Episode 24: Ben Lang on Cursor Popups - The Network State Podcast

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Ben, thank you for coming on the Network State Podcast. So you are with Cursor and you're organizing the cursor pop ups, which should be 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, the pop ups, what we, what we actually, the idea started off with pretty, pretty simple concept, which was Cursor's office in San Francisco is adjacent to a local cafe called the 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, for a day and invite users to come work from there and meet the team, meet each other, just build stuff, get some, get some Cursor credits, get some coffee

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while we're there. And, and we did that and I think people just got really excited, excited about it. And then we did another one in New York and then we, we opened it up for people to host these as well themselves. And so I think about 1000 people reached out within like a couple days of us posting about that. And now they're 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, but that's a lot. Yeah, yeah. But the pipeline, like there's a much, 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? What do you exactly do? Yeah. Yeah. Signage. Yeah, yeah, we book out a cafe like usually like a local neighborhood cafe. We book it out for, for the day and we'll, we'll invite our

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users to come and, and come, you know, come work for there for half the day, the whole day. Some folks just want to come by and drop in and, 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 cursory users to meet each other, for, for a team to come by and have kind of, you know, easy access to like getting feedback and, and, and meaning more of our users and customers. Yeah, actually, you know, we have a have a term for that'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

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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 in use cursor and get tips and get better at it. How would you say that breaks down or is it, is it going to be like, you know, what kinds of things do people do? Yeah, I'd say all those things are pretty, pretty accurate. I think people definitely have ideas for ways they want to improve cursor and they definitely want to share that 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.

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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 like even after after the event, people staying for hours, which which is really cool to see. I think, I think part, I think it was 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, I think those people tend to like be interested in meeting each other and, and have, you know, common interests which which has been 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 meet up, then they're probably somebody who's interested in a bunch of the other technologies that you're also interested in and so on. So even if you cursors only ancillary, like you know, maybe

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90% of the time that they're there, they're just hanging out with people who share their interests because they share interest and they share interest BCD and E as well. Right. And 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're 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. So I'd love to know your thoughts on the logistics of it and maybe you have some some

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idea or so. 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 actual local neighborhood cafes. And so those places usually have customers. And so actually a big part of it is convincing the cafes that this makes sense to do. Interesting. And 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, their regulars to come and we want we, we usually have someone at the door, you know, someone is there like saying, hey, here for, you know, can you check in like here, here for, for Cafe cursor. And so I ended up actually having a lot of really funny interactions with people from, from doing this a few times where they're like, wait, I'm

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just coming to my neighborhood cafe and, 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, it was fun to kind of see, see that happen. But usually people were like pretty cool, cool about it and. Actually, so, yeah. So 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 on. So there's some cost to their locals.

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So not all of them want to do it. Is that kind of the? Thing, right, Yeah, because these are these are now places that really do events. These are like these are just normal cafes, right? Like I think that's what also is part of the appeal. That's like, it's not doing this at a Co working SPACe or a place where there are meetups. This 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 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 a, the fact that they are on the street and they're optimized for street traffic, which is what makes them accessible in the 1st place, actually makes them a great event venue in that sense because you don't have to drive to them. They're not like up a flight of

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staIRS. Like you know, I guess you try to get things on the street level that are facing the street. 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 one day, it's like it works well. But I would be very curious to see like if you could do this for a full week, how that would work. I think that would be that would be really interesting, but also come with like a bunch of unique challenges. Yeah, let me show you. Let me show you some just things to contextualize what you guys are doing. Maybe this helpful. So this a post that I wrote called pop ups or the new startups. And can you see the screen? Yeah.

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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 clawed 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 Angel List Founders Cafe. So this actually started off, you know, I'd written some essays and stuff. So Angel List 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 base camp. This actually Coinbase, you know, CTO and Coinbase. And so this something that

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they ran recently, which was a sleepover kind of thing where like devs would come and actually they took over a whole mini village in like Vermont, I think for a week. OK, here's like AZ cash pop up that we ran at the STARP society that I've got here and here is basically an Ethereum pop up called Zuzulu in Montenegro. OK, this a year or two ago 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 permanence. So obviously, Elon's doing the Tesla diners, right? We have network school, which I'm actually talking to you from, OK, which is basically really it's set up to be a startup society that bootstraps other startup societies.

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So like, think of it as a very large popup that's meant to create more and more popups. There's obviously star base in Texas, Elon's other, you know, physical thing. And then this the recent Solana economic zone in Kazakhstan. So these are like crypto zones that are opening. And so about 6 out of 10 of these, not, not Tesla, not, not star base, not not yours, not Claude, but 6 out of 10, The other six are crypto things that I was involved with in some way or the other, right where or financings in the case of Angel list. And I think this actually an important macro trend that you're tapping into. And it's almost like this giant subterranean river and you you got like this burst of energy from it because you found a lot of people were actually

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interested in coming to these things. Perhaps, perhaps there's more interest than you would expect it is that 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 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, yeah, and 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.

