Scott Wu, Cognition

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 Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  I want to know why you describe yourself as salty. What does that mean?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I've just always been this way. As a kid, I just hated losing. Like, my first competitive memory ever is like when I was in second grade, I went to this seventh grade math competition. It was like a middle school competition that was held at the like local university or whatever for middle schoolers.

• 0:22David Senra?

  But you were seven.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like seven or eight years old. I was competing in like middle school math. And like I did the like math test and whatever. And then they were calling out the names of the like, here's who got third place. Here's got second. And I was kind of like waiting for my name to get called. And then I was none of them. And I just remember being so pissed about that. Yeah, I can't really give you a rational explanation for why it is.

• 0:44David Senra?

  It doesn't have to be rational. But like, how much of your brain is dedicated to competition?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I mean, it's all I do, honestly. I don't know. I think the like.

• 0:53David Senra?

  Whoa, what do you mean it's all you do?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think strategy game. I don't know. It's the way even building a company is feels the same. It's just like you're calculating the moves. You're thinking about, okay, if you do this and then this happens and you do that. And here are the different moves. And you're like calculating out what comes out to success. You know, it's like a, it's like a tree search, you know, where you're exploring the different options in the decision tree. And you're trying to figure out how to lead to victory. Like, that's like the only thing I do in my life.

• 1:17David Senra?

  And so this is basically just, you don't have memories when you weren't like this, basically?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. I was, I was a little brother growing up. And so my older brother was four or five years older than me. And naturally, we'd play video games. And similarly, I would just always be super salty there as well. I don't know. It's just like, yeah, it's just always like.

• 1:35David Senra?

  So like, I spent some time with Demis from DeepMind. And what was interesting is I draw a lot of like similarities between you two because I was just spending some time with you. And I was like, well, they're both really smart. They're both articulate. They have like a friendly UI, right? But then underneath that is like this like ruthlessly competitive drive. And Demis, I think he said this publicly, but I think he said like half his brain is dedicated to competition. And a lot of that comes from his early days in chess.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04David Senra?

  What were you competing in when you were younger besides math competitions?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, basically everything. So obviously, the main thing was math and programming competitions. And so ever since I was really young, that was like, that was like my like life, you know? My whole goal was to become like world champion of competitive programming. I would do that all the time as a kid. I would do, you know, the really great thing about these competitions too is, is. You know, you you compete in your school competition. And if you do well enough in that, then you make it qualify for the the local or like the city competition. And then if you do well in that, then you get to like the regional competition and state competition. And then you get to go to the national thing, the international thing, right? And so it's it's like a very nice setup where sooner or later, you get to kind of meet people who are like you, basically. When I was a kid, doing these competitions, going for that, it was like all I really cared about.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Those people that I met through these national, international competitions were honestly more like they were my childhood friends more than like the people around me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were. And it was like, we would hang out online, we would talk about math, we'd talk about problems. But all the other things, too, I mean, I played basically all the different competitive games. So like, I I played a lot of Super Smash Brothers. I used to go to tournaments for Super Smash Brothers. It was a lot of fun. Played Melee. And then I played like Tetris. I played a lot of poker. I played some chess. I was OK at chess. I was not good. I played some Go. My dad was a competitive Go player. My parents came to the US in some sense because of Go, which was kind of a funny coincidence because my dad was in grad school in China. And he had a professor who like really liked him. The reason he liked him was because my dad was like a really good Go player.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Like, he was like a seven don at Go, which if you were to call it in chess, would be like, I don't know, 2300 or 2400 rating equivalent or something like that. He would play with this professor, you know, on the weekends and stuff. And they're like, you know, my dad would generally win and they would like talk about the games and stuff. And then that professor ended up moving to the US to come and teach. And at the time, you know, this was super early on and, you know, immigration from China to the US. And so it was not a very like, it wasn't really a path that people knew that you could take. The professor wrote my dad and said, hey, like, I came, it's great, like, there's so much more opportunity, it's so much better, like, you should obviously come as well. Like, I'll help you with your like visa application, I'll help you like apply to colleges here and everything. And so my dad applied to grad school in the US. And that's kind of how we ended up here in the first place.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I was I was born after we moved to the US, obviously.

• 4:24David Senra?

  So your dad was competitive in Go. What was your mom competitive in, though? Because I think I read that you said that she might have been the most competitive person in your family.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, she was always, she was definitely the most salty. I would say for sure. I mean, she would.

• 4:36David Senra?

  What does salty mean?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Salty just means that you take offense to the idea of losing.

• 4:43David Senra?

  OK, I love that.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, she would always be, oh, no, no, I'm better at this, or I'm very, I could beat you at this, you know? And I don't think she, I mean, she played ping pong a bunch growing up. Actually, she played on her, like, school ping pong team. Obviously, she studied some amount of math and so on. But but it was just, it was more her personality than than any one thing that she really put all of her competitive energy into.

• 5:04David Senra?

  I spent a lot of time, obviously, reading the biographies of history's great entrepreneurs.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:09David Senra?

  I was fascinated by, like, there's usually two different kind of archetypes for the parents. One, you have like the Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. Their dads would literally tell them, you know, you're worthless. There's stories in Elon's biographies where his dad just gets in his fucking face and yells at him for hours. Larry's adopted father would just tell him, you're never going to mount anything. And so that they had this, like, inner fire to to to disprove. You know, saying that basically, no, fuck you, Dad, you're wrong about this, right? And then you have like the S.A. Laughters, who, you know, their uncle or even their father is just like, you're really special. You have a lot of talents. If you put a lot of effort into this, you can do whatever you want. Your mom falls it more into like the S.A. Lauder like category, where she would tell you that, like, hey, these people are doing amazing things. You could do even better than them, correct?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  I think they would have been happy enough if I just got like a more traditional cushy job and did all of that. Like, I don't know that they specifically steered me towards entrepreneurship and being a founder, but but no, they were always very supportive.

• 6:05David Senra?

  But your mom gave you self-confidence.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think she she always told me that I was the best. And she was always extremely proud of the, you know, it's it's the, I had these, like, when you would go to these math competitions.

• 6:18David Senra?

  Hold on, she took, she, so you said, she always told you that you're the best. Did she say that before there was evidence?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think that's right. I think even when I was like tiny, she would tell me that I was extremely talented. You know, she was always a huge source of support for me, and she always obviously believed in whatever I wanted to do. You know, because you would compete in math competitions, you would get these trophies and stuff. And like, we didn't have, like, you know, growing up, like, we didn't have, like, pictures of our parents, like, on the walls. You know, we just had all the math competition trophies. It was like, like, my mom was very intentional about, like, no, no, the thing that we value in this household.

• 6:54David Senra?

  Other people's trophies are the ones you want.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Ours, ours, the ones that me and my brother want, of course.

• 6:58David Senra?

  We're gonna put up pictures of other people's trophies, and you'd better damn sure replace them with your own.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  So like, you know, when I was pretty, my brother as well, you know, we both really liked these competitions or like, you know, like accumulate these trophies. And she would always like, every time we got one, she would hang it up and we're like, put it up on the, on the, on like the mantelpiece and everything. And, and no, it's like, it was always, um, I think what she really valued. I think, I think education was really important to her. And I think being the best was, was very important to her as well.

• 7:30David Senra?

