Cognition put its whole team on its first enterprise customer

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 42:46

   Walk us through what happens to being a customer. You know, it starts with education and everyone's gone crazy over AI and agents and so on. And those are the buzzwords of the last six months, obviously. So they want to know more about this, but there's still a lot of detail and like, what does it actually look like to deploy them? So, you know, we'll show them what this looks like. We'll talk them through like how we work with teams and how we partner, you know, how we direct them to the right use cases, how we give them guidance on like how, you know, to maximize their ROI or like what projects are or are not feasible with agents.

2. 43:16

   And then from there, you know, enterprises typically obviously have some very messy processes. And so, you know, for most software or most, you know, just generally like vendors that they'd want to work with, it's often, I mean, as you can imagine, for a massive bank, you know, adopting software, giving it access to all of their, you know, their repos, getting through security or whatever, that's like usually for typical companies, it's like a 12 to 18 month cycle.

3. 43:41

   The thing that we do naturally is we just work with them to figure out how we go and do that as fast as is humanly possible. Did you send employees down to South America for NewBank? Well, so NewBank, I mean, the first one, honestly, our entire team was the foreign deploy team. Like, we all flew to Brazil. Like, I mean, it's like the first case, you know, it's like, let's be real here, okay? Agents did not work generally, okay?

4. 44:01

   And so there was a lot of, like, how do you make it work for you? Very specific. Like, we all flew to Brazil. I was there. The whole team was there. We were sitting there with their engineers, understanding, okay, so this is what you do in that case. This is what you do in that case. And this is what Devin needs to know. and Devon needs to be able to read these things and like going and debugging their like exact problems.

5. 44:20

   Now, obviously, it's not like that at all because, you know. Hold on, we'll get to where it is now. But the idea of like, no, we didn't deploy a team. We deployed the whole company. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, getting the first customer obviously was like a real, you know, it's like, I mean, I wonder what they thought of that. But like, yeah, it was like literally like, okay, let's go through all these different things that you guys think could make sense.

6. 44:42

   Let's go through each one. Let's try some of it manually ourselves to understand what the task looks like. Let's see if we can teach Devin to do this correctly and build in the right orchestration for Devin to be able to do this. And let's just basically building the product was almost like building for one company. And yeah, it was fun. So what do you do today? So today it's obviously much more self-start and agents are so much more capable, obviously.

7. 45:11

   And we've figured out a lot more things with the onboarding experience. But a lot of it is, we're saying these cycles typically take 12 to 18 months. We try to get deployed with folks in like three months. And a lot of that requires folks to, obviously, first of all, it requires them to really appreciate that it's a priority. I mean, if you have 25,000 software engineers and an org that's running that costs $10 billion a year or something that you think can move three times faster, usually it is a priority.

8. 45:40

   But then it's like figuring out how we get through the security reviews. We can deploy in their private cloud. We have very strict data agreements. We have tight air walls on all these things, obviously. Do employees physically have to go? Are they working with, like, are these deals so big that they're working with a specific company and only that company for a period of time or no? Typically, no.

9. 46:06

   We have, you know, we have a full, like, forward deployed motion. But a lot of what that looks like, as we're saying, is a little bit more like user education and guidance. And so we will fly, you know, we still do this, but we'll fly out and kind of, like, go and see customers and work with them, point them to the right use cases, teach them how to get success, help them with their like setup and their playbooks, like all these things for how to use Devon.

10. 46:29

    But it's much more a kind of like, look, we're here to assist you guys. We're giving you a lot of this kind of like direction and so on. But like you are yourself, you know, and your team is the one that's using Devon and running all that, right? So that's a lot of what that looks like. We're set up to be as incentive aligned with our customers as possible. And so a lot of it is like, is not just like, oh, here's this tool, like hand it over to your engineers and like find out what they say about it.

11. 46:52

    It's like, okay, well, let's figure out like, what are the initiatives that you guys really care about and like we will point you to for those initiatives here are each of the projects that we think devon right now can make you 10 times faster on and we'll tell you for the ones that that it's not and here's here's what workflows you should use instead or here's how you should get to value instead but it looks more like that than like a um than than like a literal like you know we are using devon on your