5:09And we want, we usually have someone at the door or, you know, someone is there like saying, hey, here for, you know, can you check in? Like here for Cafe Cursor. And so I ended up actually having a lot of really funny interactions with people from doing this a few times where they were like, wait, I'm just coming to my neighborhood cafe. And they were, you know, and then they were just curious to learn more about Cursor. And someone actually knew about Cursor and didn't know about this. And so it was fun to kind of see that happen. And but usually people were like pretty cool, cool about it. And actually, yeah.

5:41So how did you actually it's interesting. So basically, that's interesting dynamic where you guys would sort of want a closed event, kind of right for cursor people. And of course, people could come in off the street who were friendly to that. But if that cafe was not set up to host events, then people walking in would say, what's going on? Oh, it's a private event. Oh, that sucks. I can't get my cup of coffee today. And so there's some cost to their locals. So not all of them want to do it. Is that kind of the thing? Right. Yeah. Because these are not places that really do events. These are just normal cafes, right?

6:19I think that's what also is part of the appeal. It's not doing this at a co-working space or a place where there are meetups. This is just like, you know, a real neighborhood cafe that people come and get like coffee and work and like, you know, come, come, come pretty often. So we're trying to like find places that have like that, you know, more of the local local feel. And I think that's what actually makes it pretty, pretty special. That's interesting. So they're optimized. So you've got almost the fact that they are on the street and they're optimized for street traffic, which is what makes them accessible in the first place, actually makes them a great event venue in that sense because you don't have to drive to them.

6:58They're not like up a flight of stairs. Like, uh, you know, I guess you try to get things on the street level that are facing the street. Exactly. Yeah. So you have the cursor sign. So, so all of those things that make it attractive as a cool pop-up location, make it something which is usually not optimized to be an event location. Totally. Yeah. So interesting. That's why for, for one day it's like, it works well, but I would be very curious to see like if we could do this for a full week, how that would work. I think that would be, that would be really interesting, but it would also come with like a bunch of unique challenges.

7:29Yeah. Let me show you, let me show you some, just things to contextualize what you guys are doing. Maybe this is helpful. So this is a post that I wrote called pop-ups are the new startups. And can you see the screen? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll share this link with you and let me explain basically what I think about what we're doing is printing out the cloud. So here's you guys, Cafe Cursor. Can you see that on screen? Yep. And then here is the Claude pop-up, which you probably heard about as well, right? Then I'll show you a bunch of others that are in. So you guys obviously are in AI. Here's AngelList Founders Cafe.

8:10So this has actually started off, you know, I'd written some essays and stuff. So AngelList actually did set up a permanent cafe that you can go and check out and you can see how that go ahead yep so angel's founders cafe there's steve jobs and wozniak on the wall there this is uh base camp this was actually coinbase you know i was cto on coinbase and uh so this is something that they ran recently which was a sleepover kind of thing where like uh devs would come and actually they took over a whole mini village in like uh vermont I think for a week. Okay. Um, here's, uh, like a Zcash pop-up that we ran at the startup society that I've got here.

8:49And here is, uh, basically an Ethereum pop-up called Zuzulu in Montenegro. Okay. This is a year or two ago. And, and these are like, could you see all those? Do you see all those images? Yeah, yeah, totally. And then here are what I call permanents. So obviously Elon's doing the Tesla diners, right? We have network school, which I'm actually talking to you from, okay, which is basically really, it's set up to be a startup society that bootstraps other startup societies. So like, think of it as a very large pop-up that's meant to create more and more pop-ups. There's obviously Starbase in Texas, Elon's other, you know, physical thing.

9:26And then this is the recent Solana economic zone in Kazakhstan. So these are like crypto zones that are opening. And so about six out of 10 of these, not Tesla, not Starbase, not yours, not Claude, But six out of 10, the other six are crypto things that I was involved with in some way or the other, right, or financings in the case of AngelList. And I think this is actually an important macro trend that you're tapping into. And it's almost like this giant subterranean river. And you got like this burst of energy from it because you found a lot of people were actually interested in coming to these things.

