1 min lesson
Discovery that quantifies pain
Put this idea into your own words: "Discovery is the round where that distinction shows."
Step 1 of 2
At Cursor the buyer is often a room full of engineers who already use the product and a CTO who wants to know what it costs. Bad discovery demos features into that room. Good discovery finds the bottleneck in how their team ships code, then puts a number on it.
Cursor's motion is usually bottom-up. Devs adopted it on their own, so the pain isn't "we have no AI tooling" - it's something further upstream that the engineering leader feels in their roadmap. Your job on the first call is to get past "the team likes it" and reach "here is the cost we carry every week, in hours."
A founder-led loop screens hard for whether you actually understand engineering work. An AE who opens with a Tab-completion demo reads as a vendor. The one who asks "where does a typical change wait the longest before it ships?" reads as someone who could sell to a skeptical staff engineer. Discovery is the round where that distinction shows.
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Full explanation
The Discovery Arc
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
Each step is a gate: skip one and the deal you forecast isn't real yet.