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Comment by aduffy | Hacker News Reader

That's quite a war chest to raise in such a short period of time. The market has concentrated with the couple of recent acquisitions. Sounds like likely uses of that cash are

- Buy a few million more users with more generous free tier, as models get cheaper the cost to acquire the marginal customer goes down over time anyway

- Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.

- Go to war over enterprise. Do a deal with Deloitte/Accenture and get every single one of their consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor. Another flavor: compete head-on with Accenture by making your own service firm that undercuts them and delivers ahead of schedule for once.

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> Go to war over enterprise ... consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor.

And students. Sun's Java push, especially its proliferation as "object-oriented programming language" in CS courses world-wide, might offer a lesson or two.

Students aren’t a market though. Sun and Java was really just marketing to future users

Future market?

Java only became Java because of enterprise. Getting students to use it was just an exercise in soft power.

Why do you think enterprise loves it so much?

Inertia.

I don't agree. What do you think enterprises should be using instead?

C# and that ecosystem is much more Windows-focused, which makes it quite unsuitable for server development in general. Go is the last dying gasp of 1970s programmers who can't let go of explicit pointer management and Tony Hoare's notorious billion dollar mistake. JavaScript and Typescript are not serious contenders except in the browser.

That starts to leave more niche languages. Languages such as Rust and Haskell, much as I love them personally, are not viable for the average enterprise developer.

The widespread use of Java in enterprises is far more than simply inertia. It's probably one of the more rational choices that those companies have collectively made.

Isn’t marketing basically spending money now that will result in revenue later?

> Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.

They already have their own "tab" model which might not be a very large one but definitely better than most open weight models on short code snippet completion. And for larger agentic LLMs, they can totally start from a pre-trained base model (e.g. deepseek R1) and only do post-train/RL/finetune, which is doable with a small team and their cash reserve. It's not hard to imagine a good base model (probably deepseek V4?) + cursor's user data leads to a model that surpass sonnet/gemini on coding tasks only.

> Deloitte/Accenture and get every single one of their consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor

Unless you change Cursor into a busy work assistant it is functionally useless for consultants.

Work in consulting. The entire industry has flipped on its head as rates(interest and consulting) have collapsed. Most of the non-techie and somewhat-but-dangerous people(those of us left...) are now spending most of their time vibe coding demos and early prototypes.

> Work in consulting

What is it with western white collar (tech) workers and not using first person pronouns? This sentence took me a couple tries before I realized the “I” was missing.

I see it a lot on this site as well as my own company.

I don't think it's a tech thing, this is a pretty common form in english like "Went to the store. Got some butter."

I think it might feel more common in tech because it's more common in digital communications.

Did you create the account just to post this?

That sounds way more fun than the old days of padding reports so it looked long enough to justify the 1000 hours billed.

Ive only ever worked at small production shops, so cant relate. I personally don't care, Im a hacker not a craftsman...

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