# Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Scott Wu says independent AI coding agents can help companies turn model advances into software outcomes and unlock far more building capacity. - Show: Sourcery - Hosts: [Molly O'Shea](https://realalpha.app/people/molly-oshea/) - Guest: [Scott Wu](https://realalpha.app/builders/scott-wu/) is cofounder and CEO of Cognition. - Published: Jul 27, 2026 - Length: 43 min ## The best minutes - [8:14](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=494) [Cognition negotiated the Windsurf acquisition in one weekend](https://realalpha.app/s/cognition-negotiated-the-windsurf-acquisition-in-one-weekend/) (4 min) - [20:17](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1217) [Enterprises need help changing how they build software](https://realalpha.app/s/enterprises-need-help-changing-how-they-build-software/) (7 min) - [33:24](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2004) [A MongoDB setup error revealed Devin’s potential](https://realalpha.app/s/a-mongodb-setup-error-revealed-devins-potential/) (4 min) ## Also worth watching - [13:22](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=802) [Windsurf's product integration was gradual, not forced](https://realalpha.app/s/windsurfs-product-integration-was-gradual-not-forced/) (4 min) - [28:22](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1702) [AI progress still faces organizational and feedback constraints](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-progress-still-faces-organizational-and-feedback/) (4 min) - [4:13](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=253) [Coding-agent adoption could reach far beyond software engineers](https://realalpha.app/s/coding-agent-adoption-could-reach-far-beyond-software/) (4 min) - [37:13](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2233) [AI coding's bigger payoff may be expanding what people can build](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-codings-bigger-payoff-may-be-expanding-what-people-can/) (3 min) Skip the internal merger-planning discussion, the sponsor reads, and the closing event and newsletter plugs. ## Full analysis: Scott Wu says Devin writes roughly 95% of Cognition’s code - Devin writes roughly 95% of Cognition’s code, while code shipped grew roughly sevenfold in six months. - Those company-reported output measures do not show code quality or customer returns. - Teams should track rework, delivery, and ownership alongside agent activity before expanding budgets. Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/#analysis), free with an account: - [2:10](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=130) Devin’s output rose, but output is not value - [4:32](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=272) Customer usage surged from an undisclosed base - [26:04](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1564) Enterprise adoption depends on workflow change - [10:53](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=653) Integration moved gradually after a weekend deal - [35:45](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2145) One debugging story shows possibility, not reliability - [38:37](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2317) Capacity, not speed, is Wu’s larger bet ## Summary Wu is the cofounder and CEO of Cognition, the applied AI lab behind Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer. Cognition also makes Devin Desktop, formerly Windsurf. Wu says Cognition measures AI productivity by outcomes, not token use: Devin writes roughly 95% of the company’s code, and code shipped grew roughly 7x in six months. He sees coding agents reaching a much larger market, with customer usage of Devin up 11–12x in six months. He describes Cognition’s Windsurf acquisition and gradual product integration, and argues that independent, model-neutral providers can help enterprises adapt their work rather than simply hand them a chatbot. Wu doubts that a singularity is six months away, but expects AI to expand what people can build and create an era of abundance. ### Minute by minute - [1:55](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=115) **Outcomes matter more than tokens.** Wu says Devin writes roughly 95% of Cognition's code, while the company's code shipped grew roughly 7x in six months. He says tokens are a poor productivity measure; Cognition tracks shipped outcomes, product progress and business KPIs instead. - [4:13](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=253) **Adoption extends beyond engineers.** Wu says customers' Devin usage rose 11–12x in six months. He sees a market that could grow from roughly zero coding-agent use a year earlier to every software engineer and many others in two or three years; O'Shea notes Cognition reached $500 million in revenue in under three years. - [8:14](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=494) **Windsurf complemented Cognition's agent.** Wu says Cognition saw an opportunity after learning some Windsurf researchers were going to Google. Windsurf brought an IDE, customers, enterprise sales expertise and platform engineering that complemented Cognition's agent; Wu says they negotiated the acquisition over a weekend and had the announcement ready Monday. - [13:22](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=802) **Team integration came before product consolidation.** Wu says Cognition had 35 or 40 employees and a $70 million or $80 million revenue run rate, while Windsurf had around 200 people. They first reassured customers and kept shipping, then used offsites and strategy sessions to bring the teams together and moved into a San Francisco office that fit everyone. - [15:07](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=907) **Products merged through gradual use.** Wu says Cognition kept both products going instead of forcing an immediate merger. Over time, Devin Cloud and Devin Desktop became more connected, letting developers start a session in one and hand it off to the other as users sought both local IDE and cloud-agent workflows. - [17:24](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1044) **Founders handled the deal hands-on.** Wu says the acquisition had no formal playbook: Cognition's founders and functional leaders worked with Windsurf's team on product commitments, integration steps and go-to-market. He says around 30 of Cognition's first 56 employees had founded a company before. - [19:57](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1197) **AI should remain broadly accessible.** Wu says Cognition values independence and works with multiple model providers. He sees government as a major opportunity for software, pointing to the DMV as an example of a service held back by archaic systems; he also wants AI policy to avoid concentrating control in one entity. - [25:19](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1519) **Enterprises need more than model access.** Wu says enterprises want long-term partners because it's hard to know which model will be best in 6 or 12 months. They also need help changing planning, specifications, design, user research and workflows; simply handing teams a chatbot is not enough. - [28:22](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1702) **Wu sees six months as too soon.