Alliance Lianchuang: Written on the occasion of Cursor selling 60 billion USD

Author: Imran; Translation: Jiahui, ChainCatcher

Sitting in front of your computer, you get the idea of starting a business.
You see Cursor being sold to Elon Musk for $60 billion.
Perhaps the idols of the previous generation were Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegal.
You look at these founders, can't help but compare yourself to them.
They don't seem much smarter than you.
Their resumes aren't more impressive than yours either.

So you naturally ask yourself: why can't I do the same?
Most founders' journeys start here.
But this is also where most founders get stuck.

They see artificial intelligence.
They see cryptocurrency.
They see thousands of startups already funded.
Every track seems crowded.
Every obvious idea has already been put into practice.

They conclude: the opportunities are exhausted.

Then they close their laptops, give up, and walk away.

A large part of startups die like this.
Not because the founders lack ability, but because they think the game is already over.

Let's take Cursor as an example.
Not every path is a straight road.

As early as 2022, Cursor began a grueling "biting glass" kind of struggle.
That was before ChatGPT was born.
There was no ready-made script to copy.
No obvious market.
All they had was a belief: artificial intelligence will fundamentally change knowledge work.

To stay grounded, they focused on three things.
First, they chose a field they truly felt excited about: artificial intelligence.
Second, they built their product for their own customers.
Third, they unwaveringly focused on heavy users.

Because if you can win heavy users, winning others becomes much easier.
Honestly, this story isn't unique to Cursor.

When Stripe started, online payment issues seemed solved, but the founders believed developers would increasingly become decision-makers within companies.
Who wins the developers, wins the internet in the end.
They experienced this pain firsthand, and although PayPal had already proven online payments feasible, Stripe saw an opportunity to build a "developer-first" future.

Figma spent years developing before the market was ready, because they believed the future of design wasn't about better single tools, but about collaborative design where everyone works in the same file.
Google Docs had already demonstrated the power of real-time document collaboration.
Figma extended this insight into the design field.

Shopify initially just sold snowboards online, because the founder believed millions of small businesses yearned for their own customers, brands, and destiny, rather than relying on big platforms.
Amazon had already proven centralized e-commerce works.
Shopify bet that entrepreneurs would ultimately want to take control themselves.

Different products. Same pattern.

Every founder starts with a non-consensus belief about the future of the world, then quietly builds for years before that future becomes obvious to everyone.
Their luck lies in riding the strong winds of the era.

For Stripe, this wind was the confidence that more and more commerce would shift online.
For Figma, it was the firm belief that software would prioritize the cloud and support collaboration by default.
For Shopify, it was the hope that the internet would empower millions of entrepreneurs to build independent businesses.

Cursor follows a similar trajectory.
The company's foundation is based on the belief: AI will fundamentally reshape knowledge work, and software engineers will be among the first heavy users to adopt it.
Today, this product may seem obvious, but when they started, there were no clear guidelines—only faith.

Different products. Different markets. Same underlying logic.

Identify long-term trend shifts early, find the overlooked entry points, and spend years executing before the rest of the market catches up.
Every yin has its yang.
PayPal gave rise to Stripe.
Adobe gave rise to Figma.
Amazon gave rise to Shopify.

First-generation products proved the market's existence.
Second-generation products are reconstructed around new insights, new technologies, or changing customer behaviors.
For founders, the key is understanding which stage of the cycle they are in.
If you enter early, like Coinbase or Cursor, your opportunity often lies in making new technology practically usable for heavy users.

Coinbase didn't invent cryptocurrency.
It simply made buying and holding Bitcoin extremely easy, far better than managing your own wallet or wiring funds to Mt. Gox.

Cursor didn't invent AI programming.
They just realized that auto-completion isn't the end goal; developers truly desire an AI-native way of software development.

But if you're entering in the late middle or late stage of technological change, opportunities look different.
Infrastructure already exists.
The market has been validated.
Your job is no longer to prove the technology's feasibility but to find the "yin" in the existing "yang"—the blind spots overlooked by first movers.
Many of the greatest companies were born here.

Now you've confirmed your position in the tech cycle.
You have a few ideas and are ready to go all in, but then you realize something unsettling:
You don't have many unique insights.
You lack deep understanding of the market, customers, or even your product.
And that's perfectly normal.

At this point, you need to roll up your sleeves, start building connections, insights, and reputation.
Fortunately, we live in an era with X (Twitter), where all this is easier than ever.
You can build an audience, meet customers, interact with heavy users, and learn directly from market shapers.

The first thing I would do is experience every product in the field.
If you're starting in a track but aren't a heavy user of the flagship product, it's hard to have unique insights into the market's direction.
Map out every product in the ecosystem.
Become a heavy user of each.
Talk to those who like, dislike, or have abandoned them.
Understand why they stay, why they leave, and what features they wish existed but don't yet.