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Maybe there's something I 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 definitely like one, one element. I mean, I hope like we can do a lot more this year, like next year. And I think there's there's ways like I think this 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 the 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, what 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. I have an idea for you, which is obviously a cursor. You've got SAS, you've got

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credit cards, you've got subscriptions, you've got subscription behavior. So 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 what I call it's a new SAS society as a service. Ha ha, that's fun, right? I love that. That's great. OK, so you you add the physical component and you sort of crowdfund it and when it tips, right and you have let's say there's 1000 people who are willing to add another whatever bucks a month for that and you just break even on these cafes. Yeah, frankly, actually Angel is just subsidizes it because it's like, you know, so I was talking to Avlok, who's the CEO of Angelus, and he had read my book, The Network State and so on, was interested in this kind

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of stuff. And he said that opening the Founders Cafe, he's like, you know, we did it a few months ago, but we should have done it like a few years ago. He's like one of the most important things they did for the business because Angel List, you know, suddenly all these investors, all these founders had an organizing place. And crucially, it wasn't just complaining like with a support ticket. And it also wasn't as formal as Angel list offices. It was it was like an atrium that you're welcome to hang out in and you just bring your laptop. But you could assume that every single person there was an Angel list power user, and just that alone was enough commonality to have a lot else in common. Totally, Yeah, I think, I think when you invite people based on

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like some sort of status, I think that makes a lot more exciting. Like one thing, one thing that we've that we've done in, in, in a couple cities that's worked really well is we'll, we'll pull list of like our top 1% of users and invite them. And we'll just send them a, you know, simple email like, hey, you're, you're in top 1% of cursor users in San Francisco and use my time. Yeah, just by like usage. Yeah. anDeFirst 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. And 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, I got to meet other people who are like using cursor this much. I always got like really funny

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responses to those emails that people are just like shocked or, or like so, so stoked about that. Yeah, You know, it's funny actually. You know, an editor like, you know, I, I was an, 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, you know, my, just my fingers are bound to Emacs. I love cursor. It's great. But basically like my, you know, I've all 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 sending, as you, as you may be aware, right? And so there's always like some little, oh, I'll take this little piece of E lisp and I'll

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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? And so, so that's, 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, and, and make it easier for people like one thing, one example of that, that we've done

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that we haven't fully tied into Cafe cursor yet is we'll, so you know, in cursor there's like a tab auto complete. And so every every couple 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. But you like you like put a sticker over your tab. Key. No, I can actually I can show you a picture if I can, can I share my screen? Yeah, yeah, you can do share screen. Yeah, so well, you can't see the other side. Of it, oh, it's got it's got a USBC thing. So you basically, yeah. So it's like an external tab thing.

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So it's just like a beep kind of external button. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. But it comes in like a really nice like box and, and it lights up and has like kind of the cursory logo on it. And so we'll send that out to, to power users. And so, 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 like what their pro tips are that kind. Of thing, I mean, lots of people have tried or conceptually some kind of social network around prompts or what have you. In part, a good chunk of my ex usage nowadays is almost a social network around prompts where you know, because

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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 it'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. So, 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

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right. So you have like a programmable external pad. You go bap, bap like this for the for the common prompts or what have you like you, 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. Hot bar or wait Genius Bar? No, no, not the Genius Store. There's a physical Genius Bar which is at the Apple Store, but I forget the term for it, but they're, they used to have some sort of display bar above the, you know, 123-456-7890. Oh 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, it was, it

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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, So maybe the answer is just hotkeys. So, and you don't need a special keyboard because that's like a little dinky on top. I don't know, just an experiment. Just thought. Yeah, yeah. Fun ideas. I mean, a lot of 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 can go to

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cursor.com/community and you can subscribe there to get updates when we're doing these in new in new cities, so. Great love to. Yeah, for sure. Oh, here we go. Cool. Ghana, Mexico City, Stockholm, RIA, Toronto, Taipei, SF, Ethiopia. Super super cool. Upcoming cursor events. Very, very, very cool. Yeah. And host Simon Luma? Great. So, yeah, we, we, we also have if if folks want to like help host these in cities where we haven't come yet. Like, you know, this this where people, people kind of kick, kick, kick that off and can reach out to us to, to get involved. And, you know, I think this part of what I think makes this really exciting as we want, we want to like do this together with with our community and we want folks to reach out, you know, to our who are, you know, excited about this so.

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Feel feel free to if you're if you're curious to learn more. Amazing. OK, great. All right. So thanks Ben and every check out KIRSch community and come to in the pop ups. OK, thanks for having me.