** Wu says six months is too short for a singularity. He points to organizational and hardware constraints, as well as tasks with unclear success criteria or long time horizons, while arguing that AI will eventually solve intelligence problems. - [32:31](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1951) **Wu says AI hype needs perspective.** O'Shea says she found claims in a Colossus piece hard to accept. Wu says AI could reshape lives more fundamentally than mobile phones or the internet, while urging people to stay sane. - [33:24](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2004) **A MongoDB setup proved Devin's premise.** Wu says the team was experimenting with coding agents in late 2023 when cofounder Walden struggled to set up MongoDB. Devin could draw on knowledge of possible errors and run commands to diagnose them, then fixed the setup; Wu calls it the first moment the team believed an AI engineer could do work for someone. - [37:13](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2233) **AI could expand capacity, not just efficiency.** Wu says the bigger opportunity is not only doing existing work faster, but building much more. He imagines software generated on the fly, including single-use software, and asks what people will create when software can drive itself. - [39:50](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2390) **Poker was proposed as a deal tiebreaker.** Wu says he proposed a heads-up poker match with Peter Thiel to settle a gap in the terms of an early Cognition round. Thiel declined, and they worked out a deal through negotiation instead. - [41:17](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2477) **Abundance could free time for priorities.** Wu says he looks forward to AI handling personal decisions and routine details so people can focus on what matters to them. He expects the abundance era to arrive soon. ## Transcript Sourcery, hosted by Molly O'Shea, with Scott Wu. Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=0) Cognition has raised over a billion dollars. First AI software engineer, Devin. Microsoft and Cognition. Cognition and Mercedes-Benz. Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army. They've raised over 2.5 billion today at a last valuation of 26 billion. In less than three years, you got to 500 million in revenue. That's crazy. Half a billion in revenue in less than three years. Our customers in the last six months or so have also grown their usage in the range of like 11 to 12x. Once you've solved AGI, you just take over the entire world, and then there's just one entity that pulls the world. [0:34](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=34) I just don't think that's the right future for it. There is nothing that humans do that AIs can't do. Maybe you can just have like an AI engineer buddy that can just do work for you. But that was like the very first moment that we believed it was possible. I think the Abundance Era is real, and I think we'll do that for sure. Devin welcome to sorcery yeah do you get that a lot um yeah yeah yeah like I'll be in the elevator and in my like building and like I'll just come down back are you Devin and then you know like well I'm actually I'm actually not well Scott Welcome to Sorcery. We are in Paris, which is pretty cool. We're here for the Rays Summit. [1:33](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=93) It's like this huge AI Summit. I think this is like their second or their third year. You're going to be on stage? Yeah, I'll be on stage tomorrow. I just landed an hour ago and came straight here. Well, it's awesome to have you on. I'm excited to talk through the state of cognition and autonomous coding agents today. It's very pressing. Did you know that? I did, actually, yeah. I mean, I can't even keep up with it at this point. No, things have been going like crazy. I mean, even for us internally, one of the craziest things is, obviously, we use Devin to build Devin. In fact, we almost exclusively use Devin to build Devin at this point. [2:10](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=130) Like, 95% of the code or something is written by Devin. But the crazy thing is, even in the last six months, if you ask people, oh, AI code, yeah, it's been going on for three, four years now, which is true, it has been. but even in the last six months i think the number for us was like our total amount of code shipped is roughly seven x in that time um and so it's like the number of prs we've shipped the amount of code um and obviously literal output you know like there's different ways how in terms of how you actually measure the productivity that you get out of it but i think in practice like we're just able to do so much more and get so much more leverage in even this this this period of time like the models just keep getting better i think there's more and more that's been kind of fleshed i would say with the product experience and so um yeah no things are things are flying it's crazy so how do you measure the productivity of it yeah it's a great question um so a couple things i'd say on this first of all i think obviously literal tokens is just not the right answer really i mean lots of people talk about that you know i think the token you know i kind of i say the token maximum era you know lasted from january to to may of 2026 roughly all right um yeah rip you know [3:18](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=198) It was a fun time. But no, I mean, I think we're now at this point where obviously what you care about is outcomes and what you're actually delivering. And so we see how much we're shipping. We see how much we're doing. Obviously, what do we care about is where are we getting to with the product? What are we actually delivering to our customers and our users? And I think that's roughly the same for every business. There's no kind of secret trick or there's no kind of easy way out in terms of measuring actual ROI productivity and so on, but a lot of it comes down to just actually looking to each of the outcomes that you're driving. [3:55](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=235) And so for us, it's, you know, obviously we have all. The KPIs of the business that we track and that we kind of follow. And, you know, when we think about our output, a lot of what we think about is obviously it's like, you know, how quickly are we growing those numbers as opposed to anything that we actually look at in terms of tokens or spend or something like that. Did you ever think you'd be growing this fast? It's a good question. so what i always think about with this is i think on the one hand i think relative to businesses and by the way it's it's it's not just us it's like our customers have seen this where similarly our customers in the last six months or so have also grown their usage something in the range of like 11 to 12 acts and um um of devin um and um the way i'd say it is yeah on the one hand i think you you just like think about businesses in the past you think about growth of all these tech companies in history and obviously it's pretty crazy um on the other hand you know when i kind of asked the the question um like the first principle of the question of okay how many people are using coding agents now how much are they using it