10:04Perhaps there was more interest than you had expected. Would that be correct? Yeah, totally. And so the reason I think that is the case is, as I called it, I think you're printing out the cloud. So just to extend that metaphor, you know, obviously you take a Google Doc and you print it out. But you also take like an Amazon shopping cart and you print that out to your door. Or you have an Uber and you hit a button and you print it out to the curb, right? So now we're taking the cursor social network, which is not really what your site is set up to do, right? Because it's a very solo app, you know.

10:36and you don't necessarily want to add social networking features just for the sake of it. Maybe there's some GitHub lite dev sharing type stuff that you do within a team, but a global social network would probably be too distracting on the cursor site. Probably maybe there's some, something I don't think of. However, in person, that really makes sense. Let me pause there. That's kind of how I think about this area. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. And I mean, I think this is definitely like one, one element. And I mean, I hope like we can do a lot more this year, like next year.

11:05And I think there's, there's ways, like, I think this is what we, the way we've been approaching it is like great for like localized communities. And then I wonder also like how you, you know, how you bring a more of like a global community together. And you know, that's, that's maybe like kind of the, what, what the, the more permanent longer types of types of events that you were sharing. But I think there's definitely a lot, I think there's a lot of demand for that. So I have an idea for you, which is obviously a cursor. You've got SAS. You've got credit cards. You've got subscriptions. You've got subscription behavior.

11:39So you could have a wait list in each city. And if you get enough subscriptions, you add the physical part of the subscription. I love that. And this is what I call it's a new SAS society as a service. Ha ha. That's fun, right? I love that. That's great. Okay. So you add the physical component and you sort of crowdfund it. And when it tips, right, and you have, let's say there's a thousand people who are willing to add another whatever bucks a month for that. And you just break even on these cafes. Frankly, actually AngelList just subsidizes it because it's like, you know, so I was talking to Avlo, who's the CEO of AngelList.

12:21And he had read my book, The Network State and so on, was interested in this kind of stuff. And he said that opening the Founders Cafe, he's like, we did it a few months ago, but we should have done it a few years ago. He's like, one of the most important things they did for the business because AngelList, suddenly all these investors, all these founders had an organizing place. And crucially, it wasn't just complaining with a support ticket, and it also wasn't as formal as AngelList offices. It was like an atrium that you're welcome to hang out in. You could just bring your laptop, but you could assume that every single person there was an Angelless Power user.

13:04And just that alone was enough commonality to have a lot else in common. Totally, yeah. I think when you invite people based on some sort of status, I think that makes it a lot more exciting. like one thing one thing that we've that we've done in in a couple cities that's worked really well is uh we'll pull a list of like our top one percent of users and invite them and we'll just send them a simple email like hey you're you're in top one percent of cursor users in in san francisco and just by time yeah uh just by like usage um yeah and uh and first of all people love getting that email that's awesome that's a great thought yes yeah and so then and then people come and they're like, wait, I want to meet other top 1 % users.

13:47And so usually that's actually what I think one of the things that probably draws people the most is like just this curiosity of like, oh, I got to meet other people who are like using Cursor this much. I always get like really funny responses to those emails that people are just like shocked or like so, so stoked about that. Yeah, you know, it's funny actually, you know, an editor, like, you know, I was and am an Emacs power user, right? And so I just get all the – I get the various AI things to work because you can have them with the – my fingers are bound to Emacs. I love cursor. It's great.

14:19But basically like my – all the Emacs key bindings are there. And actually why I liked meeting other Emacs people is that everybody would have some kung fu trick that I didn't know, like some keyboard – because like Emacs is like a whole operating system for text editing as you may be aware, right? And so there's always like some little, oh, I'll take this little piece of eLisp and I'll become stronger after that, right? And not one in 100 people in the world would share such an interest, but it actually is often those three things I would get, like if I learned some new thing about Emacs, would be like worth another 1 % productivity a day or something like that, you know?

15:01Totally. And so that's like the 1 % cursor power users. That's maybe the social network is around power usage. And they would all kind of share their number one tip or something like that, the thing that made them super productive. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think like that's a lot of that's happening organically. I wonder if like there are ways, I think hopefully in the future for us to help foster more of that knowledge sharing and make it easier for people. Like, like one thing, one example of that, that we've done that we haven't fully tied into Cafe Cursor yet is we'll, so, you know, in Cursor, there's like a tab autocomplete.