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• 8:12David Senra?

  a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. What matters to you more? Like, what is, uh, is it the, the pain of losing is like, losing is worse than the love, like the thrill of winning? Cause that's how you started it. You're just like, I could not stand losing. Let me back up. I was reading another Larry Ellison biography. He says this, he's just like, listen, I'm addicted to winning, but I fear losing more than I love winning.

• 8:56David Senra?

  And I actually talked to Michael Dell about it. And he's like, yeah, it's, it's just the fear of losing is the, the pain of losing is way worse than the, the, the good feeling of winning.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  So I think that's definitely true in terms of how it feels. In order to get anywhere, you gotta lose a lot. If anything, almost like a lot of the, you know, I mean, a lot of the guys are chomping on it. If anything like. The way they got to where they are is by losing a lot and having their share of wins along with that. But like, you just have to put yourself out there and do a lot. So it's kind of an interesting thing to your point of like, I definitely feel the same way that, yeah, like, losing feels way worse than winning feels good, but not by enough that it makes me want to stop trying, if that makes sense.

• 9:33David Senra?

  Yeah, no, I think it's impossible. I know your personality type, like, it's just impossible for you not to do this. What is, like, let's get into Devon. What is, like, winning with Devon look like to you?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  So again, you know, we're hyper competitive. But also, you know, the other thing about us is like, we all had kind of started our own companies before this. So our founding team is, it was a pretty big founding team, it was nine people. And most of us had already founded our own companies before, we had done different things. It was true for a lot of the early team. And we've always thought about this as like, this is the big one. And so like, we want to go for all, you know? We want to be a generational business, like, we want to build a hyperscaler and we want to go and do that. And like, maybe we'll succeed, maybe we won't, I don't know. But like, that's what we're going after. And I think to me, what that means in our field in building software is like, you know, people sometimes use the term like, coding agents or like, you know, like AI programming or something. I always like, you know, I was here that I think a little bit about like, well, we're not always,

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I mean, we're not going to be interacting with code for that much longer, you know? Our programs might not be the right, like, level of abstraction. But I think what is always true probably is that it will be the human computer interface. And so what I mean by that is like, like, the way that we think about Devon if we're successful is Devon is the way that humans can tell their computers what to do. Because that was the whole point of software engineering anyway, right? It's just to be able to work with your computer and tell it what you want it to do. I mean, I think doing that for the world is like a massive opportunity. And that's what we're really excited to go after.

• 10:59David Senra?

  Why is that interesting to you? You just said, we all did different things, we came together and we're like, no, this is the big one.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the simple answer is, you know, we're a bunch of nerds who were all programmers and built software and so on before. And now this is the idea of teaching AI how to go do that.

• 11:13David Senra?

  Wait, say more about that. What you just said, we're all nerds, this is the big one, because we can actually teach AI how to program.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  We're all nerds who've spent the last, you know, I don't know, 20 years of our lives just coding and making little things for the world and the idea. Idea that you could teach AI how to go make things and have everybody have an AI that can help them make things and feel the wonder of that. I mean, it's pretty sick.

• 11:34David Senra?

  Is that the idea, the single idea in the world that animates you the most, that gets you the most excited?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  I think it is incredible. Yeah, I mean, the, well, I would go further too and just say like at a zoomed out level. It's, I honestly think that

• 11:48Speaker 01

  because, you know, everyone talks about AGI, everyone talks about what is the future going to be like? What are human lives going to be, you know, once AI can do everything? And, I mean, to some extent, I think the thing that is most human, obviously, is self-expression, creativity, like having things that you want to make happen in the world and being able to go do those things, right? And so, I mean, a lot of how I think about this is basically we want to build the tool that gives everybody the power to go and make things that they want to make in the world. My co-founder has a slime which I've always loved, which is, you know, we've been spending all this time living in survival mode as a species, you know, and now we're going to be living in creative mode.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  And I think that's right. Like, I think, you know, Minecraft Survival Mode is where you're like, you know, you're growing food, you're like making sure you're safe from the monsters at night and whatever. And like creative mode is just like, everything's up to you, you know? You have all the resources at your disposal. If you want something to happen, it'll happen. And the only question for you is like, what you want to make happen? I think it's going to be amazing. And I mean, I think that is like the world that we're going towards and like we want to be the ones building that.

• 12:55David Senra?

  Okay, so talk about what Devon does today.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:58David Senra?

  And then I want you to flesh out that idea of like where you see in the future. It's just the interface between humans and computers.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, so Devon is today, you know, what what folks know as an AI software engineer. And basically what that means is that Devon is a tool that anyone can use that will work with them end to end on building out software. And so we work with a lot of the biggest companies across the world, you know, we work with Goldman Sachs, we work with Mercedes, we work with, you know, a lot of areas of the US government at this point and so on. And we work with their software teams to just help them build more and do much more. And, you know, the thing about it is in the last 20, 30 years, obviously, I mean, software is eating the world is the famous line. I think it's very much true. It's still like, it's still got a couple of order magnitudes to go.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  And in practice, what it looks like is that teams use Devon to ship 10 times faster and to do 10 times more.

• 13:51David Senra?

  Okay, so that's where it's at today.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:52David Senra?

  How do you get to where you're saying, you mind, there is no, like, you're just the interface machine, humans and computers?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  So now, we're going to get into a philosophical discussion of what it means to be a programmer or a software engineer, right? And I think like, you know, if you go all the way back, it's, you know, there was a time where programming was like using the vacuum tubes, like plugging all those in and having it do, the machine do the arithmetic, right? Like, the ENIAC was, you know, with the first, in some sense, the first computer out there, although it was obviously very different. Or it would have been like, you know, filling out the punch cards and like setting up the, or writing, you know, the, like, putting down assembly, you know, or writing in BASIC or something, right? So we've gone through a lot of generations already, is my point. And what does it look like, you know, going forward? When you talk about programming, all it really comes down to is like, how do you tell your computer what to do? And like, every single piece of software that you use, if you're using, you know, Instagram

• 14:41Speaker 01

  or TikTok or YouTube or whatever, like, that's a piece of software that somebody, or like some, you know, in these cases, some pretty big teams of engineers, came together and thought through all these details of, okay, here's what I want it to do, here's how I want it to look, here's what I want this button to do, here's how I want to architect it. Every single little decision, obviously, was made by somebody. But the computer itself is then executing it accordingly to what the wishes of its creators was, right? And I think what we'll start to see is that abstraction will continue to climb, right? And like, you know, we kind of see this already, like, at this point, you don't need to know a programming language, it's like, you don't need, you don't need to know Python or Java or something like that in order to build your own software, right? And you can just say, hey, here's what I want.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I want to make a cool website that does this, this and that. Or, for example, you know, in my existing product, you know, here's, here's what we have today, and I want to change this thing, or add this new plan, or add this new feature, and just have the agent go and do that for you, right? I think we're going to continue to go further down that axis. One important kind of like distinction I'd make, which is, you know, I think what we'll see a lot more of in the near future is, software today...

