Scott Wu says his parents are chemical engineers who immigrated from China for graduate school.
“My parents were both chemical engineers. and so they immigrated from China for grad school.”
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Scott Wu
1 episodes · 24 quoted claims
Scott Wu attended Harvard for two years and then dropped out.
“I went to Harvard for two years, and then I dropped out.”
Scott Wu and Alexandr Wang started at Addepar on the same day as high schoolers, among a group of four.
“there were four of us who started at the same time as high schoolers. And it was myself, Alexandr Wang was actually another one. We started on the same day.”
Scott Wu met Alexandr Wang in sixth grade at the national Math Counts competition; Wang was from New Mexico and Wu from Louisiana.
“He was from New Mexico. I was from Louisiana. But we met in this math competition called Math Counts. We were both at the national competition.”
Scott Wu argues that top poker players have shifted from intuition-driven pros of the 1980s and 1990s to mathematically minded players as the game matured.
“and now it's just all math nerds you know it's basically like at some point when the space gets mature enough”
Super Smash Bros. Melee is a GameCube game, and the GameCube was released in 2001.
“It's for the GameCube, which came out in 2001.”
Cognition acquired Windsurf, so its products now include Devin, an AI coding agent, and Windsurf, an IDE.
“most recently just acquired Windsurf. And so, you know, Devin, the agent, and Windsurf, the IDE.”
Scott Wu describes Devin as an asynchronous product in which a user delegates a task to an agent, unlike IDE tools that speed up typing.
“Devin is a very different paradigm of what I would call like an async experience, right? Where you have an agent and you delegate a task.”
Scott Wu says Devin's customers range from large banks such as Goldman Sachs and Citibank to startups with two or three people.
“We work with some of the biggest banks in the world, like Goldman and Citibank, all the way down to startups with two or three people.”
Scott Wu says that in successful organizations Devin typically merges 30 to 40 percent of all pull requests.
“Typically, in a successful org, Devin is merging something in the range of 30 % to 40 % of all the pull requests that come through.”
Scott Wu says customers who measure enterprise code migrations internally report an 8 to 15 times productivity gain with Devin.
“when folks measure internally, they see something like an 8 to 15x gain for a lot of these use cases with Devin”
Cognition's largest internal benchmark is called junior dev and measures real-world junior developer tasks, which Scott Wu says may need to become senior dev.
“The biggest is one that we call junior dev, which we might need to upgrade to senior dev pretty soon.”
Scott Wu argues AI products fit usage-based pricing because their cost of goods is mostly GPU spend that scales with model use.
“usage obviously just goes so naturally with the cogs themselves because a lot of this is effectively GPU spend on how much you're spinning the models”
Scott Wu says the Cognition team uses Devin to order DoorDash and Amazon packages.
“we order our DoorDash on Devin. You know, we order our Amazon packages with Devin.”
Scott Wu says a Cognition colleague named Walden used Devin to negotiate an airline refund for a canceled flight, and it succeeded.
“Walden had a flight that got canceled and was trying to, you know, use Devin to go and, like, negotiate with the airline to get the refund for it.”
Before the Windsurf deal, Cognition had about 35 people, including about 19 core engineers, which grew to roughly 30 to 35 core engineers afterward.
“what we call core engineering was about 19. With WindSurf, obviously the team count has grown a lot.”
Cognition's engineering interview has candidates build their own version of Devin, a full agent, in about eight hours.
“basically just having people build their own Devin in eight hours and seeing how far they get with it.”
Scott Wu says about 21 of Cognition's initial roughly 35 people had previously founded a company.
“of our initial kind of 35, I think 21 of us have founded a company before.”
Scott Wu predicts that within two to four years software engineers will no longer use code as their main interface.
“my guess on this point is probably in the neighborhood of, let's say, two, three, four years from now, where we stop using code as the main interface.”
Cognition contacted Windsurf's remaining leadership the evening the Google deal news broke and met them that same night.
“We reached out to them cold that evening and got to meet the new Windsurf leadership, Jeff and Graham and David, that evening.”
In the Google deal, Windsurf's core research and product engineering team went to Google while its other functions stayed intact.
“there was a core research and product engineering team that went to Google. And all of the other functions were entirely intact.”
Scott Wu says Cognition signed the Windsurf acquisition on Monday at about 9 a.m. after an overnight session with lawyers.
“we got it signed on Monday at like 9 a .m. Because us and the lawyers were up all night”
Windsurf shipped its Wave 11 release a few days after Cognition closed the acquisition.
“We shipped Wave 11, you know, a few days later after we closed that deal.”
Scott Wu says Cognition offered a buyout to Windsurf staff who did not want its intense culture, and only a small fraction took it.
“most folks have been really excited to come in and do it, and only a small fraction have taken the buyout.”