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The future belongs to AI natives
Impressive AI-native companies, a bit of Mac nostalgia, and more vibe coding with Cursor
Roger Wong
July 13, 2025
AI-native companies and employees are the way of the future.
This is a bold statement, but I think the evidence is mounting. Lovable, one of the breakout stars in a now very crowded field of AI prompt-to-code tools, is an $80 million per year business with about 35 employees. This is an average of $2.3 million of revenue per employee. The SaaS gold standard is between $250,000 and $300,000.
Lovable started out as “GPT Engineer App” in November of 2023. They pivoted and retooled a couple of times before launching as “Lovable” a year later. This growth is extraordinary.
How did they achieve this success? By being AI native and hiring AI-native employees. Elena Verna, who joined the company just over a month ago to lead marketing and growth, writing in her newsletter, observes that everyone at the company is an AI-native employee. “An AI-native employee isn’t someone who ‘uses AI.’ It’s someone who defaults to AI,” she says.
Here, when someone wants to build something (anything) - from internal tools, to marketing pages, to writing production code - they turn to AI and... build it. That’s it.
No headcount asks. No project briefs. No handoffs. Just action.
At Lovable, we’re mostly building with… Lovable. Our Shipped site is built on Lovable. I’m wrapping hackathon sponsorship intake form in Lovable as we speak. Internal tools like credit giveaways and influencer management? Also Lovable (soon to be shared in our community projects so ya’ll can remix them too). On top of that, engineering is using AI extensively to ship code fast (we don’t even really have Product Managers, so our engineers act as them).
And they’re not alone.
Cursor, the leading AI coding app for software developers, is bringing in $500 million per year, as of June. The company reportedly has about 60 employees. That’s an astounding $8.3 million of revenue per employee. And of course, they’re using Cursor to build Cursor. In a recent interview on Lenny’s Podcast, Michael Truell, the CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, says:
From the very start, our product development process was really about dogfooding, and using the tool intensely every day. And we never wanted to ship anything that wasn’t useful to us, and we had the benefit of doing that because we were the end users.
That’s not to say that engineers at the company are only using AI to build. In the same interview, Truell mentions:
[Dogfooding as we were building] definitely made us think that we need the humans to be in the driver’s seat, the AI cannot do everything. We’re also interested in giving humans that control too for personal reasons. And so that gets you away from just…this end-end stuff without the human having control.
The company is valued at $9.9 billion.
In September 2024, Sam Altman said, “We’re going to see 10-person billion-dollar [valuation] companies very soon. …In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there’s a one-person billion dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.”
Aaron Epstein, a partner at Y Combinator, said in a post two months ago:
Over the next decade, as new coding tools make it easier than ever to build and ship products quickly, great design is going to matter even more.
Especially as many designers are worried about AI replacing their jobs, the real opportunity is for designers to use AI themselves to launch their own products and build their own companies. The design job of the future will be “founder”.
Designers already have so many of the skills needed to be great – strong user empathy, a focus on solving problems, a high bar for quality, and taste. These are a must for every founding team.
AI-powered tools like Lovable and Cursor make this so much more reachable than it’s ever been. We’re witnessing the emergence of a fundamentally new way of building companies, one where small teams leverage AI to achieve extraordinary productivity. What strikes me most about Lovable and Cursor isn’t just their impressive revenue metrics, but how they’ve eliminated the traditional friction between having an idea and bringing it to life. They point toward Aaron Epstein’s broader prediction about the opportunities ahead.
The barriers to creation are dissolving across disciplines. For designers, this represents a crucial inflection point: the skills we’ve always possessed — user empathy, problem-solving, and taste — are becoming more valuable than ever, while AI tools are making the technical execution barrier lower than it’s ever been. The question isn’t whether we’ll see more designers become founders, but whether we’ll seize this moment to expand beyond our traditional boundaries and become the builders of our own visions.
(You’ll probably see me recycle this in a longer post on the blog.)
Highlighted Links
 | Marcin Wichary goes through multiple versions of Mac operating systems and performs digital paleontology, uncovering long lost Settings minutiae. It's also a great lesson in UI along the way. Be sure to click in the Mac screens. |
 | Basic Apple Guy documents the design evolution of Mac system icons over the decades. |
 | John Calhoun, a programmer at Apple, recounts how he improved on the system Color Picker, including adding a web color palette for picking hex colors and the crayon picker. |
What I’m Consuming
Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware. Recent interview with Sam Altman on the future of AI.
Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again). Andrej Karpathy, the engineer behind the term “vibe coding” describes the concept of Software 3.0.
Vibe coding with Cursor’s Head of Design. Ryo Lu, Head of Design at Cursor, sits down with Dive Club to discuss his process and how he uses AI in his workflow.