• 15:51Speaker 01

  The math only really works out to create software if it's going to be used at least like a million times or something, you know, I'm giving a, maybe it's 10,000 times or whatever. And my point is like, if you want to go build a product today, you need a whole team of engineers. Engineers are expensive. You got to pay salaries. You got to go build all this out and you got to go and do that. Right. You need that software to be used enough times or to be, to create enough value for that to be worth it. Right. And you know, something like YouTube passes that test because obviously so many, so many hours have been spent on building YouTube, but way more hours have been spent on using YouTube. And that's, that's what's made that, that work out and made it feasible. Right. But there are so many things out there, which only, you know, very specific things that, that only need to be used a few times,

• 16:33Speaker 01

  or even like only need to be used once. Right. And so like all the white collar work that we talked about today even is very, um, all right, you know, wake up in the morning. All right, I'm going to go look through these like 15 LinkedIn profiles. I'm going to look for this and that or whatever. Or I'm going to go fill out these forms, or I'm going to do this data analysis and put this Excel sheet together with this research that I've found. Right. All of these things are things that could be done with software. It's just, it obviously doesn't make sense to, to hire a whole team of people to go make you that piece of software, which you're going to use one time and never again, versus just having the human go and do that themselves. Right. I think what we're going to get to is we're going to get to a point where you are just giving your instructions to that agent.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And the agent on the backend, you know, you don't even have to look at this, but on the backend, the agent is going to figure out, okay, here's, I'm going to write this code that's going to go do this. I'm going to put a, a script that automates this part. I'm going to do this and do this. And that's what's going to allow it to actually go and do all these things. But, but, but what you start to get to, you know, as we're kind of saying, it's like, this is really just how you control your computer and how you do what you want to go do. Right. And you wake up in the morning and it's like, here, here's what I want to go do. You talk to your agent about it. You figure out the task together. Once it has it, it can do the part of, of the literal like, all right, put the, put the pen to the paper on writing code. But that task is like, you know, you're, you're the one that's deciding what to do.

• 17:55David Senra?

  So this ideal future that's in your mind, right? How far away do you think we are to that?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we've made a lot of steps toward it. I would say we still have got a ways to go. You can use Devin today. You can use all the different kind of coding tools today. And you can do a lot more than you could have done 10 years ago. But certainly, or even one year ago or six months ago. But certainly, it's not at the level that we're talking about of you are neural linked into the AI and you can tell it exactly what you want it to do and what you want to see in the world and just have the AI go and do that. When do we get there? It's hard to say, but I honestly, I mean, I think we'll have solved most of that over the next five years or so. In AI terms, five years is like a century. In the rest of the world terms, obviously, it's like, it's kind of crazy to imagine that things can change that much in five years, but I really think it will.

• 18:45David Senra?

  So this is kind of related to something I heard you say, where you're saying that humans just have a really hard time understanding exponential curves.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  So true. I mean, you see this in the progress itself. You see this in the scaling laws with the data. You see this in the revenue curves of the companies that are building in AI.

• 18:59David Senra?

  Including your own.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And it's a very, you know, it's like humans aren't really wired for this, right? Like all of our inherent like fight or flight response are kind of like, our ability to kind of like measure things to vastly oversimplify it. If you're just fighting out there, foraging for food or whatever it is, like a good hunt will bring you a couple of days worth of food or something. But obviously, with the kind of exponential curves that we deal with, the equivalent of a good hunt here could be 1,000 years worth of food. And we don't have that intuitive signal in our brains to really understand that, right? At a really deep, like native level. People often understand, I think, how fast things can change and how fast the world can change.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I mean, my parents even like drilled this into me because they grew up in Communist China and they came to the US. And even that, like we're talking about what are, what were ultimately even like much slower scales of progress in some sense relative to, I think, what we're seeing today. But even that was like. As you can imagine, it was incredibly jarring to them. You know, the idea that like you come to the US and everybody has a car and all of these different, you know, it's like all everyone has all these household appliances and has all, you know, it was a very different life when they grew up in like, you know, the 60s in China. And they were much, much poorer and it was very, very different, right? And it's like, I mean, funnily enough, people got used to all these things pretty quickly.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  And now we can't live without them. But, but I think we'll kind of undergo the same period with AI where five years from now, it's going to be insane to think about all these things that we're going to have. 10 years from now, we're going to have forgotten that we ever lived without them, honestly.

• 20:39David Senra?

  What do you think you understand about AI that other people don't?

• 20:43David Senra?

  The reason I ask the question is because we have some mutual friends. I would describe our mutual friends as some of the most AGI-pilled people that I know.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:49David Senra?

  And I feel every time I have a conversation with them, I'm like, oh, even though I pay attention to this stuff, I feel like a toddler compared to like somebody like you. And so I'm very curious, like, what do you understand about AI that, that most people?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:01David Senra?

  And even people within the tech industry?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  No, you're way too generous. I don't know that there's, I don't know that I have that, anything that interesting or that deep of an insight. I mean, I think it's, it's.

• 21:10David Senra?

  You say that because you're used to it.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Here's what I'd say is the way that folks typically kind of predict the future or think about what happens next is they pattern match based on what they've seen historically. And they say, okay, well, for a hundred years, it's always been like this. And it's probably safe to assume that it will be. And 99% of the time, that works great, right? And in these particular periods where things that actually move and they're real things that are different, those are the, the 1% of times where it truly is different. Now you just kind of, you know, rather than any kind of pattern matching, like what, what really matters is just thinking about things from first principles. Like AI, you know, there's, there's the famous like METR report, which was saying, you know, a couple of years ago, AI would, would, would do about 10 to 20 seconds worth of human work

• 21:57Speaker 01

  without interruption. And then you'd have to, you know, guide it or direct it, or it would make a mistake or something like that, right? 10, 10 seconds, 20 seconds. And that's just doubled every, you know, every couple of months, basically. And now we're talking about like hours of work. So, so basically an AI can just take a task that would have taken humans hours of work to go do. If you go and describe that task well enough to the AI, it will just go and do the whole thing and come back to you with the result. And then you give it the next thing, the next thing, right? And if you just ask from a first principles question, well, why can't that be days? Or why can't that be weeks or months of work? And then what does the world look like if everybody has an agent that can just do months of work for them at a time? Then you get to a pretty different conclusion from, from what we've all seen and what we've

• 22:41Speaker 01

  all lived for the last several years. And I think that that kind of first principles thinking is as different as it sounds and as crazy as it sounds, you know, this is one of those times where it's actually more correct than the, the, the simple pattern match.

• 22:57David Senra?

  So you, I think you've even taken this further where you're like, well, what happens when they can work for a year, unassisted?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think that's true and I think we will get there.

• 23:05David Senra?

  If Devin could work for a year without any human assistance?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:10David Senra?

  What would you have it do right now?

• 23:13David Senra?

  Destroy your competitors?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  All sorts of things. I mean, no, I mean, I, I still wake up and think about this in every different, like, you know, every little thing that I run, you know, dumb example, yesterday I was sending out like a bulk email. And I was like trying to get the like email formater to work and it's like kind of painful. You know, some of these things are still like kind of hard to use or it doesn't support a certain like styling of the email that you wanted to go do. I think the thing I like had pasted something with indents and then it was like, just couldn't like unindent them because the editor like, I don't know, there were some weird things where the editor like would not allow you to unindent one part, but not the other or whatever. And I was just thinking like, it's really crazy that like, that I'm still doing this basically, right?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Like in as much simplicity or honestly more as it would take you to explain this to another person. Like, hey, here's what I want to do. I just like, I'm just trying to make it look like this and then this and then that. Like the rest of that execution should just be done for you, you know? And then you get to the point where you actually really just to get to spend all your time thinking about, well, what do you want to do? What do you want to build? What do you want to create? Like, what are the things that you want to see in the world that aren't there already?

• 24:20David Senra?

