Warm-Intro an Early Cursor Employee
Cold applications to a 40-person AI startup vanish into an inbox no one reads. The honest fix: find the early employee who shares your school or a past employer, and give them a 30-second way to help.
Find Your Warm Intro →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick a tech target:
Why the early employee beats the founder or the form
At a startup growing as fast as Cursor, the founder gets pitched dozens of times a day and the careers form routes to a queue no one prioritizes. An early employee, engineer number 8 or the first devrel hire, actually feels the hiring pain and gets asked for warm intros far less often.
That person can walk your name to the hiring manager in one Slack message. A referral from inside a small team is not a nice-to-have there, it is often how the role gets filled before it is ever posted.
How to find and reach the right early employee
Your leverage is the overlap that already exists. Work it in this order.
- Rank by shared context, not seniority. A classmate who joined two years ago beats a VP you have never met. Shared school, a past employer, a Y Combinator batch, or a Discord community you both ran all count as warm.
- Prove you understand the product before you ask. For a devrel or community role, ship one small thing first: a tutorial using their tool, a fix to their docs, an answer in their community forum. Link it in your first message.
- Lead with the share, not the ask. Open with 'we both went to X' or 'I saw you were early at Y', then one line on why their community motion fits what you have built. Save the referral request for the reply.
- Make helping cost 30 seconds. Ask for a quick reaction to your sample work or a yes or no on whether they are hiring, not a coffee chat or a full referral write-up up front.
Let the finding-and-ranking part be automatic
Manually cross-referencing a startup's LinkedIn team against every school and employer on your resume is slow, and you miss overlaps you forgot you had. FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking step for you: point it at a company like Cursor and it surfaces the real early employees you share a school or past employer with, ranks them by how warm the path is, and drafts the opening message.
You still do the human part, the sample work and the honest note. The tool just removes the hour of detective work so you reach the right person while the role is still open.