for how much are they getting out of it versus like what do we think they're going to be using and how much of it are [5:10](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=310) they going to be using in you know three years or something i think the rough answer especially if [5:15](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=315) **Scott Wu:** you look you know if we rewind a bit like a year ago the rough answer a year ago was roughly zero and the rough answer for you know two three years from now is roughly every software engineer in the world and probably a lot more than all the just the software engineers because i think a lot more [5:31](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=331) people will be able to produce code and produce products and so on right um and so then when you when you take those two points on the curve and you just extrapolate out what has to happen you know it's i i think there has to be massive adoption massive growth i think what that looks like in practice often is like um of course you know there's there's the virality itself there's like you know there's there's a ton of great content that i think a lot of different folks are putting out in terms of like educating people and and showing people how to use the tools effectively and then there's you know real organizational change that has to happen all these companies to make that happen but it's insane like of all the categories there was an interview i did way back when with naveen from mayfield and he laid out the three fastest growing categories and i know it's like it's really obviously it's it's quite easy to kind of forget about these things when you're in it and like when the whole market is moving with it yeah but it's insane how fast this new category in less than three years you got to 500 million in revenue that's crazy half a billion in revenue in less than three years yeah that's insane yeah no it's [6:34](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=394) i mean it's i think we're very fortunate and i think that the like obviously i mean ai as a whole has moved like crazy in the last few years but like the way that we think about it is like we have to move this fast you know it's it's like if if we frankly if we only 3x year over year or whatever it is you know we'd be we'd be lagging the market right in terms of how fast all this adoption is happening and i think it's i would say it's more a reflection of just how meaningful the technology is you know it's like everybody in enterprise or you know just building products in general like the hardest part about building any product selling a product all that it's just like explaining to people why they should care you know it's like hey i've got this like you know payroll optimization thing i've got this usage-based building thing i've got whatever but like here's why this is like you know really meaningful and here's why you should be thinking about this right the nice thing about this with with you know ai that can write code by itself and build self-driving products for you is you know it's it's i think it's kind of obvious why you should care right and so a lot of it is is just like figuring out how you solve all the [7:41](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=461) practical problems of like getting the technology there and then getting it out to to people you're at half a billion in revenue and you have customers that entail i'm going to list them out because these are some pretty big customers so far goldman sachs mercedes East Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army. And you've raised over $2.5 billion to date at a last valuation of $26 billion. I want to go back in time because Cognition played a pretty big role in a redemption story of a company called Windsurf. So can you bring us back to that moment and how M&A has played a role in the growth? [8:26](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=506) Yeah, it's a fun time. I mean, it was all of 11 months ago. um but um so we uh and by the way it's kind of topical because i think recently you know there's similar news with cursor um uh you know we at the time kind of heard this news roughly around the same time as everyone else that hey this company windsurf which is building a really great ide um that a lot of folks used individuals companies and so on um the some of the team was going to google right and so there was kind of like a you know uh aqua hire deal almost where where a number of the researchers on that team were going to Google, right? [9:00](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=540) And there was a company kind of behind that, you know, that still had all the customers, that still had a ready-to-go go-to-market team, a lot of the platform engineering, the product itself, you know, all the details there. But obviously it kind of like, you know, was trying to figure out what to do. And that was announced that Friday afternoon. And, you know, we at Cog, at Cognition, we were talking about that internally. And we were kind of joking about it at first, like kind of interesting like is there um and then you know as we actually thought about it seriously more we were like actually this is really interesting for us because you know if you think about where we're at like you know we've always been focused on obviously you know the research the product itself like really making progress with the agent product um i think as time goes on it's become more and more clear that like the the really good coding ide products you know the tool that you're the the tool that you're kind of like um sitting in and and and like using to look at the code itself versus the agent product which is kind of that almost the engineer that you can delegate um you obviously want this to be very hand in hand like a lot of the same [10:04](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=604) information on on like understanding your exact code base you know obviously like you want the same you know you want the same knowledge to persist across a lot of like how you even go and do your work and manage assessments is very common you know you're you're looking at the code yourself and then you figure out there's something you want to go do and so you hand that off to like a remote agent right um and so ton of synergies in the product similarly in terms of go-to-market it like um you know windsurf had an amazing um enterprise traction already had a team that was really you know had a lot of expertise in going and selling um um to these folks and and and kind of like figuring out how to actually you know deliver uh and so on like a really really amazing [10:44](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=644) **Scott Wu:** deployed engineering motion all the pieces that you would need basically um and so we got in touch with the windsurf team that evening so it was friday evening and then basically over the course of that weekend we worked out the entire acquisition together so by monday morning we had the [10:58](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=658) announcement ready to go uh fun announcement both myself and jeff and honestly our entire team you know we all got very little sleep that weekend um but uh but you know we