  But I think what makes it interesting about what you were saying earlier is like the more you increase the time, the more interesting it gets to me. So like there's this guy named Edmund Land who I won't shut up about and he was the founder of Polaroid.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:31David Senra?

  Steve Jobs hero, a lot of Steve. We think of Steve Jobs ideas literally just came from Edwin Land down to like the chairs and the table he would use for his presentations. It's like the same thing that Edwin Land used in like the seventies in Polaroid. And he thought of himself as a scientist, not as an entrepreneur, Edwin Land. He died with, I think, the third most patents. He's like Thomas Edison, some other dude, and then Edwin Land. And what he did is he couldn't figure out, he invented the industry of instant photography.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:58David Senra?

  Before you took a picture and you're like, hey, how's it look? Like, we'll find out two weeks from now when we get it back from Kodak. Like, I have no idea. And he, now he took a picture of a Polaroid, he's like, we'll find out in 60 seconds when it dries. But that was black and white forever. When I read that part where you're like, well, we're gonna have agents that can work on a sister for a year.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:14David Senra?

  I didn't think of what I would do, which is a question I just asked. I thought of Edwin Land hiring this guy. He's like, I want you to think about how we turn this from black and white into color.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:22David Senra?

  And before he could begin, the guy worked there and just thought for two years.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 25:26David Senra?

  I'm like, that would be very convenient if I could have an agent attack this problem while I'm working in the background, because I can't figure it out. They're just thinking about how to attack a single problem for two, in his case, this guy that fucking solved instant color photography. It just took him two years of thinking to do it. So this is like, I'm gonna push you on this a little bit more because it's like, I don't want your year-long agent to send bulk email.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I agree. I agree. Just to be clear. So, and I think at some point, it's kind of, you know, you see this, right? Where it's like, you know, when you're talking about seconds, you're literally talking about just like a specific command, right? When you're talking about hours, you're talking about giving it a task and having it do the task, right? And I agree with you, obviously, bulk email is not, you know, for years, what you're talking about is like, you're giving the agent a mission, basically. You know, and it's like, this is-

• 26:09David Senra?

  That sounds way more fun.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And this is like, what do I care about? And, you know, the answer might be, look, I want to, I'll give you a million different examples. You know, the answer might be, look, there's this like one societal problem, which is really important to me. And I think there's like, I think it's a solvable problem. I think we can all be happy, but like, you know, we really need to spread awareness about it. We really need to get folks to understand the points of it. And we, you know, we need to figure out how everybody should, you know, work together and coordinate on. That's your point. That's a problem that an agent can think about, right? Or even, you know, some of the kind of like sillier things too, like, yeah, you know, there's this video game that I really like, but I wish- You know, if I were making the game, here's exactly how I would think about all these things. And I feel like there's like this really cool idea.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  If, you know, you could combine elements from this one game that I really like, but then incorporate some of the elements from this other game and set the agent off on that mission of like, look, we're gonna go and like make the coolest thing ever and the coolest game ever. And like, we're gonna incorporate those elements. We're gonna think about how those like, you know, nicely intertwine and work together, right? Or if it's like, here's this, this like piece of just like novel science, which I'm just like really passionate about. You know, materials have been created this way for, for, for years and years. But like, like, here's this like avenue of attack, which I've been wondering about and thinking about of, maybe there's, there's a different like novel construction of materials this way. Send your agent to go work on that for, for years, you know, or months, right? And, and like have it study that and explore these things

• 27:38Speaker 01

  and run its own experiments and trials. I think all of these are, are, I think soon going to be very possible. And to your point is very different.

• 27:45David Senra?

  Yeah, like the, the framing of we're sending them on missions.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:49David Senra?

  I would have one that would pick the missions that I need to send other agents on.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you'll have the AI, yeah, which is like the, the manager AI of the, the missions. Yeah. And, and I think it's like, I, I think we will continue, you know, it's, my example of this is like, I always joke about how, you know, if you think about our ancestors from, you know, hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago, imagine them looking at us and what we do. And it's like, you know, you're pushing buttons, you know? And you're like sitting in a room and talking with other people and you call that a meeting. And that's like, that, those things, that's work for you guys, you know? And it's like, what do you mean that's work? You know, like I'm in the fields, like I'm doing this every day. You know, I'm, I'm going and farming. I'm making sure that, you know, making all of our, our, like, you know, clothes by hand or taking all, taking care of all these things. And that's like work, you know? But like, how, how can you guys call, you know?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And, and my point is just, I think what we will have going forward is going to look that different from what we have today. We will look at people who, as we say, just like have these really brilliant, interesting curiosities that they want to pursue. They have like causes that they're passionate about. They have like fun ideas or, or like art that they want to create. And like they're, they're sending off their agents in pursuit of those missions. And they will think of that as work. And we will look at them and be like, wow, it's kind of crazy that that's what you get up and think about all day.

• 29:07David Senra?

  I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what Apple Lovin has done with their advertising platform. Apple Lovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Apple Lovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Apple Lovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on Apple Lovin in minutes. You set the goal, and Apple Lovin achieves it.

• 29:49David Senra?

  There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and Apple Lovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Apple Lovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

• 30:18David Senra?

  When you started Cognition, did you know that you were going to try to make an automated software engineer? Was that your first idea?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  I'll say it was always two things. One, it was always related to code and software, which again, probably has something to do with us all being programming nerds. And then two is, it was always around the idea that these would be like real multi-step iterative processes, which was, I would say, was a real hot take at the time. Like, this was 2023, end of 2023.

• 30:47David Senra?

  So this is when I met you guys. And I was on a walk with a mutual friend of ours, and I remember first here, this is, you guys scaled from what, like a million in revenue to like 500 million or something like that in what, like 20 months or something?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, a little more than 18.

• 31:00David Senra?

  I remember before, you had no revenue, and I heard the idea, and it was pitched as like essentially like an automated software engineer. And I was like, holy shit. This is like a huge, you're going after labor. This is a huge market. And then you released.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:13David Senra?

  I remember the demo video.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:15David Senra?

  And then you got a lot of shit.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:17David Senra?

  Is that what you were describing?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  I think is the full polar ends of the spectrum, right? So there were some people who were like... This is the coolest thing ever. And like, you know, all this. And then there were some people who were like, you know, this is like the worst, you know, thing that you could buy. But similarly, like in terms of the capabilities, there were some people who are like, oh, my God, everybody's gonna lose all their jobs tomorrow, which is not what we've ever really believed or thought of this as. To also like, dude, there's no way this is ever gonna work. And like, this is totally a scam, you know?

• 31:51David Senra?

  So what was the criticism? Did you, did you release the product earlier than you wanted to?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Well, look, it's, it's, it wasn't even a product at the time, to be honest. I mean, it was more just like a prototype or like a demo of what was possible. And, and, you know, we had been working with it and playing with it for a few months at that point. And the kind of just wanted to show people some of the examples of what it was capable of. Because there was a real like, like, it was pretty, it was pretty insane for us to see as well. Like, I remember the first time that it did like a real task, like, I could not sleep that night. And so it's just like showing that.

• 32:22David Senra?