Eventually, you'll find that most market winners aren't because existing companies are stupid.
They are replaced precisely because they became successful.

As companies grow, they naturally drift further from individual users.
Feedback cycles lengthen, fringe needs are ignored, and a new generation of heavy users with different demands emerges.
This is where new founders find opportunities.

The goal isn't to come up with an idea behind closed doors.
It's to immerse yourself deeply in the market until the missing puzzle piece becomes obvious.
Once you've done this long enough, you'll stop actively searching for ideas and start noticing that they are everywhere.
That's the state you want to reach.
Eventually, you'll find opportunities so abundant you can't pursue them all.

Next comes the hard part: choosing one.

Once you're confident in your idea, the next question is simple:
Is this a tenfold improvement, or a burning pain point?
If the answer is no, don't waste your effort.
People rarely switch products for minor improvements.
They only do so when something is vastly better or the pain is severe enough to demand immediate change.

The easiest way to find a burning pain point is to observe those who are already tinkering with workarounds.
Spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, tedious manual processes, copying data between systems—these are signals.

The best founders look for pain points, because when the pain is big enough, customers will eagerly snatch the product from your hands.
When the pain is trivial, no amount of marketing, growth hacking, or clever positioning can save you.

Now you've confirmed your idea, identified the pain point, and are building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

With tools like Claude, Codex, and various AI tools, building a product has never been easier.
Ironically, this also becomes a trap.

I find myself constantly adding features just because I can.
The product gradually turns into a Frankenstein-like patchwork.
Each feature seems reasonable in isolation, but together they make the product worse.

Eventually, I return to first principles.
The most important question isn't what features I should develop.
It's why others would abandon existing tools and switch to your product.

Every great startup has an answer to this question.
Cursor could have just built another coding plugin.
Instead, they forked VS Code.
Developers already like this editor, understand how it works, and embed it into their daily workflow.

Cursor didn't ask users to learn something entirely new.
They simply let users continue doing what they already liked, just integrating AI directly into that experience.

The most outstanding startups rarely force users to adopt entirely new behaviors.
Instead, they find familiar workflows, eliminate friction, and significantly improve them.

As founders, we're obsessed with what we're building.
But customers care about what they have to give up.
The lower the switching cost, the higher the value created, and the faster adoption happens.
That's why the best MVPs are not feature-rich.
They are extremely focused, providing an irresistible reason for customers to switch.

By now, you've identified the pain point, built an MVP, and given customers a compelling reason to choose you.
Next is the stage most founders underestimate: distribution channels.

I've seen many founders spend months obsessing over the product, but only five minutes thinking about how users will discover it.
The truth is, distribution channels are often the moat.

Airbnb's success wasn't because their website was better.
The founders went door-to-door, took photos of apartments themselves, and manually guided hosts to list their properties city by city.
Stripe recruited developers one by one.
Long before cryptocurrency became mainstream, Coinbase was active on major Bitcoin forums.

Cursor is also a great example.
Their team posted six times on Hacker News.
Most posts went unnoticed.
They sent private messages to thousands of developers, patiently listening to feedback, one by one, trying to win users.

Today, many say Cursor's success was inevitable.
But for years, they did labor-intensive, unscalable work.
Founders love talking about product-market fit, but before reaching it, the first thing to solve is the fit between distribution and market.
Where do your customers spend their time?
Who do they trust?
How do they discover new products?
The best founders don't just build products—they build distribution engines.
Because the market won't love a product they've never seen.

All of this comes down to resilience, adaptability, and never giving up.

Unfortunately, I can't teach you these qualities.
No one can.
They can only be learned through experience.

Cursor once again is a prime example.
They spent years developing before the market was ready.
They repeatedly posted, sent private messages to thousands, and most ignored them.
Looking back, it all seems logical.
But at the time, the future looked bleak.

The same pattern is everywhere.

The founders of Airbnb faced rejection after rejection, even selling cereal boxes to keep the company afloat.
Nvidia faced multiple near-death experiences before becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Rain, one of our incubated startups, was born after the FTX collapse, when most believed crypto was dead.
While others fled the industry, they persisted.
Years later, they raised over $100 million at a $2 billion valuation.

The lesson isn't that these founders are smarter than you.
It's that they persisted long enough in the game to generate compound insights.

So, I’ve laid out the entire framework for you.
Identify shifts in the tech cycle.
Cultivate unique insights.
Be obsessed with your market.
Engage with customers.
Find burning pain points.
Build the simplest possible entry point.
Win your distribution channel.

Most importantly, when things get tough, never give up.

That’s it.

There are no secrets.
Most people can't do these things consistently over the long term.
And the few who do end up building the great companies that the next generation of founders will study.

The world is yours.

Go create.