put everything together and and yeah no it's great that we were able to do that i mean i think it made a lot of sense for us as a company i think it was also obviously like a really great team that was just kind of figuring out what to do um and i think over the last like um year you know there's why i remember saying this it's like it's like peanut butter and chocolate honestly for us like it's been it's been a lot of fun and at this point it's like i think the first few months a lot of little details as you can imagine to figure out like some of the same customers or companies you know it's like yeah we had somebody on the cognition side who had a relationship with them we had somebody on the windsurf side who had a relationship there's tons of stuff to figure out right all the product stuff you know it's like we're talking at the high level about what the synergies are ton of detail involved and actually going and plugging that in and making billing work and thinking about how you actually hand a session off from the local environment to the remote [11:59](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=719) environment and All these other things. And then similarly, even like the teams, the offices, all of that, you know, stuff to figure out. But today, I would say it's like, it's all, you know, it's all one product. It's all one kind of clean. You know, you come to see our office and it's like, you wouldn't know at all. Like, okay, is this person from the old Cognition or the old Windsurf or do they join after, you know, that time? And it's kind of like, it's been really nice in that time. This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on. And I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing, and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. [12:50](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=770) brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards expenses and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in ai agents that handle expenses automatically enforce policy before spend happens and close your books in minutes that's why sorcery runs on brex so i can spend time on building and not busy work it's time to get brex af learn more at brex.com slash sorcery that's b-r-e-x dot com slash s-o-u-r-c-e-r-y bye what was it like merging the teams together yeah um no that was a real process and by the way one of the things that was tricky about that process is cognition at the time was all of 35 or 40 people um and we had a meaningful business with you know real traction we were doing um in the range of 70 or 80 million of revenue run rate at the time. [13:45](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=825) But it was a very small team. Windsurf, on the other hand, because it had kind of scaled up go-to-market and set all that up, it was around 200 people at the time. And so a lot of details to figure out, obviously. And so for a few months, I mean, the immediate day of or week of, all of us were just like, okay, let's just write the ship. Let's make sure folks know, customers know that we're going to be there for them. We're going to be shipping. we're gonna be like um you know taking care of both sides of the product and doing that well right and let's just go and deliver um over the first few months obviously a lot of it was just like figuring out how we um how we kind of get into a good state and then you know as with all things it's kind of like it's much easier to go build these things and do all this you know with with some time um and so um you know we had a lot of little like kind of like fun off sites which helped I think for people getting to know each other ton of strategy sessions obviously like working out all the details and so on and then you know pretty soon like at the end of last year we got to kind of like we were looking for like a bigger SF office space obviously like as [14:51](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=891) soon as possible just as like a tactical matter because you know we needed an office that could fit everybody right and so like but by the end of the last year we got that office space and then kind of were able to put everyone in one space and all kind of like work together and um and those were i would say kind of the big milestones that like made things super super smooth how did you work through the product integration i mean it was it was a lot of steps for sure um no i i mean i think the um one way i'd put it is like you know not trying to overly force it um and so you know for the time being it was like there's a windsurf product there's a devon product both those are great let's work on both those and kind of do the obvious like next steps on each of these things um and then as we kind of had pieces of overlap just like naturally building them in together and so it wasn't like uh you know one month later windsurf is gone and that's it you know it was like over the course of the last year even we've been building all these things and now it's kind of like you know devon cloud and devon desktop are like super super like nicely paired together you can start sessions from one and hand [16:00](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=960) Off to the other, you can work with them all in the same systems, whatever, right? But it was much more of a gradual thing. And I think one of the things that was interesting for us was a lot of the users of either product were kind of already naturally looking for the other side, right? And so we had a ton of people, for example, who were on the IDE framework. And obviously, right around this time that we're talking about, late 25, early 2026, is right around when these asynchronous agents were really starting to get big. And so all these folks were thinking about, okay, well, what should my strategy be? [16:35](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=995) And obviously, it's great to be able to work with a single team and somebody that already understands your code base and has all the details kind of figured out and deployed, right? And so that was nice. And then on the reverse side, obviously, similarly, for a lot of folks who were, like, you know, adopting the cloud agent, it's very nice to say, okay, yeah, like, the local side of it is there, too, for any of the developers who still want to use the local form factor and who want to have that, right? [17:00](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1020) **Scott Wu:** And so I think it's kind of like maybe the simple way to put it is like rather than force it and say, okay, over the next 30 days or 60 days, like we have to integrate these products. [17:09](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1029) It's much more of like letting the actual usage and the new features that we're building, the kind of next paradigms that we're getting to, like letting those like pull the products together more gradually rather than forcing it. How were you getting advised during this? Were you just making it up as you go or were you like who were you turning to? It's a good question. A lot of making it up. Okay. And I think for us, I mean, it's, one of the things about COG, honestly, is like we, and, you know, we've talked before about how, like, a lot of our team are former