  Wait, wait, say more about that.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  The first task that Devin did was it like set up MongoDB for us. And it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's a standard thing. It's issues that a lot of people run into all the time when they're going and getting their kind of like initial, you know, DB setup or whatever. But we would just like run into errors. You have this whole flow where you like, you find an error, you Google error, find some message on Stack Overflow or whatever, or you ask ChatGPT, and it tells you, okay, here's, here's what you should try. You try that thing, you run into a different error. You just like paste that in, you know? And, and like for this one, we kind of like, at some point, we're just like, okay, Devin, just, just try to go fix it, just go run commands, like do whatever you need to go do it. And then it worked.

• 33:04David Senra?

  And you couldn't sleep?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  It was truly like, because again, it's, you know, it's, it's like just seeing the exponential curve ahead. Because this was a very, you know, very specific case. It was the one success that we had. It was very much like a, you know, like, like, definitely a way better than average run. But no, there was this feeling of like, why shouldn't all software and all products be built this way now? Like, you can just tell it what you want it to do and have it go do it. I mean, it's kind of funny because, yeah, to your point, like, we did get hate in the beginning. We did not feel motivated at all from the hate to be like, oh, yeah, no, maybe you guys are right. Like, maybe we should go and like, you know, focus on the more kind of like, Chatbot Q and A style product experiences like maybe more than we should have. I mean, maybe, maybe we should have done something in the middle, you know?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  I don't know, but, but like, I, I think for us, like when we had seen that and when we had done these different things, like all of those like demos that we showed, you know, in, in our launch announcement were like actual runs of Devon that we had done ourselves and like run into and been like, holy shit, this is insane. For us, it was always kind of like, like you can, you know, we can debate when or, or, or like what level of effectiveness or whatever, but like, it's just, it's gonna happen. And that's how we always felt about it.

• 34:16David Senra?

  So explain the process of iteration to go from that product, you're getting a lot of hate. Well, actually, you know what? I called Jeremy Stern, who wrote this excellent profile of you in Colossus, which there's a lot of parts I was just laughing my ass off, by the way. And I was asking, I was like, tell me the stuff that didn't make the profile.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:34David Senra?

  And he said, there wasn't that much because you're kind of like an open book and a lot of people like, um, manage their media.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:39David Senra?

  And, you know, you could have to talk about certain stuffs off the record or whatever. And you were just like saying everything. But you did say something about like, you made the point where like, when you released the first product, what was the benchmark?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Sweet bench.

• 34:49David Senra?

  And it was at like?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Thirteen percent.

• 34:51David Senra?

  That was Devon.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:53David Senra?

  And your point was that that's already better than?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the time, the best known was like three or four percent or something like that, but obviously, yeah, thirteen percent still means you fail, you know, eighty seven percent of the time.

• 35:03David Senra?

  Was there a pronounced benefit from releasing early like that?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah. I mean, so, so, so for us, by the way, you know, if you kind of think about this overall AI ecosystem, I mean, a simple way to put it is like, dude, we were late by a lot, you know? It's like OpenAI started.

• 35:16David Senra?

  Why, why though?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Google DeepMind or Google Brain, I mean, these are obviously, you know, more, more than a decade old already. OpenAI started like end of 2015 or even, you know, like the Anthropic or, or, you know, other that that folks talk about in the world, like had been around already for years. Like we were getting started in early 2024. It was like a year plus out from the ChatGPT launch. A lot of the existing players were already there, you know? And the same was true in code specifically. I mean, there was, you know, GitHub Copilot, um, which had people had already, you know, engineers had already used for years. And that was very much the like Q and A, like the autocomplete style experience of, of, you know, working with AI. You know, when you start a company, you kind of have nothing, like you, you have no right to exist is maybe one way to put it. It's like an interesting truth about the world, which is.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Obviously startups succeed, you know, startups succeed all the time and the startup versus a big company has been played out for, you know, for forever. But like, there's no reason, you know, in terms of resources, in terms of people, in terms of brand awareness, like you have none of the things that, you know, the big guys have. And so from that perspective, you have no right to win, you know, over, over, over what they're doing, you know? And then the reason that you're sometimes able to anyway is if you really like, you know, plant your flag in the ground and, and put a stake into like what you think the future is and you run like hell towards that. And, and if you like turn out to be right on some of the core things and like, I think

• 36:45Speaker 01

  we were, we were wrong on a lot of things, uh, to be clear, a lot of things we were, you know, so definitely we were early, which is a very fair criticism. I think a lot of the details and the nuances, like we learned and adjusted over time. But the idea that like you would work with AI as a coworker, you know, rather than as like a tool or a chatbot, I think was, I mean, over the last couple of years has obviously like really grown. And I think it was like very important for us, for our brand, for our recruiting, for our, you know, customer work, everything for us to be, you know, the first ones that actually planted that flag in the ground and said that.

• 37:17David Senra?

  So when did you have this idea where you guys are going to take a run at very, I would say ferociously to like these giant like Fortune 500 companies or even the like the US Army uses you?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 37:28David Senra?

  Like where did that strategy come from?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  So funnily enough, so that launch was in March of 2024. And to your point, it went very viral, but again, we didn't have any customers, we didn't have any revenue, we didn't really have like.

• 37:38David Senra?

  I thought your first iteration of the business model was like $500 a month or something, wasn't it? Am I misremembering this?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  So we had that, that was actually later on, actually. That was, that was end of 2024.

• 37:47David Senra?

  Okay.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  But, you know, initially what we started was just like, you know, a bunch of people came, asked us for the product, we were like, guys, I don't know if this is a product that's ready for prime time, but if you really, you know, where you can try it and like just let us know. And so like people ran, you know, we had to go and scramble to build a system of like a, okay, let's do like a pilot or like a PSC, you know, and like, you try to invest to like not over promise and go like, guys, like really, it's like very early, but if Want to try it, you know, try it. And we did all this and perhaps unsurprisingly, I mean, they were all just like failing.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Which is kind of natural. Like, it's like, you could do some pretty cool things with it. You could, you could do some pretty interesting like toy demos or projects or whatever. But it was certainly not ready to work on like actual companies, like real code base and so on. Right? And so from that point, this would have been like April or May of 2024. We were making agents work with like GPT-4. You know, this is like a very different era. So they were much more primitive agents. We kind of talked about this and got to this question of like, okay, well, what do we think it actually does look like when the agents start to get good enough for adoption? And I think what we kind of came to was, well,

