# cognition: people

> scott wu, steven hao, walden yan, and the people around cognition — who they are, what they wrote, and what they claim.

## the people

- scott wu (ceo, scott_wu): cofounder and ceo. born in baton rouge to chinese-immigrant parents — 1996 in his own words to colossus, 1997 per wikipedia; the discrepancy is unresolved. mathcounts national champion 2011 after competing against middle-schoolers as a third-grader; ioi gold 2012/2013/2014, first overall in 2014; harvard ~two years then out, with an icpc 2016 gold along the way; codeforces legendary grandmaster peak 3350. worked at addepar as a high schooler, co-founded lunchclub (cto, 2017–2022, a16z-backed, forbes 30 under 30), and reportedly spent time at scale ai before cognition. 'i learned to program when i was nine years old, writing little programs in basic on a ti-83.' (sources: [bio: b.1997, baton rouge, harvard, lunchclub cto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Wu), [long q&a](https://colossus.com/article/scott-wu-tapes-cognition/), [bio details: coded at 12, mathcounts 2011, lunchclub 2017](https://stripe.com/en-ca/customers/cognition-scott-wu), [ceo since nov 2023](https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-wu-8b94ab96), [wus 8vc venture cup problem orchestra](https://algorithms-live.blogspot.com/2018/02/episode-31-orchestra.html), [verbatim origin-story post (ti-83 basic, age 9)](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/scott-wu-8b94ab96_i-learned-to-program-when-i-was-nine-years-activity-7480660748705157120-EBoW), [scott wu on lunchclub era + a16z $4m raise](https://share.transistor.fm/s/9c66aedf), [john collison interview](https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/cognition-ceo-scott-wu-on-acquiring), [verbatim: 9-person founding team, hyperscaler, tree search](https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/scott-wu))
- steven hao (co-founder): cofounder and cto. mit math/cs; ioi 2014 gold (6th place) after a 52nd in 2013; icpc world finals 6th with mit; a january 2015 jane street trading internship; then an early engineer at scale ai (~2018–2022, autonomy and sensor-fusion ml per speaker bios). secondary profiles also list meteor, d.e. shaw, dropbox, and quora — individually unverified. he keeps a deliberately low public profile: no known blog, no solo interviews. the quietest founder on the cap table. (sources: [ioi 2013 (52nd), ioi 2014 gold (6th)](https://cphof.org/profile/topcoder:aceofdiamonds), [co-founder](https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-hao-160b9638), [speaker bio: early scale ai engineer](https://gne.mplify.net/speaker/steven-hao/), [employment list incl. meteor, d.e. shaw, dropbox, quora](https://success.ai/profile/steven-hao-7874977468))
- walden yan (co-founder): cofounder and cpo. ioi 2020 gold for the us; mit primes researcher in crypto/ml; harvard cs/econ — left for cognition, telling bloomberg he 'hasn't yet had the talk' with his parents about his status at the school. reported: a thiel fellowship, an engineering stint at anysphere (cursor) pre-cognition, co-founder of deepreason (web3 security), managing partner of inverted — all on community bios, not primary sources. he narrated the launch's upwork demo and later wrote the company's most-cited essays, 'don't build multi-agents' and its 2026 revision. (sources: [compiled leadership bios](https://mungomash.com/orgs/cognition/leadership/), [founder bios](https://komo.ai/directory/cognition-leadership), [ashlee vance launch feature](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-12/cognition-ai-is-a-peter-thiel-backed-coding-assistant), [original demo video narrated by walden yan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTS2Hz96HYQ), [walden yan essay](https://cognition.com/blog/dont-build-multi-agents), [walden yan follow-up revising 2025 thesis](https://cognition.com/blog/multi-agents-working))
- russell kaplan (team): president since january 2024 — pre-launch. stanford cs bs/ms, treehacks founder, tesla autopilot senior ml scientist, founder/ceo of helia (acquired by scale ai in 2020), then scale's director of engineering and ml. he co-led the windsurf outreach with wu and announced the 2026 exec bench. some event bios style him 'co-founder & president' — a styling, not a fact pattern. (sources: [president since jan 2024](https://www.linkedin.com/in/russelljkaplan), [co-founder & president styling](https://event.foundryco.com/speaker/russell-kaplan/), [kaplan bio: helia→scale acquisition, tesla autopilot](https://siliconvalleyinvestclub.com/companies/cognition/team/russell-kaplan/), [wang recounts frantic weekend](https://www.businessinsider.com/windsurf-ceo-jeff-wang-openai-google-cognition-deal-2025-7), [russell kaplan podcast](https://hgcapital.com/insights/orbit-podcast/a-golden-age-of-software-engineering))