founders. Our first, like, you know, 56 people, I think like 30 of us were, had founded a company before this. [17:50](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1070) And so obviously, like, a lot of us together were people who liked being ambitious and entrepreneurial and thinking from first principles. But, yeah, also, I mean, I think the – no, I mean, it was a real, like, team effort. I specifically remember that weekend there was a point. So there was the initial kind of discussions, which were with, like, myself and Russell from our side and then Jeff and Graham, you know, from the windsurf side. But then, obviously, as soon as we got past, like, the very first initial discussion, there was a question of like okay but like what are we actually going to do and so then there was like every single kind of like part of the business that that saturday was it was one of my my favorite like honestly one of the funnest days of my life really um was like um and because you know we had our kind of like you know technical team we had steven and walden and so on who are like you know engineering product leaders like my co-founders going in like um you know sitting with their team to understand okay what's going on with windsurf what do we do to get out wave 11 what are the things what are the specific features which we need to make sure deliver on time, the things that we've promised [19:00](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1140) folks that we obviously want to live up to what are the next first steps on how we would start getting towards an integration, similarly on all of the go to market stuff, we had our folks there working with across teams, making that happen there's just kind of a feeling I think for all of us of like we just love figuring this kind of stuff out you know i think sometimes people kind of describe it as like oh like i just want to like build my product and piece and everything else about building a company is you know that's just like i'll put up with it but it's it's not my cup of tea i think for all of us like yeah like you know the experience of building the company is like is a lot of the fun of it and so it's a really fun weekend for us wow yeah i would imagine i'm sure it's something else every week so yeah yeah yeah it's fun i mean yeah we've had all sorts of uh yeah we've had we've had a lot of more fun weeks since that one too It's always a mess, yeah. [20:01](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1201) Well, speaking on the backdrop of M&A, with Cursor and their deal, their $60 billion deal with SpaceX, M&A is floating around and there's all those kinds of fun stories that are happening, but Cognition remains independent, so much so that you spent Independence Day at DC, in DC. So why were you guys in DC for Independence Day and what's the DC play here? Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, I mean, it's, look, I think it's like a really, obviously it's a really topical thing right now. And I think especially because code is, I think in some ways, like, you know, the most kind of like mature vertical. I think a lot of folks look to code as kind of like an expectation of what's going to happen in the rest of the industry and all these verticals. [20:47](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1247) And yeah, I think there's been a narrative out there that, oh, like in order to win, you have to be a lab yourself or you have to go sell to a lab. And obviously, like, we've just always believed that because there's a lot of value and a lot of power in being independent. And you see that in how we work. Like, you know, we're completely model neutral. Like, we work with all the different providers. We work with OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, Google, so on and so forth. But also just, like, in our approach with companies and so – or with all the orgs that we work with. So DC is really exciting for us for a couple reasons. [21:24](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1284) I think, one, because, frankly, it's like you talk about places that need software and that have, you know, things that they want to build but not enough software engineers to build them. You see, and government in general might perhaps be the single biggest kind of point of that, right? All of these orgs have so many things that, you know, I mean, I feel like the one-liner is like, imagine going to the DMV and it actually worked. And why doesn't it work? You know, it's because there's all this archaic software. It's all these crazy processes. it's because the website kind of doesn't really you know work and or you're not able to kind of see these things and track all these things in advance and like government software doesn't have to be that you know all these things can be good um and and i think it's like i think it's like a really important thing um for for us to work towards i think the other thing and the other reason why why it's so important to us is frankly i think ai itself is just going to be a pretty fundamental um policy issue over the next few years and like you think about the early days of the internet for example and there were all these discussions about okay what's going to [22:32](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1352) happen is there are there going to be a handful of corporations that control the entire internet or they can be whatever um obviously we ended up with the open internet and now you know all the businesses of the world are built on the internet but there will come a day where all the businesses of the world are built on ai you know and i think it's something that we should be thinking about sooner rather than later and um and and so like we we wanted to to to to to to give our thoughts to that conversation as well it's awesome to see the new admin just embrace technology so much the amount that they've done in the last year has been incredible but from your standpoint of being independent like you mentioned a couple reasons but why do you think in the long run it's it's more important for you to build this company as big as you can independently than under another umbrella yeah yeah no i mean i think the um i guess a few things i'd say i i think there's a world that folks sometimes talk about where there's the full recursive super intelligence and then everything is all owned by like a single entity you know or maybe there's two entities or something that they're you know but then they have the um and it's like um you know everything [23:46](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1426) all collapses once you've solved AGI you just take over the entire world and then there's just like one entity that pulls the world I mean I just don't think that's the right the right future for us and and I think AI will get to this level of that to that level of capabilities and I think we'll see it do even crazier and crazier things like I've I've always felt that there's in terms of just pure knowledge work there's there is nothing that humans do that AIs can't do you know partly because humans are humans you know our brains are just computers you know like like like like the AIs are too right and it's like I mean they're literally called neural networks because they were inspired by how our brains operate and so like I think we will solve all these problems, but I think we want that to be done in a way that people can control their own intelligence, can have access to all these things, and so on. [24:36](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1476) And I think more than that, too, I think that it can be done, which is obviously an important part of any mission that you want to bet on. But like I think there is a lot of room and I think there is a lot of appetite from everyone out there, you know, individuals and businesses and so on for, you know, truly like independent tools that they can use and, you know, for things that really innovate at the product and the value layer rather than just the pure intelligence layer. I mean, so on this topic, Christian Garrett, I asked him for some questions. 