Ben Lang
@benln
@cursor_ai team, @nextplayso newsletter
A personal update: I joined the Cursor team earlier this year. Excited to be working with this small but mighty (growing!) team on the best tool for building with AI. Cursor is a beloved product by so many and I’m thrilled to support such a special community.
In the past month, Cursor found 1M+ bugs in human-written PRs. Over half were real logic issues that were fixed before merging. Today, we're releasing the system that spotted these bugs. It's already become a required pre-merge check for many teams.
We hired someone at Cursor who'd already been doing the job for a few months out of love for the product. They had zero expectations. Still the best way to join a startup.
This startup thinks email could be the key to usable AI agents | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2025/07/22/thi…
2025 playbook for startup launches • X announcement post boosted by friends/investors • 2 minute video optimized for X feed • @tbpn appearance with clips to boost • Exclusive funding announcement on Fortune, Newcomer, Upstarts Media, Bloomberg, or Forbes
To accelerate AI adoption, we need an AI standard. What Moody’s is for bonds, FICO for credit, SOC 2 for security. Standards offer credible signals of who to trust. They create confidence. Confidence accelerates adoption. Introducing AIUC-1: the world’s first AI agent standard
Who are the best pre-seed / seed angel investors every founder should want on their cap table these days?
I collected a list of small teams (<10 people) backed by top-tier funds who are all hiring:
Breaking into tech is hard. This is what I'd do today: • get good at writing cold emails • start a niche Substack • build stuff in public, learn distribution • follow the "in" crowd on X, get good at cold DMs • once one of these work well, focus, drop the rest, repeat
Opening up a handful of 10 minute slots on Sunday, anyone can book. Let me know and I'll reach out with my calendar soon, first-come, first-serve basis. Happy to chat through finding your next role, angel investing, community, side projects, AI tools, you decide.
Lovable just raised $200M at a $1.8B valuation led by Accel. This all started unexpectedly with me calling my friend at 6AM to go for a walk. I've never shared this story before: (thread)
Know a few former founders looking to join startups (technical, product, ops) Which companies are specifically hiring former founders?
A conversation with @patrickc on old programming languages, software at industrial scale, and AI's effect on economics/biology/Patrick's daily life. 00:15 - Why Patrick wrote his first startup in Smalltalk 03:35 - LISP chatbots 06:09 - Good ideas from esoteric programming…
If you're a natural community builder and a Cursor power user, let's chat. DMs open.
Any university students using Cursor a ton? Putting something new together starting next semester.