- the medalist bench (team, tourist): the founding team's claimed '10 ioi gold medals' are only partially named: the three founders plus neal wu — scott's older brother, 3x ioi gold himself, founding advisor from november 2023, departed for mira murati's thinking machines lab in february 2026 — gennady korotkevich, whose codeforces 'tourist' tier was literally named for his handle when he broke 4000 while at cognition, and andrew he ('ecnerwala'). the about page adds that 21 of the initial 35 team members had previously founded a company. (sources: [10 ioi gold medals](https://cognition.com/about), [founding aug/nov 2023 discrepancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI), [founding advisor nov 2023](https://theorg.com/org/cognition-ai/org-chart/neal-wu), [neal wu departs cognition founding team for thinking machines](https://www.businessinsider.com/mira-murati-thinking-machines-lab-hires-competitive-coder-neal-wu-2026-2), [tourist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich), [software engineer at cognition (current)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gennady-korotkevich))
- jeff wang (team): the human thread through the windsurf saga — windsurf's head of business since may 2023, interim ceo the day google took the founders, ceo through june 2026, then 'president, new enterprise' at cognition running international expansion and government work. he recounts 'the craziest 72 hours' of the deal and notes windsurf's retained engineering core is 'maybe five or six people' amid agent-driven reorgs every two or three months. windsurf's actual founders — varun mohan and douglas chen — went to google deepmind, not cognition. (sources: [wang: windsurf ceo jul25–jun26 → president, new enterprise at cognition](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefflinwang), [wang interim ceo](https://www.theverge.com/openai/705999/google-windsurf-ceo-openai), [wang interview: reorgs every 2–3 months](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNQLawiYhQE), [wang recounts frantic weekend](https://www.businessinsider.com/windsurf-ceo-jeff-wang-openai-google-cognition-deal-2025-7))
- the cognition team (team): the extended roster and the unsigned company voice on the blog: swyx (latent space) and investors-turned-employees christian lawless (conversion capital) and emily cohen (neo) joined around the september 2025 series c; the 2026 bench added takumi masai (cognition japan), richard spence (apac, singapore), paul grewal (chief legal and global affairs, ex-coinbase), art l. (global partnerships, ex-brex), and jared palmer (vp engineering). headcount arc: ~10 at launch, an eng team of ~15 each running ~5 devins in early 2025, ~200 by late 2025 per wikipedia, 300–400 across 21 countries per linkedin. (sources: [scott wu: >$400m at $10.2b post](https://cognition.com/blog/funding-growth-and-the-next-frontier-of-ai-coding-agents), [full dated post index used for timeline items](https://cognition.com/blog), [president since jan 2024](https://www.linkedin.com/in/russelljkaplan), [~15-person eng team each using ~5 devins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0ZNhA0rvE), [founding aug/nov 2023 discrepancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI), [ceo since nov 2023](https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-wu-8b94ab96))
- the backers (team): founders fund led the first three priced rounds — peter thiel personally involved at the seed — with angels elad gil, patrick and john collison, chris re, and sarah guo. 8vc led the ~$4b round with lux co-leading; lux, general catalyst, and 8vc co-led the series d; a16z and accel led the series e — andreessen's 'proud to back him for the second time' closing a lunchclub-era loop — inside a ~30-firm syndicate that includes nvidia, also a devin customer. (sources: [ashlee vance launch feature](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-12/cognition-ai-is-a-peter-thiel-backed-coding-assistant), [$21m series a](https://www.maginative.com/article/new-ai-startup-cognition-raises-21m-unveils-autonomous-coding-assistant-devin/), [~$4b round led by 8vc](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-18/cognition-ai-hits-4-billion-valuation-in-deal-led-by-lonsdale-s-firm), [scott wu: >$400m at $10.2b post](https://cognition.com/blog/funding-growth-and-the-next-frontier-of-ai-coding-agents), [$1b+ at $26b](https://cognition.com/blog/series-d), [do it all with devin: >$2b at $48b, a16z + accel](https://cognition.com/blog/series-e), [marc andreessen post](https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-cognition/), [~$900m run rate](https://siliconangle.com/2026/09/08/ai-coding-startup-cognition-raises-2b-at-48b-valuation-as-revenue-nears-900m/))

