Building The World's First AI Software Engineer | Cognition’s Scott Wu

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 David Senra X: https://x.com/davidsenra Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsenra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsenra Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senrashow Threads: https://www.threads.com/@davidsenra Spotify: https://spti.fi/TVrr557 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4msoZtb Website: https://www.davidsenra.com Scott Wu X: https://x.com/ScottWu46 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-wu-8b94ab96 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

David SenrahostScott Wuguest

Jun 28, 20261h 5mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: June 28, 2026
Duration: 1h 5m
Channel: David Senra
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the world's first AI software engineer. Wu describes himself as "salty," a word he traces to second grade, when he competed in a seventh-grade math competition, lost, and never forgot it. Born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant family, he grew up the little brother who hated losing at video games and turned that into a career. At the International Olympiad in Informatics he won three gold medals and placed first overall in 2014; he was the 2011 MathCounts national champion. He approaches building a company the way he approaches a strategy game: a tree search, calculating moves, working the decision tree toward victory. By his own account, competition is all he does. He dropped out of Harvard after two years, worked as a founding engineer at Scale AI, and co-founded Lunchclub before starting Cognition in August 2023 with fellow IOI gold medalists Steven Hao and Walden Yan. They built it in a New York apartment. Devin's annualized revenue then climbed from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025. In May 2026, Cognition raised at a $26 billion valuation. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/scott-wu David Senra X: https://x.com/davidsenra Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsenra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsenra Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senrashow Threads: https://www.threads.com/@davidsenra Spotify: https://spti.fi/TVrr557 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4msoZtb Website: https://www.davidsenra.com Scott Wu X: https://x.com/ScottWu46 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-wu-8b94ab96 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

SPEAKERS

David Senra
host
Host of the podcast “Founders with David Senra,” known for entrepreneur-biography-driven interviews.
Scott Wu
guest
Founder/CEO of Cognition, the company behind “Devin,” an AI software engineer product.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of David Senra, featuring David Senra and Scott Wu, Building The World's First AI Software Engineer | Cognition’s Scott Wu explores scott Wu on Devin: agentic AI, enterprise adoption, generational ambition Wu frames his lifelong competitiveness as a central force behind how he builds Cognition and defines “winning” as creating a generational, hyperscaler-scale company.

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