1 min lesson
The skeptical follow-up, prepared
Draft your own answer to "why not join a more established company with a mature CS org?" Then check it against what the question is really probing.
Step 1 of 2
The skeptical follow-up, prepared
- What they're checking
- Whether you actually want a flat, playbook-light environment or just landed here
- The trap
- Praising the chaos abstractly, which signals you haven't lived it
- The pass
- Name a concrete reason you want to build the motion, not run one someone else wrote
- The proof
- A time you thrived without process and what that required of you
Cursor expects you to build the deployment motion, not inherit it. So the honest version of "why not somewhere established" is that an established CS org would bore you, because the part you're good at is the part that doesn't exist yet here.
When you cite a Cursor capability, pre-load one specific limitation you hit and how you worked around it. Praise alone reads as a pitch to a team that built the thing. "I used Agent and watched it confidently break our error handling, so I learned to review its diffs before merge" reads as a real user.
Do not invent product specifics. If you haven't used a feature, say what you'd want to try and why, framed as a hypothesis. A wrong claim about how indexing or privacy mode works, made to the people who built it, ends the conversation faster than honest curiosity ever would.