Cursor grew 1,000x in 2 years
Cursor, an early Fireworks customer when it was a single-digit-million company, grew approximately 1,000x over two years.
Snapshot · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
Explore episode
Jul 20, 2026
Where this was said
How Much Will AI Token Usage Explode Over the Next Two Years?
At 41:20 · chapter starts 37:00
Harry opens with the customer concentration question — can Fireworks survive a Cursor churn given a potential SpaceX acquisition? Lin pivots to the broader portfolio: 2024 was the year of coding, 2025 is the year of co-work, and co-work customers span legal, finance, healthcare, consumer-facing recommendation systems, and beyond. He then drops a striking operational disclosure: Fireworks processes more than 40 trillion tokens per day, the majority from customised models. When Harry asks where that number goes in a year, Lin offers a range of 20x to 100x — and argues that at those growth rates, the idea that AI CapEx is in a bubble is simply wrong. The world is bottlenecked by physical supply chains, not by lack of demand.
20–100x token growth projected
Lin Qiao projects Fireworks' token throughput could grow 20x to 100x by end of next year as AI adoption accelerates.
Benioff spends 3.8% of dev salaries on Claude Code
Marc Benioff reportedly spends about 3.8% of Salesforce developer salaries on Anthropic's Claude Code product.
Similar snapshots
$14K/month in 6 months
Sam built Algrow from zero to $14,000 in monthly revenue within just six months of shipping his first MVP.
10,000 users in 6 months
Algrow reached over 10,000 users in roughly six months, driven almost entirely by organic Discord community growth.
First 400 users from Discord
Sam acquired his first 400 users entirely through Discord communities, without paid advertising or traditional outreach.
480 new customers in one month
Algrow added exactly 480 new paying customers in its most recent month, demonstrating strong ongoing growth.
£10K revenue in last 4 weeks
Sam's Stripe dashboard showed over £10,000 in revenue in the last four weeks, equivalent to roughly $13,000–$14,000 USD.
Free access for early users as growth hack
Sam gave all early users free access so they could show the tool to friends, turning them into live demos and advocates who helped the product spread virally.
No self-promo rule exploit: screen sharing
By silently screen-sharing his tool in Discord voice chats rather than posting links, Sam attracted curiosity without violating no-self-promo server rules.
$10K+ from affiliate marketing first
Before building Algrow, Sam and two friends made over $10,000 in revenue through affiliate marketing for RizzApp by posting faceless texting story content.
$13K MRR with $0 marketing spend
Bhanu grew SiteGPT to $13,000 monthly recurring revenue entirely through organic channels, spending nothing on paid marketing.
