Scott Wu, Cognition
Episode description
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the world's first AI software engineer.
Wu describes himself as "salty," a word he traces to second grade, when he competed in a seventh-grade math competition, lost, and never forgot it. Born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant family, he grew up the little brother who hated losing at video games and turned that into a career. At the International Olympiad in Informatics he won three gold medals and placed first overall in 2014; he was the 2011 MathCounts national champion. He approaches building a company the way he approaches a strategy game: a tree search, calculating moves, working the decision tree toward victory. By his own account, competition is all he does.
He dropped out of Harvard after two years, worked as a founding engineer at Scale AI, and co-founded Lunchclub before starting Cognition in August 2023 with fellow IOI gold medalists Steven Hao and Walden Yan. They built it in a New York apartment. Devin's annualized revenue then climbed from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025.
In May 2026, Cognition raised at a $26 billion valuation.
Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/scott-wu
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Chapters
(00:00:00) Scott Wu’s Obsession With Winning
(00:02:06) Competitive Programming, Games And Finding His People
(00:04:24) Family, Go, And The Roots Of Scott’s Competitiveness
(00:08:35) Why Losing Hurts More Than Winning Feels Good
(00:09:38) What Winning With Devin Looks Like
(00:12:55) Devin Today: The AI Software Engineer
(00:13:52) Software As The Human-Computer Interface
(00:18:45) Why AI Progress Is Hard To Intuit
(00:20:39) Thinking About AI From First Principles
(00:22:57) What Happens When Agents Can Work For Months
(00:30:18) The Original Thesis Behind Cognition
(00:31:12) Launching Devin And Handling Criticism
(00:37:17) Finding Product-Market Fit In The Enterprise
(00:42:41) How Cognition Deploys Devin Inside Large Companies
(00:48:34) Measuring ROI Instead Of Token Spend
(00:50:01) Why Cognition Wants To Be Model-Neutral
(00:52:18) Why Focus Lets Startups Beat Giants
(00:57:14) Independence, Acquisitions, And Building A Generational Company
(01:00:27) Why Money Is Not The Goal
(01:03:42) One Life: Going For It All
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