137, they're big fans. They talked about you in their interview we just did with them, with Justin Fishner-Wolfson. [25:20](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1520) Justin and Christian also. They're great. So Christian asks, why do enterprises want third-party providers or open source and won't solely rely on the labs, thus their coding tools? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think several reasons. I think first of all obviously the way enterprises work is they want to have long term partnerships and frankly it's just hard to know what's going to happen in the long term right like who even is going to have the best model in 6 months or 12 months or whatever and I mean I think that's very reasonable you know like you don't want to teach all of your engineers or your entire team how to use one particular suite and one particular product and then find out oh actually it turns out people aren't using this one anymore because everyone says this other one is better or something right [26:04](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1564) **Scott Wu:** But I think the other reason that it's important, too, is because, as we said, you know, I think for every company or for every team, like, what they care about is not how many tokens they're using, it's how much value they're driving, right? [26:16](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1576) And I think it's very important for there to be a player that is going and helping them drive all that value and, like, turning that into reality, right? And I think in practice, it's, you know, how you organize your teams, how you think about planning, how you think about specs or design, how you do user research. All of these things should be different in the era of AI, right? It's not as simple as, like, you know, throw the tool over the wall. Here's your chatbot. Try that out. Hopefully, it's good for you, right? It's like there's a lot of fundamental questions that you have to think through and work through. [26:51](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1611) And these obviously, like, require organizational change, right? And so I think from their perspective, they want to work with somebody who's thinking a lot about that, who really understands that, and is excited to go help them with all those details. If you're building what's next in AI, you need to know MongoDB, the database platform developers love and built for the agents you're running. MongoDB stores, searches, and reasons over your data in real time. with vector search and embeddings from Voyage AI all in the same system. No separate pipelines, no stitching together 10 different tools. [27:28](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1648) It's why 75% of the Fortune 100 and leading AI-native startups run on MongoDB. Build and scale from your first user to billions of vectors. Go to mongodb.com slash AI to learn more. That's mongodb.com slash AI to learn more. Bye. Assembly AI is a voice AI infrastructure layer millions of developers build on. They build the industry's best speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models that serve as critical... Infrastructure for companies like Granola, HeyGen, Ashby, and ClickUp. Their speech-to-text models lead the industry in accuracy and quality, and their speech understanding models help you go beyond transcription by uncovering insights, identifying speakers, and highlighting key information from voice data. [28:18](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1698) You can get started today at assemblyai.com slash sorcery and get $50 of free credits to start building voice AI products. That's assemblyai.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. So you're based in Silicon Valley. Do you believe the whole six months to singularity thing? What's your take on the whole singularity? Six months is a bit short. I mean, so look, the recursive thing, here's what I'd say. there is obviously some version of the recursive thing which is literally i mean i even just said that like devin writes most of the code of devin so it's like you know on the other hand i think the question of you know whether um um you know whether humans will be rendered irrelevant and all human like all science problems and all societal problems will be solved you know six months from now with the ultimate intelligence i don't quite believe that um um and and i think there's a few reasons for why that is i think for one there's a lot of practical problems out there in the world that are not actually you know necessarily like uh purely intelligence soluble right there's just like organizational things that have to be done there's like um uh there's processes that take time that have to be figured out there's like hardware components of like how [29:35](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1775) much g you know how much gpu compute can you get and and so on and so i think all those things obviously exist for two i think we see more and more um that you know in in the model training landscape i think the vibe today is almost like you can teach the model pretty much anything as long as you know exactly what you are trying to measure or what kind of outcome you're trying to get out of it and so um benchmark scores for example are obviously every time there's new model people release benchmarks the thing that's kind of almost like um counterintuitive is we're kind of getting to the point where you can solve basically any benchmark right because what does it mean to have a benchmark it means you've already defined the task you've clarified what success or failure looks like you've given a bunch of examples of what that task looks like and what the right behavior should be and the truth kind of is well if you do that then you can teach the model to go do that you know it's rl works it's it's it's it's incredible how much it works right um but obviously not all of the tasks of the world today cleanly fit into that you know description right and then there's lots of things that are you know um that are super [30:47](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1847) super amorphous that don't really have clear definitions that it's hard to say what counts as success or failure that have like really long time horizons where it takes a long time to find out whether it was the right decision right um and so it's like you know if you're asking it to