15:36And so every, every couple of weeks we'll send, we'll send out to all of our most active tab power users, just like a little tab key. They can, like a branded tab key they can plug into their computer. People love getting, people love getting, getting that and people do use it. uh wait wait but you like you like put a sticker over your tab uh uh key no um i can actually i can show you a picture if i can can i share my screen yeah yeah you can do share screen it yeah so well you can't see the other side oh it's got it's like a usbc thing so you basically yeah it's just like an external tab thing so just like a beep kind of external button exactly yeah yeah but it comes in like a really nice like box and um and it lights up and it has like kind of the cursor logo on it.

16:22And so we'll send that out to, um, to power users. And so, um, you know, it's the kind of thing I think that like gets people excited to use tab more and like, you know, talk about how they're using tab. And so I don't know, I wonder if there's, I imagine there's ways that we could like tie that kind of thing into cafe cursor and like have more, you know, more of this power, these power user conversations where people are like sharing what's working well for them, what's not working well, what, what, like what their pro tips are, that kind of thing. I mean, lots of people have tried or conceptualized some kind of social network around prompts or what have you.

16:50In part, a good chunk of my ex-usage nowadays is almost a social network around prompts where, you know, because prompting is as broad as whatever you can type into a buffer, you know, and the kinds of techniques people come up, just crazy things that you wouldn't have thought of. And you just see, you know, like I'll give some examples, like the role play prompts, right? Or the like, I am a, you know, senior Erlang dev with this, that, blah, blah, blah. And here's what I would do on the problem, right? Sometimes that's just, that is just LARPing, but, and it's just the tone of it, but sometimes it unlocks new vocabulary or new concepts if you, if you're prompted that way, right?

17:31So, you know, I wonder if you could have, you know, maybe this would be overkill, maybe people wouldn't use it, but common prompts are like bound to hotkeys and you have an external, you know, like the numerical pad that sometimes they would, they would hand out, right? So you have like a programmable external pad, you go back up like this for the, for the common prompts or what have you like you might assign them for you know apple tried something like this with their hot bar if you remember like which they discontinued so maybe it's a bad idea but or maybe the answer is you just actually wait the hot bar or wait genius bar no no not the genius bar there's a physical genius bar which is at the apple store but i forget the term for it but they used to have some sort of display bar above the um you know one two three four five six seven eight 890.

18:18Oh, yeah, yeah. I forgot what it was called. And I but I and it was programmable. But I actually never it looked really cool. Because like, wow, in Photoshop, you can have a button that does this. And in you know, it was it was similar to the concept of actually on an iPhone, your UI is programmable. But it just didn't work as it was an intermediate hybrid between the analog and the digital, you know, right. So maybe the answer is just hotkeys. So and you don't need a special keyboard because that's like a little thingy on top. I don't know. Just an experiment. Just thought. Yeah. Yeah. Fun ideas.

18:50I mean, a lot of a lot of cool things could be doing. So OK, cool. So you have held pop ups around the world and you're thinking about maybe doing some permanence. If you do the physical subscription, let me know and we will. We will. I'll definitely tweet that out. And anything else people should know about cursor pop ups? Anything else? I mean, if people are curious to like stay in the loop, You can go to cursor.com slash community, and you can subscribe there to get updates when we're doing these in new cities. Great. Oh, let me put that on screen. Yeah, for sure. Oh, here we go. Cool. Ghana, Mexico City, Stockholm, Riyadh, Toronto, Taipei, SF, Ethiopia.

19:31Super, super cool. Upcoming cursor events. Very, very, very cool. Yeah. And your host, Sam, and Luma. Great. So, yeah, we also have – if folks want to, like, help host these in cities where we haven't come yet, like, you know, this is where people kind of kick it off and reach out to us to get involved. And, you know, I think this is part of what I think makes this really exciting is we want to, like, do this together with our community. And we want folks to reach out, you know, who are excited about this. So feel free to if you're curious to learn more. Amazing. Okay, great. All right. So thanks, Ben.

20:09and everybody should check out Kirsh's community and come to the pop-ups. Thanks for having me.