Ryo Lu
Ryo Lu is a product designer who was head of design at the AI coding tool CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry from 2025 to 2026, after earlier product design work at Notion, Stripe and Asana.
Contents13 sections
Key facts
Early Life
Ryo Lu was born in China and raised in Canada. He has described himself as equally curious about design, culture and technology.[1]
Lu has recalled growing up with beige-box PCs and first seeing the iMac G4 after moving to Canada. Unable to afford a Mac, he changed the icons, fonts and windows to make his PC look like one and learned to make shiny buttons. “that’s how i got into interface design,” he wrote.[2]
2013–2014McGill University and Software Development
Lu studied computer science and biology at McGill University and received a BSc in 2014. During his studies he interned at large companies and took freelance and personal projects from conception to development.[1]
In 2013 he worked as a software developer at Autodesk and at Ericsson.[1]
2014–2016Early Startups and Ping++
From 2014 Lu worked on problems faced by startups. As design co-founder he designed and built SchedulingDirect, an employee management service for businesses, and he co-founded Pluto, Inc., maker of the gamified language-learning app Pluto; both projects ended when their teams dissolved.[1]
2016–2018Product Designer at Asana
2018Joining Stripe
In 2018 Lu joined Stripe as a product designer.[3]
January 31, 2025Leaving Notion for Cursor
After five years at Notion, Lu announced on January 31, 2025 that he was joining the AI coding tool Cursor as Head of Design. “Time to go deep on AI and code, build an incredible team, and craft the best tool to turn ideas into reality,” he wrote.[4]
December 16, 2025a16z Podcast Appearance
On December 16, 2025, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released the podcast episode “Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers,” in which Lu, as Cursor’s head of design, spoke with the firm’s general partners Jennifer Li and Erik TorenbergErik TorenbergErik Torenberg is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and podcast host who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests and is responsible for marketing and the ecosystem network. He was the first employee of Product Hunt and founded or co-founded On Deck, Village Global, and Turpentine, long combining founder communities, expert content, and early-stage investing.Open the full entry about AI letting designers ship code.[5]
June 23, 2026Cursor Compile Talk
On June 23, 2026, Lu posted his talk from Cursor Compile on his website, describing it as “some thoughts on how we build in the age of AI and what doesn’t change.”[6]
August 10, 2026Leaving Cursor
On August 10, 2026, Lu announced that he had left Cursor. “after 10 years inside the tech bubble in San Francisco, Cursor felt like the sharpest version of that world,” he wrote, adding that he needed a different rhythm and that “Asia feels like the right place to begin again.”[7]
Design Philosophy
Lu has described his work at Notion as a search for the basic building blocks of software: “we landed on blocks, databases, views, relations,” he wrote, and “Notion is lego blocks for thought and work.” He sees Cursor doing something similar at a different layer, lowering the barrier between human intention and working software.[8]
In November 2025 he wrote that the gap between disciplines disappears when designers and engineers work in the same medium: “i'm a designer who built ryOS entirely in Cursor,” he said, adding that he was not replacing engineers but removing execution barriers while keeping his design taste and systems thinking.[9]
ryOS
ryOS is a web-based desktop environment that Lu made with Cursor. Inspired by classic macOS and Windows, it is built with React and TypeScript, includes a system-aware AI assistant, and offers themes such as System 7, Aqua, Windows XP and Windows 98 along with apps such as Finder, TextEdit, MacPaint, Terminal and iPod. Its GitHub repository has about 1,300 stars.[10]
Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts
Personal website: https://ryo.lu/ (opens in a new window).[11]
X: Public account: https://x.com/ryolu_ (opens in a new window).[11]
Sources
- Ryo Lu (opens in a new window)
- remembering Steve (opens in a new window)
- Ryo Lu (opens in a new window)
- After 5 amazing years at @NotionHQ, I’m joining @cursor_ai as Head of Design. (opens in a new window)
- Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers (opens in a new window)
- here's my talk at Cursor Compile (opens in a new window)
- i left Cursor. (opens in a new window)
- making things true (opens in a new window)
- the old way of scaling teams is dead (opens in a new window)
- ryokun6/ryos: ryOS, made with Cursor (opens in a new window)
- Ryo Lu (opens in a new window)