• 38:54Speaker 01

  different tasks are different, right? And so, so like, there are some tasks out there that are just really mundane and really repetitive. And you're just doing the same tedious thing over and over and over again. And there are some tasks on the other end of the spectrum that are like really tough, like architectural problems or like deep, like, you know, deep issues that you have to like really understand all the context and have all the know-how to know how to fix. And like, people were trying to use Devon for all of those and were failing at it understandably. And so then the question was like, okay, what are the, the, the natural tasks that are like, if there's like a first task that is going to have PMF, you know, and real value from these kind of agent experiences where it can do the whole thing and, and what is that going to be? We kind of said, okay, well, it should be some of these like really repetitive tedious ones.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  It's not so cut and dry that you can just like have an automated script that does the exact thing every time. So it does take obviously some intelligence and some amount of meandering, but it is like repetitive enough and scoped enough. And like on a tight enough feedback loop that you can have an agent do it and it would be able to kind of go and diagnose and like fix that problem. Right? And so that's kind of what brought us to some of these like naturally to some of these like, you know, initial use cases, which are things like migrations or version upgrades or, you know, helping people upgrade from like Java seven to Java eight or something like that, which were kind of like, you know, as you can imagine, enterprises had, enterprises had these massive code bases where they would go and do all that, you know? And it's like a 50,000 file code base where you have to go, you know, it's like the same eight things that you need to change in each one. You have to be a little bit.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  About how you'd make the trade offs, but like it's a very repetitive task. Right. Our first success ended up being with a company called New Bank, biggest bank in Brazil. You know, by market cap at the time and the use case was like one of these big migrations and we had a kind of a custom Devon that was like extremely, extremely optimized for doing that. And as we grew from there, you know, later on, we had kind of, as things got a little bit more mature, you know, we've had both self serve business and enterprise business and so on. But I think from the beginning, we had always seen this value that building software in the real world and managing massive, massive products that like millions of people use every day was pretty substantially different from, you know, just building a cute website or a cute demo from scratch.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Right. And I think we really, really leaned into that. And naturally it's, you know, all the Fortune 500 or all the biggest companies in the world are software companies in 2026. You know, even the ones that that folks don't necessarily think of that way, right? And like Walmart or CVS or JP Morgan or Mercedes or whatever, you know, they're all software companies. Right. They have massive, massive teams of software engineers. They have tons of things that they're building and shipping and maintaining. And that kind of became like a natural thing for us to work on because like we had had learned very early on that we want to work on real problems and we want to work on things that that matter and that people actually care about.

• 41:40David Senra?

  So wait, what percentage of your revenue is coming from enterprise then?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Today, around 75, 80%.

• 41:47David Senra?

  What are people using on the self serve? Like what are examples of?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we have a lot of teams who use it in self serve. I mean, that's grown, actually, that's grown quite a bit as well lately. But, you know, we have startups who, you know, we have Exa, who uses it a ton or Open Router or Bill. You know, I, I ran into someone in my apartment in the elevator the other day. Oh, you're the Devon guy. Like we use Devon.

• 42:11David Senra?

  Are you Devon?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've gotten that as well. Are you Devon? And I was like, you know, I'm actually not, but that's, that's, that's okay.

• 42:18David Senra?

  Why don't we call it Scott?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  You know, there's kind of both self-serve and enterprise. With that said, it is entirely in both sides. It is still like actual engineering teams building real output. And so, so we don't focus at all on like, you know, individual hobbyists who are just like trying to make a cool thing or something like that. We focus on like real teams who are building real products that they want people to use and getting output out of that.

• 42:40David Senra?

  Okay, can you walk us through? I'm very curious, like, I'm a big enterprise.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:45David Senra?

  I contact you.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:46David Senra?

  Walk us through what happens to being a customer.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  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. And 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? What is it? So, you know, we'll, we'll show them what this looks like. We'll talk them through like how we work with, 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. 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, for, as you can imagine, for a massive bank, you know, adopting software, giving it access to all of their, you know,

• 43:33Speaker 01

  the repos, getting through security or whatever. That's like usually for, for typical companies, it's like a 12 to 18 month cycle. The thing that we do naturally is, is we just work with them to figure out how we go and do that as fast as is humanly possible.

• 43:47David Senra?

  Did you send employees down to South America for NewBank?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Well, so NewBank, I mean, the first one, honestly, our entire team was the forward deploy team. Like, we all flew to Brazil.

• 43:54David Senra?

  What?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's like the first case, you know, it's like, it's like, let's be real here, okay? Agents did not work generally, okay? And so there was, it was a lot of like, how do you make it work for the 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 Devin needs to be able to read these things. And like going and debugging their like exact problems. Now, obviously, it's not like that at all because, you know.

• 44:22David Senra?

  We'll get to where it is now. But the idea of like, no, we need to deploy a team. We deployed the whole company.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  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, but, but like, yeah, it was like, literally, like, okay, let's go through all these different things that you guys think could make sense. 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, kind of like, you know, the, the right orchestration for Devin to be able to do this. And like, let's just like, basically, building the product was like, almost like building for, for one company. And yeah, it was fun.

• 45:00David Senra?

  So what do you do today?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  So today, it's, it's obviously much more, it's, it's, it's, it's much more self-started and, you know, agents are so much more capable, obviously. And we've, we've figured out a lot more things with the unbearing experience. But, but a lot of it is, you know, we're saying that these cycles typically take 12 to 18 months. We try to get deployed with folks, you know, 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 that you're, you know, and an org that's, that's, that's running, that, that, that, that, that costs, you know, 10 billion a year or something that you think can move three times faster, you know, usually it is a priority. But then it's like figuring out how we get through the security reviews, you know, we, we have all the, you know, we can deploy in their private cloud.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  We have very strict data agreements. We have like tight air walls on, on, on, on all these things, obviously.

• 45:54David Senra?

  Do employees physically have to go? Are they, are they working with, like, are these deals so big that, that they're working with a specific company and only that company for a period of time or no?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Typically, no. We have a, you know, we have a, a, a full, like, forward deployed motion. But a lot of what that looks like, as we're saying, is, is a little bit more like user education and guidance. And so we will fly, you know, we, we still do this, where 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 make, get, get success, help them with their like setup and their playbooks, like all these things for how to use Devin. But it's much more a kind of like, look, we're here to assist you guys. We're, 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 Devin 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,

• 46:50Speaker 01

  find out what they say about it. 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 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, um, than, than like a literal like, you know, we are using Devon on your, on your, on your behalf or something.

• 47:18David Senra?

  Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring, the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world. So you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers.

• 47:59David Senra?

  The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world." Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. Wait, so tell more about how you align the incentives between your company and then your customers?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a couple of things here, uh, which I think are really important. One, obviously is, is just like really working with them on the, the very clearly defining the ROI, um, which I think is a very important, I mean, it's like, everyone's talking about this, right? Like over the last few months, like people are going crazy on their token budgets and you know, one engineer can spend so much. And you know, you want to know that that's actually doing real value for you. And you want to be able to identify where you are.

• 48:58David Senra?

  Do you think all this stuff is a little crazy?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I think it is directionally correct, but I think there are definitely some places where people have gotten carried away. People talk about, "Oh, we rank our engineers by how many tokens they're spending." Well, let's try and rank people by how much output they're actually producing, or how much good work is actually getting done. But obviously, I think the math works out in terms of the GPUs are expensive, but if your engineers are actually able to ship three times more, then it's very clearly worth it. You just want to make sure you're doing it the right way. Obviously, a lot there on just tying to specific outcomes, tying to, okay, what are the actual tickets that are getting done? What are the projects and the initiatives? And this project, which was scoped out for 18 months and was going to be handed off to an outsourced contractor and was going to cost you 15 million, like, let's just

• 49:45Speaker 01

  talk about how you do this all internally with your own team, and you do it for 1 million, and you get it all done in three months. Stuff like that, which I think is super important. The second thing, which I'll call out especially, is just being neutral. A lot of discussion, obviously-

• 50:00David Senra?

  What do you mean by that?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Being neutral with respect to all the labs, the models themselves-

• 50:05David Senra?

  Yeah, I think you said you like being Switzerland.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we like being Switzerland, exactly. And so I think it's like an important thing of, you know, we are just as incentivized as they are to figure out how to make their token spend efficient. And so Devon is purposely meant to be a compound model system. And so all of these different things for the right task, or even the right sub-task of a task, or something like that-

• 50:28David Senra?