to write a simple program that goes and does a thing super easy to run the program and say okay it got the right result or it didn't you know if you're asking it to make a 10-year strategic decision well it's kind of hard to get the data on whether you did that right or wrong until you've waited 10 years out and seen that right um and so i i i think i think we will solve all these things to be clear and i think we'll we'll i i really don't think that there are like intelligence [31:26](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1886) **Scott Wu:** problems that ai will not solve in the long term i just don't think of that as like it's going to be all over in six months okay i could be wrong i don't know maybe maybe it is all over but you [31:38](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1898) know it's but if it is all over in six we had we had it we had a good time yeah there's a certain i actually think that there's there's a certain nihilism there which is like yeah like like i i agree there's some point at which there's like almost like this like event horizon in AI, right? There's some point in which the AI gets so smart that it's hard for us to even kind of like reason about what that world will look like you know will humans still um you know we still have desire i think we still will have desire we still have passions and things that we want to explore i think we will but like who knows you know like maybe maybe maybe like ai will just like solve all of those problems for us too or something but like um so the event horizon does exist and i think past that point it's hard to predict but it's just like you just got to stay sane you know it's like like you just you got to make reasonable decisions you got to build it and maybe it all ends in six months but but you know i don't currently think that's the case by the way i think most of these people are already insane i don't know if you read the beginning part of your colossus piece yeah but what is up with the rest of the silicon valley tech community like i [32:46](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=1966) read that and then i commented below and i'm like what the fuck like yeah i can't unread that thank you jeremy what was going on there there's some of that for sure no i mean it's um i it's it's it's crazy you know obviously it's like we're saying like these companies are growing faster before these capabilities are clearly like i think it's i think it's true that the ai paradigm is on another level compared to you know the mobile phone or the internet or something it's not just the technology that people use every day i think it will like fundamentally reshape our lives but yeah to your point it's just gotta stay sane so so the first task that devin did was spin up mongo db i want to understand why you picked that yeah so mongo db it wasn't on purpose or anything by the way we were literally we were playing around with i guess there wasn't a term for a coding agent back then but like the idea of like what it would look like to have like a coding agent this is like end of 2023 so like there's not you know there were not any of these that existed um uh but you know we made these little things it's kind of funny you know one of my co-founders steven and another co-founders walden um we were all like okay we're gonna make the dev [34:00](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2040) version of our cell like that the the ai debt right so there's like a dev steven you know in our slack and then there's like a dev walden in our site and then eventually obviously we took all those ideas and like made it into a single um you know single product and that was dev naturally as the kind of culmination of all these. But yeah, we had each of these, and people were building them, and just messing around and trying to get them to do cool things, right? Like, what can you do if you can actually, like, test your code and not just, like, LLM completion your code, you know? What can you do if you, like, hook it up so that it can actually run commands in the terminal or, like, you know, have, like, a basic, super basic, like, browser use thing, right? [34:42](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2082) And we were messing around with these. and then we actually just needed mongodb ourselves so like walden was walden this is actually what happened so walden was setting up mongodb and then um you know it's like sometimes with these when you're trying to set up a developer tool it's kind of like this or like a database or any of these things where it's like um you just like run a bunch of commands you like paste it in the things that it told you to go and do and then it's just like not working and there's some error this board or whatever and maybe it's because one random dependency package is on the wrong version and that messes up everything, maybe it's because you have some other process that's open on your computer that's hogging it or whatever, but for whatever reason, like MongoDB, like Walden was just like not getting it set up and you do it, you always do it you just google the error message and you see what that says and you try that command or whatever this person on Stack Overflow said it didn't work you know back in the days before ai you had to go do that um and uh and he like spent some time on it and he's just like yeah i don't know so then he had his devin at the time [35:45](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2145) basically he's like all right devin just go just go just go try and make it work and it turned out to be like a really great use case because if you kind of think about what do you need you need number one you just need like encyclopedic knowledge of all the different errors that you can run into and what would I'm going to go. And then number two, you need the ability to actually run and diagnose things. It's one thing to just have the error message and nothing else, but it's another thing to be able to go run commands, to go look at the other running processes, to go and whatever else you need to go do. [36:16](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2176) And obviously, those two things, like the encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to actually go and run commands, I mean, that's literally what a coding agent is. um and like devin just ran a bunch of stuff for a few minutes and then fixed it and then and then like sent walden a message like hey i got it it's up now walden really he didn't really believe it at first i think we still have the video recording of that really so unbelievable and that was like i remember like i couldn't sleep that night like we were just like shit like maybe it maybe it does work you know maybe you can just have like an ai engineer buddy that can just do work for you [36:52](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2212) **Scott Wu:** you know but that was like the very first moment that we believed it was possible i would say [36:58](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2218) that's amazing thank you mongo db for yeah giving something engineers can go after yes thank you for the the complicated yet solvable documentation pages that was that It was just right in the cusp of what it needed