{"id":368353,"date":"2026-06-20T13:52:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T13:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/368353\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T13:52:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T13:52:13","slug":"these-mit-startup-founders-just-made-billions-in-san-francisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/368353\/","title":{"rendered":"These MIT startup founders just made billions in San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"

This column is from Trendlines, my business newsletter that covers the forces shaping the economy in Boston and beyond. If you\u2019d like to receive it via email on Mondays and Thursdays, sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last week, SpaceX\u2019s initial public offering minted about 4,400 millionaires<\/a> among current and former employees, according to investment platform Hill.com. More than 400 of them owned stock worth at least $100 million. <\/p>\n

Then, on Tuesday, Elon Musk\u2019s rocket and AI company made four former MIT students in their mid-20s breathtakingly wealthy when it agreed to buy their startup for $60 billion<\/a>. They started AI coding company Cursor (officially incorporated as Anysphere) four years ago while still going to school in Cambridge, but they chose San Francisco as their home base.<\/p>\n

Led by CEO Michael Truell, the Cursor founders will be multibillionaires<\/a> when the SpaceX deal closes later this year. Truell and Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, and Arvid Lunnemark each own a roughly 9 percent stake in the company worth about $5.5 billion.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the same old song<\/a>: AI entrepreneurs get their degrees in Massachusetts but make their fortunes elsewhere. <\/p>\n

\u201c21 of the Forbes 50 AI companies had founders that went to school in Boston\/Cambridge,\u201d tech veteran and mentor Brian Halligan posted on X<\/a> in February. <\/p>\n

Halligan, a cofounder of Cambridge-based HubSpot, was bragging about one of our region\u2019s superpowers: a higher education hub that cranks out large numbers of undergraduate and graduate students who go on to start companies. <\/p>\n

But he also appended a list of those companies \u2014 only one of which, AI music maker Suno, is based here.<\/p>\n

Truell & Co. don\u2019t appear to have explained publicly why they went to California, but there are at least three possible reasons.<\/p>\n

San Francisco is the center of the AI universe, home to two of the biggest model makers \u2014 OpenAI and Anthropic \u2014 and a high concentration of coding talent and venture capital money.Truell interned at Google after his freshman year at MIT and later joined Neo Scholars, a training program for young talent run by Ali Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb.The Cursor team received $125,000 in funding and access to a network of founders, investors, and advisers when it was accepted into Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in California.<\/p>\n

Y Combinator also operated in Cambridge but shut down there in 2009.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoston just doesn\u2019t have the startup culture that the Valley does,\u201d cofounder Paul Graham explained at the time<\/a>. <\/p>\n

As I wrote in March<\/a>, Massachusetts missed out on the massive investments fueling models like ChatGPT and Claude, but we may be poised to capitalize on AI\u2019s next phase: using those models to build systems tailored to meet the needs of individual businesses.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, state and local tech executives are trying to up our AI game, the Globe\u2019s Aaron Pressman reported earlier this month<\/a>: <\/p>\n

The Massachusetts AI Hub, a $100 million initiative launched by the Healey administration in 2024, has struck deals to get free access to Google AI training for any state resident and to give 40,000 state workers access to ChatGPT. The Boston fitness-tech company Whoop this year helped organize a coalition of tech and investment firms to attract AI startups to the state while encouraging local entrepreneurs to start tech companies\u2009\u2014\u2009and keep them\u2009\u2014\u2009here.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou gotta start somewhere and we\u2019re starting in 2026,\u201d Halligan told a commenter on his February post. \u201cLots [of] smart people working on making Boston a better hub now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This column is from Trendlines, my business newsletter that covers the forces shaping the economy in Boston and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[149398,7,100373,77891,149399,2398,101,103,102,145867,104,106,105,149397,1264],"class_list":["post-368353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-arts-culture-and-entertainment","tag-california","tag-color-image","tag-horizontal","tag-moscone-center-south","tag-photography","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-san-francisco-california","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-stage-performance-space","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}