Kristofer Lachance

If you had to leave your current job and could work at any company, in any role, what would be your top 3 dream companies?

Here are my picks:

1. Anthropic - Arguably the most important company in history, and trying to build AI responsibly

2. Cursor - Some of the smartest engineers working across incredibly difficult technical and design problems

3. Linear - Super product-focused and seems like some of the highest density of talent ever

A question we get from customers (and occasionally from investors) is why we don't expose a model picker the way Cursor does.

The short answer is that we're building for a different user. Cursor's users are developers; picking between GPT-5 and Claude is a meaningful choice they're equipped to make. Our users include CFOs, sales leaders, customer success reps. For them, model choice is friction at best, and at worst a new vector for self-doubt. A marketing director second-guessing a revenue number because they're not sure whether they picked the right model is exactly the failure mode we're trying to design out of analytics.

My instinct is always to polish. I want the first thing someone sees to be good, because I figure you only get one first impression and an embarrassing v1 sticks to you.
But almost every product I actually respect started out rough. The early versions were janky and half-broken, and the founders shipped anyway because real users teach you things a year of polishing never will.
So I go back and forth on this constantly.
The case for shipping ugly is that you stop guessing. You find out what people actually care about instead of perfecting features nobody asked for. The case for waiting is that a bad first experience can kill momentum before it ever gets a chance to stick, and you don't always get told why people left.
I think the answer depends on how reversible the launch is. A small audience that forgives you is very different from a big public moment you can't take back.
But I'm probably biased toward polishing longer than I should, and I've definitely buried good ideas thinking they were not ready yet.
Where do you land: ship the ugly version and learn, or hold it until you're proud of it?