Salaya, 23 August 2026
Hello everyone,
I hope you're resting and settling back into your routines after such an intense and fun day.
First, my deepest gratitude. There were 104 of us in that café yesterday, and 22 teams building. Thank you for coming, for throwing yourselves into it, and for what you built. We know how powerful Cursor is, but the creativity, the depth of thought and the care you put into your projects went beyond anything we expected.
The results
Winners: Dearly · Teletubbies · June, Please
Judges' Picks: Lovedrop · Free Food · Team Freshers
If you're on one of these teams, please have one person email me at luisfer.romero.calero@gmail.com in a single message, with your team name, the full names of every member (not nicknames), and the email address attached to each member's Cursor account.
What didn't work
I want to be straightforward with you about yesterday.
Clay holds about 70 people, and that's the number I planned for. This was the tenth Cursor event I've organised in ASEAN, and attendance normally runs 60 to 70 percent of sign-ups. Yesterday it was nearly 95 percent, which put considerably more people in the building than I had prepared for.
That created problems I hadn't prepared for. Many of you couldn't find a comfortable place to sit and work. We had to split the event between 'upstairs' and 'downstairs', which meant presentations ran simultaneously in two rooms and neither was as quiet as it should have been. Our timing slipped. We had to drop the popular vote, both because of time constraints and because you hadn't had the chance to see all the projects. And the decision I'm sorriest about: we had to prematurely select six teams out of the twenty-two that took part, to keep the agenda sustainable and moving at a steady pace. The wifi struggled too.
If you feel these issues really affected your work or your presentation, and you'd like to show me what you made, send me your GitHub repo link at luisfer.romero.calero@gmail.com. I'll have a look, and I'm happy to give you constructive feedback on it if that would be useful.
Clay were wonderful hosts, and delighted to see that much energy in their space.
Khun Aim, Shivek, Jon and Sai were selfless all afternoon. They adapted to every decision I made and thought alongside me when I had to make them quickly. Whatever went wrong yesterday came from my planning, and the responsibility is mine.
What I'll do differently
Everyone will have a proper place to work, regardless of how many people turn up. That means being open to bigger venues, and to a deeper partnership with Mahidol if they'd like to help with that.
Presentations will happen in one single room, always, so that everybody sees everything.
I'll keep the atmosphere casual, because that's the point of these events, but the schedule and the voting will be planned properly rather than improvised.
And the wifi will work properly for everyone.
What next
Some of you have already left feedback on Luma, and I'm grateful for it. If you'd rather talk privately about how to make the next Salaya event more enjoyable, more welcoming and better structured, my inbox is open. I'd also like to hear what kind of event you want next, whether that's Cursor or Grok Bot.
You were all great. Seeing that much work and creativity in one afternoon was a true gift, and I hope we meet again and I get to follow what you build next.