to be in December of 2023. Oh, my gosh. What do you think the biggest question people should be asking right now that they're not? You know, it's kind of interesting. I think there's actually an important question to ask about what we would do with abundance. And maybe, like, I don't actually know what went down in all the industrial revolution. You know, I wasn't there. Really? Yeah, I wasn't there. [37:40](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2260) What? but but so i assumed that there was some phase where it was kind of everyone was farming they were and then there was a point where it's kind of like oh wow we can actually just like mass produce and obviously in the time since then you know we have all like there's different things that we all want there's things that we care about there's like self-expression there's there's all this kind of like you know knowledge work and so on that's that's come about since then and i think there was like a middle period obviously where it was kind of like the abundance was there but but it was like figuring out those things i kind of think we're about to enter something like that you know in ai and i see this the reason the reason i i say that is because um you know with software obviously the first thing that people think about is okay like how can i be more efficient you know it's like all this work that i'm doing now i can do that work in a third of the time and it's true like you can it's amazing it's really cool right and obviously that's that's [38:32](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2312) **Scott Wu:** worth a lot already and that means you could do you know but but but i think the the real unlock like, is not in efficiency, but in capacity, right? [38:43](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2323) It's like, what can we do if we can build so much more, right? And obviously, I mean, we gave the example of, okay, maybe the DMV is going to actually work, you know, in the post-software abundance, or maybe, you know, all of your logging into your bank account or checking your medical records, like, all of those would be, like, really smooth product experiences. But I actually think there's just so many more things, like, you know, software is eating the world. It's a famous line, obviously. it was true already you know here's how we'll look back on this in 2031 or something you know it's like it was true already back when you had to go and manually write every single piece of software every every line of code that was going to run and yet still it was correct for software to eat the world and to turn all these processes and software imagine how good it is and how much more you can do where you can just generate software on the fly to go do anything like single use software is going to exist like self-driving software is going to exist right so like anything that you want to go do or want to turn into reality like probably involves doing you know that anything that involves using a computer in some form is ultimately some kind [39:44](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2384) of software and and when all the software drives itself like what do you want to do what do you want to create and so like that's that's the first thing that comes to my mind honestly it's like what are we going to create with all this abundance and i think i think we're like starting to get to that question so So... Last question, what was it like beating Peter Thiel in chess? Oh, I didn't beat him in chess, no. I would not recommend playing against Peter Thiel in chess. I don't think that's, like, a good, you know, you got to pick games that you can win. But I did challenge him to pull into a poker match. [40:14](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2414) I think there was, like, somehow there was, like, both, but it was just a poker thing that actually happened. There was a round that was one of the earliest rounds of Cognition, so this is, like, the seed, basically. And kind of got to a point, like, we were clear with that, you know, to their credit, by the way, they were always super, super upfront and super hesitant about how they negotiated with us, too. But we were at the point where we're like, look, we want to go and do this. Here's the numbers that would make sense for us. And they were like, here are the numbers that would make sense for them. And we were kind of close enough that you kind of felt like it should work in some form. It was just a question of, okay, what do we land on? And I was like, you know, since you're such a big fan of poker, we could just play a heads-up poker match for that and we could have the winner decide whose terms we actually signed it would have been for in retrospect it would have been for like one percent of the company or something which would have been a lot but but um um i put that with napoleon napoleon was kind of down and then peter shut it down oh peter you know i don't really think that's the right way to do this and then he said that you know and and so then that [41:18](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2478) didn't end up happening you know we worked it out anyway and we came to a deal and it was all good and then we've been been been working together since yeah what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months yeah um you know i'm honestly just really excited about us getting closer to this era of abundance and i think we'll see a lot of that happen in the next like not just as somebody you know in ai but like as like a like as a spectator also like as a consumer like i i'm excited for ai to you know to be there for me for all of my like tough personal decisions that i have to go make i'm excited to have ai like handle all these different like little details in my life i'm excited to have like ai that like basically just like allows me to like spend all of my time and focus on the things that i care about and take care take care of the rest um i think like i think the abundance era is real and i think we'll be there pretty soon amazing such a positive optimistic way to end it thank you so much scott i really appreciate it thanks for having me and uh maybe we'll get some hot takes at Versailles. [42:21](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2541) Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. Okay, cool. Huge thank you to the entire Raze team for an incredible event. And thank you to Brex, MongoDB, and Assembly AI for making this trip and series possible. If you enjoyed this conversation, you're going to love the rest of the Raze series with Tony Kim from BlackRock, Scott Wu from Cognition, Andrew Feldman from Cerebris, Rodrigo Yang from Salmonova, Michael Hurlston from Lumentum, cj desai from mongo db and many many more like our hot takes that we did at a secret location that you can find on x youtube and instagram subscribe to sorcery on youtube for more conversations with the people shaping ai and join the free newsletter you can also do paid at sorcery.vc for weekly insights on ai robotics enterprise software consumer semiconductors Did I say AI, AI again, and everything that's coming next, like funding announcements and all big things in tech. [43:22](https://realalpha.app/v/y1XxtvYll4s/?t=2602) Thank you. Bye.