Cursor Café Geneva

I went to Switzerland for the first time in the first week of March. I had a plan, but I kept it a bit open for improvisation.

The main idea was to visit the places that inspired Tolkien. Back in 1911, he traveled through Switzerland, hiking across Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, and Zermatt. Lauterbrunnen Valley especially is known as the inspiration for Rivendell. That was what I wanted to see. The landscapes, the scale, the feeling behind those stories.

While I was in Geneva, a friend sent me a Twitter post. It mentioned that there was a Cursor Café event happening on March 6.

It wasn’t something I planned at all, but it was only a short bus ride away. I thought about it for a bit and decided to go. I didn’t really have anything to lose, and it felt like a good opportunity to meet people while traveling.

When I got there, it felt different than I expected. Almost everyone I talked to was deeply involved in tech. AI engineers, product managers, consultants, senior developers. Conversations naturally went into how people are using AI tools and how they approach problems in their work.

I spent most of the time just talking to people, asking what they do, which tools they use, and sharing what I’ve been working on.

At some point, I was talking with Joel. He mentioned that he works in the healthcare field, specifically in medical imaging, which was a coincidence because my senior project is also about medical imaging.

I told him about the project, that I’m building a deep learning model to estimate age and gender from clavicle CT images. He also mentioned that he’s working on a medical imaging startup, so the conversation naturally shifted into the technical side of things.

When I explained that we only have around 220 patient samples, which is quite low if you want to get reliable results, he immediately suggested a different direction. Instead of relying only on that dataset, he recommended using existing models to detect bone structures in chest CT scans, isolate the clavicle region, and build a larger dataset from there. He also pointed me toward some datasets that could be useful.

It was a rare moment where I could directly talk about my work with someone who has deep experience in the same field.

I also had the chance to talk with Kamila, one of the organizers. At some point, the conversation shifted into building a company and where it makes sense to start one. She explained that the decision is not really about picking a single best location, but more about what you are building, where your users are, and where your niche is active.

The way she described it made it clear that the choice depends entirely on the context of the product. You choose the place based on what you are trying to do, not the other way around.

Another thing I noticed during conversations was how people viewed Türkiye. Most of them had a very positive impression of the culture, either from their own trips or from Turkish friends living in Europe. But at the same time, there were concerns about the political climate and the region’s proximity to ongoing conflicts.

It was interesting to hear that perspective from the outside. As someone who was born and raised in Istanbul, I’ve always felt quite distant from those kinds of situations, like they were happening somewhere far away. And honestly, it still feels far away.

But they were asking questions like whether Turkey is affected by the tensions with Iran or the ongoing conflicts in the region. I told them I don’t think we are directly a target, but at the same time, you can’t say anything with certainty. Maybe we are not involved today, but who knows what happens next.

By the end, I had met a lot of people and genuinely had a good time. It felt like the meetup really reached its purpose.

It felt more like being in the right place at the right time.

I’m really grateful I got to be part of this meetup. Shout out to Kamila and Colin for making the day as memorable as it was.