  Describe what a compound model system is.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So for each different part of your use case, I mean, imagine, let's say you tell Devon, "Hey, customer just reported this bug. There's a Jira ticket, can you take a look at the ticket and go and solve the whole thing?" What does Devon actually go do? First of all, Devon's probably going and investigating, understanding, like, what does the report say? What's going on? Second of all, probably, as any engineer should, it's going to go and try to reproduce the bug itself. So it'll say, "Okay, let me spin up the product locally, let me click around, try to follow the same steps that they followed, and see if I can make the bug happen as well." Then if you did that, then, okay, now you're looking at the logs, you're trying to figure out what went wrong, you're pinpointing what are the particular files or- What was the flow of, you know, what was the command flow that led to this?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Then you do the debugging, then you go and test it again, make sure, you know, all these steps, right? Then you put it up for review. And it turns out that there are different models that are good for different parts of these tasks, right? And even for across different tasks, obviously, also, it's like, some tasks are these really crazy hard ones where you want to actually use max thinking and you want to use the very best models you can get your hands on in the world, right? And then many other tasks are, you know, boilerplate enough or repetitive enough that what you care about is just getting it done really fast, getting an immediate answer, having the ability to verify that it was correct, but then beyond that, making sure that it was like as cheap and fast and efficient as possible, right? And so Devin, rather than being pegged to one model and saying, oh, we're only going to serve you GPT for this, or we're only going to serve you Okifis for this.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Devin can use any of the different models it has in its arsenal, which include all of these models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, et cetera. But also our own models, right, or open source models out there. And it will, you know, dynamically go and choose these models for these tasks.

• 52:12David Senra?

  How do you think about this? Like, you're a customer of them, but also competitor with.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, I think in practice, there's a lot of positives some work for us to do together. And so like, you know, the way that we think about ourselves, a couple of things. One, software is the only thing that we care about, obviously. And there's a lot of value in focus and in building products and building our whole motions specifically around that.

• 52:37David Senra?

  Say more about how you think about focus and the value in it.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  You know, back to what we were saying about startups, right? Like, why do startups ever win at all? And if you do everything, you will lose to Microsoft or Google, who does everything, but also has like trillions of dollars more resources and 100,000 more people than you, right? And infinitely more brand name, right? And like the way that you build, you know, like a real kind of like, you know, a real like lasting business or lasting product is by.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Really, really focusing and nary on one specific thing, making a very concentrated bet. And then obviously, you know, your bet has to end up being right. But, but, but like, you know, from there, it's like a lot of just like really tight execution. And so in software, you know, I love, you and I have talked about this. I love the quote from, from Daniel Ek in Spotify, right? People were saying, so like, you know, there's, there's like, YouTube's trying to go and do this, and Apple has Apple Music, and like, why, why should there be like, he was like, you know, I can give you all the other reasons, but the truth is, we're just going to care way more about music than they are. And I think for us, it's true. It's like, we are just going to care so much more about like, what does it look like to build software end to end at Goldman Sachs, or at like Mercedes Benz, or something like that, you know? And, and there's a lot of nuance in that. And

• 53:48Speaker 01

  there's like, a lot of messiness in that, right? It's, it's not as simple as like, oh, here's a sandbox algorithms problem. Go and code me the correct, you know, 30 line program that solves this problem or something. It's like, how do you work with all the messiness of the real world? How do you understand the code base as it exists today? How do you like, collaborate with all the humans on it? How do you plug into their ticketing system? How do you give the agent the ability to test its own code and run everything locally? Right? Like, all of these are obviously just super hairy, messy problems. And that's, that's, that's what we care a lot about, right? And so from that perspective, it's, it's a very kind of nice, like, you know, the labs have their own products. I'm sure they'll continue to do more. But, but in practice, like, there are a lot of nice ways for us to cooperate. Obviously, like, on top of that, like, being the Switzerland means that, you know, folks can work with us and kind of like, trust in us that, that,

• 54:33Speaker 01

  that we will kind of route them to the right models, that we will optimize the price performance for them, that we will kind of like, direct them to the right use cases and so on. Because, you know, we're not incentivized for them to spend more on the models either, you know? We're incentivized for them to get value and to get output out of it.

• 54:48David Senra?

  I love that you use the example of the war between Spotify and the rest of the, like, Apple Music, for example. Jimmy Iovine, who also came on the show, and now is actually a friend of mine, actually called me yesterday about this, because anything, anytime anything happens with AI music on Spotify, he calls me. But, we talked about this because he's like, you don't understand, like, he had like, 40 years of experience in the music industry, he had all the relationships. He's like, Apple bought me for $3 billion. Spotify, at the time, he's like, we're going to go head to head with them. Spotify only had 3 million paid subscribers at the time Jimmy's gonna fight the war and he's like I have one of the biggest companies in the world. And then he talked about he's like that wound up being a huge he thought was an asset. It was a huge liability. Yeah, because they're like, we don't give a shit about getting a couple million more, tens of millions or more of subscribers. We invented the most successful consumer product of all time.

• 55:33David Senra?

  And he said something like they just clipped his wings. And he was like, he was trying to do something like, oh, this isn't important to us. Where Daniel was going to die if he was not successful. He just cared about a lot more.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Dude, even in the two years that we've been around, you know, I've heard so many different versions of the same argument. Because when we started, as you can imagine, this was true for us. It's true for everybody in the space, building the space. The number one pushback that you would always hear from investors, from other people, people is like, but like, Microsoft already has GitHub Copilot. Like, isn't that everybody's just gonna use that, right? And it's like, it's a very reasonable thing to say in some sense, because you know what? They did have all, you know, they did own all of GitHub and they did have the partnership with OpenAI and they did have like VS Code and so on. I think in practice, the reality is there's so much more innovation and so much more to build that there was a lot of like positives. You know, Microsoft's like a great partner of ours and we do a lot of things together and we build even more together, right?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  And I think the reality is like, people have said this forever of like, oh, like, yeah, like startups versus, you know, like, why should it? You can give all the rational arguments.

• 56:30David Senra?

  10 years ago, it's like Google do this or Facebook will do this.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, why should Datadog exist or why should Snowflake or Databricks exist or whatever? You know, the clouds, the clouds have all, you know, the clouds care about observability too. The clouds care. And the reality is like, it's in some sense, a bit of an uncreative way to think about things, I think. Like, if there was like one thing that, okay, here's what we all know is gonna be the end state future. And everybody's just working toward it and whoever has the most resources toward it wins. And of course, yeah, you know, it's like, we know who has the most resources to it, right? But if there are millions of problems out there to solve, there's lots of different things. The world is dynamic. Things change all the time. There's lots of new, you know, ideas or opportunities or ways to build new products. And the reality is like, of course, there's, there's, there's lots of different niches to own.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  There's different things to really bet on. There's different focuses to spend your time on. And I think that will continue. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like a for better or for worse, after the last couple of months of news. You know, cognition, I think, has been a bit more of the like, we've become a bit more known as the, you know, the folks betting on independence in some sense. Because obviously there have been some high profile acquisitions.

• 57:36David Senra?

  It's funny that you said that because I was, I wanted, one of the questions I'm gonna ask you, which I probably won't answer. It's like, how many different acquisition offers have you had?

• 57:44Speaker 01

  I will not answer that question.

• 57:46David Senra?

  Dozens, more?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Dozens is a lot, dude. I don't know about dozens, but.

• 57:50David Senra?

  The time, it's probably only a handful that could actually have, afford to buy you if you would sell. But the amount of times they keep coming back.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. Well, yeah, it's definitely, anyway.

