flâneur

David Senra: Scott Wu, Cognition

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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.dav

David Senra: I want to know why you describe yourself as salty. What does that mean? Scott Wu: I've just always been this way. As a kid, I just hated losing. Like, my first competitive memory ever is when I was in second grade, and I went to this seventh-grade math competition. It was a middle school competition that was held at the local university or whatever for middle schoolers. David Senra: But you were seven. Scott Wu: Yeah. I was seven or eight years old. I was competing in this middle school math. And I did the math test and whatever, and then they were calling out the names like,…

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