About Cursor
Who I am
Hi, I’m Badrul. I’m a product leader and early-stage investor based in San Francisco. I was Figma’s first Product Manager, joining before its public launch, and led product teams that built the core design tool, Plugins, Figma Community, and more. At Square, I led the teams responsible for global product onboarding and our internal developer platform.
My career began as an engineer, building award-winning mobile apps at Expedia, scaling global fulfillment systems at Teespring, and creating interactive experiences for millions of people at Hook. These experiences helped me refine my sense of product quality, craftsmanship, and building products at a global scale.
What founders say
Badrul has a clear and consistent vision for what good products should feel like and what makes good teams successful. It is hard to find investors who have good taste and operational experience in building generational products.
Badrul is one of our most insightful investors and a key advisor on product, strategy, and high level company challenges. His thoughtful guidance and genuine commitment to our success have made him Rive’s most trusted partner.
Badrul understands what it takes to build developer-focused products. His product instincts and strategic clarity have helped shape our go-to-market and product thinking at Knock. In the years we've worked together, he's become one of my go-to thought partners and friends. He brings valuable insight without ego, challenges my thinking when I need him to, and does it all with humor and taste. I'm a big fan of Badrul and recommend him to any founder building a technical product.
Badrul has been in the trenches with us from day one. He’s helped us solve hard problems, build a strong initial product team, and make clear, high-conviction decisions when they mattered most. He took the time to deeply understand our product and hiring goals, consistently going above and beyond as a true partner.
Whenever I meet a founder working on creative tools, I make sure to introduce them to Badrul. He's been a great friend and collaborator on tldraw, always ready with strong opinions informed by his close observations of the industry, as well as from his own experiences working on creative products. As an investor, Badrul provides excellent connections with fellow builders and solid advice on building the company and its reputation among creatives.
Everyone can be creative
Cursor Capital exists because:
1) There is enormous potential for software to help everyone be more creative in their work. The creative tool market is large and growing, but professions that aren’t traditionally seen as creative are stuck using legacy tools that stifle creativity, productivity, and innovation.
2) If you’re a technical founder building a creative tool—especially for an unconventional market—it’s hard to find an investor with direct, firsthand experience. Instead of finding a partner relevant to your journey, you’re left passing a hat around the entire industry. It becomes less about finding a partner with a shared vision and more about who you can get an intro to.
Creative tools are the future of software
When everything else is automated, creativity will be the only true differentiator.
At its core, knowledge work is the expression, exchange, and shaping of ideas. With the right tools, this process is enjoyable and engaging. Software can help you express your ideas in ways that are harder with words or putting pen to paper.
Unfortunately, the tool you’re dependent on to do your job often saps the creativity and joy out of work, relegating tasks to pure drudgery. Hamstrung by the product’s limitations and lack of imagination, the work takes twice as long. This is especially true for professions that aren’t seen as inherently creative. Creative tools tend to be pigeon-holed—video and image editors, things that could compete with Adobe.
But when not mired in Jira or wrestling with a rigid architecture, software engineering is a creative, even playful act: finding inventive ways to solve a scaling problem, or manipulating a library to address a challenge in a unique way.
A data scientist preparing a model in a spreadsheet is effectively expressing an idea of how the business works and is performing. The same is true when transforming a cloud of geospatial data into a digital map—a creative act of interpretation lost to the tedium of manual and dated software.
The dream is for the tool to feel like an extension of you. Like a 21st-century bicycle, it’s still you and your skill, just more creative, productive, efficient, and imaginative.
Creative work is a group effort
To go from the first notion of an idea, to a working concept, to a tangible product that you put out in the world is no small feat. Figma is successful because, in addition to amplifying designers’ gift of imagination, it makes it easy for everyone to interact with the design process.
The seed of an idea may start in one person’s imagination, but bringing it to life requires many people to work together. The most popular and innovative products are the result of many different functions coming together and converging a number of disparate ideas into one thing greater than the sum of its parts. The act of collaboration is where the magic happens.
My goal with Cursor Capital is to help grow the next generation of tools that amplify human creativity, serving not just designers, but developers, data analysts, product leaders, and beyond. Tools that allow anyone to bring creativity to their work and make it enjoyable to do so. Software that accelerates the process of expressing, interrogating, and iterating on an idea.
If you’re building anything that resembles a creative tool, or a design-first developer tool or enterprise product, let’s talk.
Investing philosophy
Cursor is a no-frills, direct-access fund. When I shifted from angel investing to pursuing investing full-time, my primary motivation was simple: I wanted to deeply understand and genuinely care about every founder and company I work with. With Cursor, I purposely make few investments, so that I can be available whenever I’m needed and care about the outcomes of each company.
On a practical level, that means:
1) Direct, hands-on support with refining your product roadmap, shaping your early team, and growing your product, based on deep, firsthand experience.
2) Access to a broad network of engineers, designers, and product leaders from Figma and beyond, as well as future investors when you need to fundraise.
And on a more personal level:
3) Empathy for the journey you’re on. Building something people love is hard and takes a lot of time. I’ve been there and I’m excited to co-discover the future with you for as long as it takes.
I invest between $200k - $500k at the earliest stages (usually before the Series A). I’m specifically looking to partner with technical founders who have a clear hypothesis around their product and its impact on customers.
If you’re building a startup that takes advantage of a significant shift in your market or the workflows that support it, and you’re serious about building a lasting product, company, and team, I’d love to hear from you.
I run an efficient process, respecting founders’ time as well as my own, so you can expect to move quickly if we’re a good fit.