How Cafe Cursor grew from one gathering to 120 cities

Ben works on community at Cursor. In under a year, a simple idea, renting out a cafe and inviting users to hang out, became Cafe Cursor: 176 events across more than 120 cities, most of them run by community members. I spoke with him about how it started, how it scaled, and what he’s learned about building genuine community for a company.

Zelda: Before we get into Cursor, I’d love to start with you. How did you become a community builder?

Ben: I worked in a similar role at Notion before this. And before that, honestly, I’d always enjoyed hosting events and bringing people together, both online and in person. I’d done a lot of things I found fun along those lines and kind of found myself on this path.

At Notion, I was just a power user. I built a Facebook group for Notion and helped put together a template gallery before Notion had one. I started doing it for fun. It wasn’t like, I want to do this as my job. Before that, I’d been a founder, worked a bit in venture, organized events and side projects that I thought were fun. So community was never really the plan. It just kept being the thing I gravitated toward.

How did you come into this role at Cursor, and what did the community look like when you began?

I met the team when it was still pretty small. It was the early days, and there wasn’t really anyone else building in the space yet. What struck me was how much love there was for the product. People were just so excited about it.

The more time I spent digging in, the more I realized there was something really special here. Some of it reminded me of Notion, but the scale and the sheer amount of passion blew my mind. And I could see so much potential on the community side.

So the first thing we did was tweet out a form. Just, “hey, if you’re a Cursor fan, fill this out.”. It was very open ended. What should we do? How can we capture and foster more of this? That was the very beginning. I think around 1,500 people responded with what they wanted more of: these kinds of events.

Most developer tool companies build communities online. What does in-person unlock for Cursor?

Both matter, and they go hand in hand. You don’t really want one without the other.

But in person, there’s just a lot of hunger for it, especially in a post-COVID world where people didn’t have that for years.

Tell me about Cafe Cursor. What is it, and where did the idea come from?

It’s a very simple story starting with our office in San Francisco. It is attached to a cafe with only a door that separates the two, so you can just go back and forth between them.

At some point I was in the office and thought, it’d be really cool to just rent out the cafe for a day and invite Cursor users to come hang out, meet the team, share feedback. So we did it last September. We posted about it online, people were really excited, and we rented the place out for the full day.

It ended up being such a special experience. It was very free flowing. Some people came and brought their laptops and worked. Some people just had coffee and left. The fact that it was in a local cafe made it feel like a real place, not a boring corporate event. It turned into this mix of coworking, block party, and a chance to meet the team and see who’s actually building with Cursor. Just a really positive experience. And it evolved from there.

What made you think, we should do this all over the world?

When we tweeted about it people immediately started reaching out. Can we do this in this city? What about ours? It just blew up.

Not long after, I said, okay, let’s try New York. And I posted a form for people who wanted to help bring it to their city. I think a thousand people filled it out within a couple of weeks, from dozens of countries and probably hundreds of cities. They were all excited to make it happen.

So very organically, I built out a playbook, recorded some Loom videos, and started working through all these people. We also have a really active ambassador program that we’ve invested a lot in, and a lot of those folks were excited to bring Cafe Cursor to their city. It became this loop: Cafe Cursor attracted new ambassadors, and ambassadors were excited to bring Cafe Cursor to their city, and then more people would see it and get excited too.

For some cities we run it ourselves, but for the vast majority we partner with people in our ambassador program or new folks reaching out. It’s really the only way we could make this happen at this scale. I actually checked the other day: since we started less than a year ago, we’ve done Cafe Cursor 176 times, in at least 120 cities. It’s been fun to see this community grow so fast.

When someone else is hosting Cafe Cursor in their city, how do you keep the experience consistent?

We’ve really tried to recreate the experience from San Francisco. That was the whole idea.

The key things are: not an office, not a coworking space, but a real cafe, somewhere people enjoy going. It should look good, have nice sunlight, and plants. A place where people can hang out but also pop open their laptops and work, so they can choose their own adventure. And understated branding. Those are the essentials.

The tricky part is that a lot of cafes don’t want to be rented out for a full day, because they want their regulars to be able to come. So there’s a lot of reaching out to cafe owners who are often like, wait, what is this? Every once in a while someone says sure, let’s do it. Most of the time they say no, which I understand.

Cursor has this well-known culture, the no-shoes office, an ethos of doing things differently. Do any of those principles carry over into how you design events?

There’s a difference between the community-led events and the team-led ones, like our first conference, Compile, which recently took place. When it’s community-led, everyone brings in their own local flavor and ideas, which is great.

On our end, we really want to keep the bar high in terms of people having a great experience: working with great venues, being thoughtful about the small details, staying understated on the branding side. So each event is its own world, we’re not trying to make two identical. We’re experimenting a lot as well.

How do you think about who’s the right fit to build community on the Cursor team?

The people who end up joining are very much self-starters, people you can trust to go out and build and push things forward and raise the bar. That’s been amazing to see.

It’s a role that means a lot of different things at different companies. I’m thrilled with the folks who’ve joined the team.

What would you tell someone at another company trying to build genuine community rather than just run marketing events?

It means a different thing for every company. There’s no one-size-fits-all, and there’s a lot of value in coming up with your own playbook instead of just copying what other people do.

But I’d start with listening to the people who are excited about what you’re building. Talk to users, talk to fans. Be in the weeds, on calls, on Twitter, on email, whatever it takes. You can’t reinvent the wheel without having a base for it. It starts with the people themselves, and then you craft your ideas and programming around that.