• 58:01David Senra?

  No, this, this independence part is really interesting to me. We were on the phone, me, you and a mutual friend on three way, like, I don't know. I think it was actually last summer and um, I'm not gonna say the company.

• 58:13David Senra?

  But I was like, Scott, what do you, what do you, what do you think about? You know, an acquisition with X, not X the platform, X the, the blank company. You're like, I don't know how we'd be able to afford them. I just assumed I meant you buying them. And I just fucking cracked up laughing. It was hilarious.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  No, so, so I, I, I think like, yeah, yeah, and it's like folks, like, there, there are folks taking acquisitions and doing things. There's some big, high-profile ones. I, I think those are great, to be clear, and I, I think it's a very reasonable path for exit. As I mentioned, for us, it's like, we, we, we've all come into this, like, we want to build a generational business. It's something we're really excited about. And, and I think people, I think today, sometimes, I, I've, I've seen some more of this nihilism where they say, oh, like, yeah, maybe it's just, maybe it's too late. Maybe it's not possible anymore and like.

• 58:59David Senra?

  What, what does that mean? What's not possible?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Like, maybe it's not possible to build a new independent business because everything else, you know, it's like.

• 59:05David Senra?

  Because the labs are gonna do everything?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  All the opportunities, take it, you know? And it's like, guys.

• 59:09David Senra?

  Those people aren't founders. Founders are rationally optimistic.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:12David Senra?

  They're just not founders.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:14David Senra?

  They, they believe even there's no evidence that they should succeed, that they will succeed.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:19David Senra?

  So people like that just need to get a job.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Do I say this even with Devin? Like, if, if you think that going on to the Devin web app and like, giving the, or, or any other coding product out there today, you know, and, and like, giving the instructions the way that you do right now, and then you get the pull request out, and then that's how you review it, and that's how you build software. If you think that that's gonna be the way that software is built forever, then yeah, then, then nothing will change. But like, I think we have 10 more generations of these different product experiences to come, right? And like, building those and doing those, it's like, that is what innovation is. And like, that's, that's, that, that's what's gonna happen.

• 59:49David Senra?

  The advantage I have of reading, you know, for the last decade of all, like, all these biographies of entrepreneurs. Like you're studying somebody's life, but in many cases, if they you were so successful, they wrote a book about your life, you usually it's almost like you get a minor in like new industry creation.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03David Senra?

  Every single time it's just like, we're too late, it's over, there's no more opportunity.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06David Senra?

  And the way I thought about this was like the best definition of a business I ever heard actually came from Richard Branson. He says, all businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. And if that's true, which I believe it is, then that means there's infinite opportunity in the future now and in the future, because there's infinite ways to make somebody else's life better. And that's all a business is. So this idea that's like, we got to the end of history is just bullshit.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26David Senra?

  There and you know, I don't mean to push you on this, like I am personally curious though, because like I know you're already rich. I don't think money is your north star based on the conversations we had in the past, but like, there's gotta be some crazy number somebody can throw at you where you're just like, fuck, I have to take this.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Not really. I mean, it's like the, you know, people have asked me sometimes before they've asked me like, okay, but like really that would you like?

• 1:00:55David Senra?

  This is what I'm doing right now.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  And the way that I say it sometimes is like, we would sell if we thought it was the most ambitious thing to do. It's kind of an oxymoron because obviously, but but you know, it's like my genuine answer in the sense that like, that's like what we care we care about, you know, it's it's like the, I mean, it's funny you talk about money like, I mean, I don't even do, I don't have like, I don't have a car.

• 1:01:19David Senra?

  I live in an apartment, I just I just realized.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  I have an apartment. Yeah, it's like, I don't know. I think I like eating sushi. That's fun. The sushi doesn't cost that much. You can do that off of an engineer's salary as well.

• 1:01:31David Senra?

  Just so you know, if this is true.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33David Senra?

  Like then you are the the type of entrepreneur that I find the most fascinating in the world. Cause like when startup founders talk, talk, come to talk to me, it's just like, I don't give a shit about your startup. I like, I asked the same question. It's like, is this your last business?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46David Senra?

  Right? I asked Kareem from Ramp like this before we did this like deep partnership.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49David Senra?

  And it's just like, it's like, okay, you could sell it, like the Zuck example where they're like, why didn't you take a billion dollars? I think you own 25% of the company. You would have made 250 million. You're like 22. He's like, well, what would I do with the money? I would just start another social network. I kind of like the one I have. Like, I just want to build shit anyways.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06David Senra?

  So like, what do I do? And then the other element of this, which I think is almost tied into you where it's like, I feel like you're just having a lot of fun, like even being around here, it's just like, there is, your company's weirder in the composition of the people because it's literally just all nerds. Like, and I think you like, you know, and I mean, well, like, you know, like, there's usually a mixture of, obviously, the nerds and some other people. And like, you kind of built this, like, almost like your social network is like now.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  You're not allowed here if you're not a nerd, yeah.

• 1:02:33David Senra?

  Yeah, it's like a physical manifestation of your social network, but like, the way I would describe this is like.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Okay, cool, cool. So my friends are all nerds. Yeah, I agree.

• 1:02:39David Senra?

  And I mean that in, obviously, in a daring way.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  I love that, yeah.

• 1:02:42David Senra?

  But what, what, the people I'm most interested in is just like, there's no price, right? Like, the example I use is, go ask Steve Jobs. I'll give you $2 trillion, but you can't work on Apple.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55David Senra?

  What the fuck do you think he would've said?

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. No.

• 1:02:58David Senra?

  No, he's like, well, I want to work on Apple. That's what I want to do. There's a funny thing that I wanted to tie together, which I didn't find the opportunity till now, is you are currently the second wealthiest entrepreneur from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I don't know if you remember, we've talked about this.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  We've talked about this, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:15David Senra?

  The first one.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  She can figure this great business, but I'm a customer of that business as well.

• 1:03:19David Senra?

  The first one is Todd Graves.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21David Senra?

  Owns Raising Canes.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23David Senra?

  I, I talked to him, he was on the show.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26David Senra?

  You tell him, you'll give $100 billion for your chicken finger empire.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31David Senra?

  No, he, there's no, he's turned down, and I know this for a fact, because I've talked about it, he's turned down crazy acquisitions offers. He's like, I don't care about, it's not the money.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, for us, it's very like, like, again, it's not rational, but like, the way that I would describe it, it's like, I feel, and I think all of us do, like, that

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  it'd be one thing if we tried and we gave it our all and we just weren't good enough, then we're fine. Like, it wouldn't be that, dude, I'd be, I'd be salty as hell, you know.

• 1:04:04David Senra?

  It wouldn't be fine.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  But, but like, but like, it would be like, it would be an outcome, it would be like an outcome that I could live with, you know? But if we felt like, you know, we could have gone for it all, we could have pushed harder, and we did it. Like, that, I think, is like, I just, I don't think we would, like, live with ourselves in that outcome. And that's like the, if you have me explain, it's almost, it's kind of circular, I don't know, but, but it's like, why, why are we so excited to do this? Why do we do, you know, it's like, we want to achieve our potential and build what we were meant to build, you know? And, and, and maybe that's something, and maybe that's nothing, but like, you'd rather find out than see, you know?

• 1:04:40David Senra?

  I think this idea of you have one life, go.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44David Senra?

  Is a perfect place to end. Thanks for the time, Scott.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.