## writings

- 2024-03-12 — introducing devin, the first ai software engineer (essay, scott, cognition blog): the launch manifesto — 'the first ai software engineer,' a sandboxed shell/editor/browser, a 13.86% swe-bench claim footnoted to a 25% unassisted subset, and a 'hire devin' cta that made the labor framing literal. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/introducing-devin)
  > "devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review."
  > "by solving reasoning, we can unlock new possibilities in a wide range of disciplines—code is just the beginning."
  > "we even tried giving devin real jobs on upwork and it could do those too!"
- 2024-03 — devin's upwork side hustle (video, walden, youtube): 'devin's upwork side hustle' — the demo video walden narrated that internet of bugs later took apart frame by frame: the wrong prompt, self-generated bugs, files that didn't exist in the repo. the artifact at the center of the demo-reality gap. [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTS2Hz96HYQ)
- 2024-03-15 — swe-bench technical report (document, roster, cognition blog): the swe-bench technical report — methodology (570 of 2,294 issues, unassisted) plus the eval harness and devin's edits released on github. the paper trail behind the launch number. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/swe-bench-technical-report)
- 2024-12-10 — devin is now generally available (post, roster, cognition blog): 'devin is now generally available' — $500/month flat, no seat limits, slack-primary with an ide extension and api; the '16x faster timelines' claim and the first named customers (nubank, vesta, ramp) are company-reported. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/devin-generally-available)
- 2025-04-03 — devin 2.0 (post, roster, cognition blog): devin 2.0 — the agent-native ide experience, interactive planning, parallel devins, and the $20 entry plan that collapsed the $500 flat price into pay-as-you-go acus. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/devin-2)
- 2025-05-05 — deepwiki (post, roster, cognition blog): deepwiki — free ai documentation for any public github repo; the code-understanding surface that grew into devin wiki and devin search. [source](https://cognition.com/blog)
- 2025-06-12 — don't build multi-agents (essay, walden, cognition blog): the essay that popularized 'context engineering' as the discipline over prompt engineering — full-context single-threaded agents over parallel sub-agents, with the concession that the field is 'still playing with raw html & css.' [source](https://cognition.com/blog/dont-build-multi-agents)
  > "share context"
  > "actions carry implicit decisions"
- 2025-07-14 — cognition's acquisition of windsurf (document, scott, cognition blog): the windsurf acquisition announcement, written as wu's internal all-hands memo — the deal terms for employees made legible, the 'bricklayers to architects' thesis to the nyt, and the labor-relations promise the august buyouts would be measured against. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf)
  > "100% of windsurf employees will participate financially in this deal … will have vesting cliffs waived … will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date."
  > "there's only one boat and we're all in it together"
- 2025-09-08 — funding, growth, and the next frontier of ai coding agents (essay, scott, cognition blog): 'funding, growth, and the next frontier of ai coding agents' — the definitive metrics post: devin arr $1m→$73m in nine months, lifetime net burn under $20m, >30% combined-arr growth in seven weeks post-windsurf, <5% customer overlap. all company-reported. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/funding-growth-and-the-next-frontier-of-ai-coding-agents)
  > "we hunkered down in a new york apartment and built the product we always wanted for ourselves."
- 2025-10-29 — swe-1.5 (post, roster, cognition blog): swe-1.5 — a frontier-size in-house model at 950 tok/s via cerebras, measured on swe-bench pro. the buried lede: the company that made swe-bench famous stopped reporting it a year earlier. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5)
  > "we stopped reporting swe-bench numbers in 2024"
- 2025-11-14 — devin's 2025 performance review (post, roster, cognition blog): 'devin's 2025 performance review: learnings from 18 months of agents at work' — the self-evaluation format applied to the product itself, claiming deployment at 'thousands of companies.' [source](https://cognition.com/blog)
- 2026-04-22 — multi-agents: what's actually working (essay, walden, cognition blog): 'multi-agents: what's actually working' — the revision: multiple agents may contribute intelligence to a task, but writes stay single-threaded. the 2025 absolutism narrowed by a year of shipping. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/multi-agents-working)
- 2026-05-27 — more devins in more places (post, scott, cognition blog): 'more devins in more places' — the >$1b series d at $26b, the 'independent agent lab' positioning, and the engineer-hours framing that turns employees into 'executives' over an army of devins. [source](https://cognition.com/blog/series-d)
  > "at cognition, 89% of code committed by our engineers is committed by devin"
- 2026-07-08 — the ti-83 origin post (post, scott, linkedin): the linkedin origin-story post — ti-83 basic at nine, and the claim that the end state was always 'a full operating ai software engineer,' not autocomplete. [source](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/scott-wu-8b94ab96_i-learned-to-program-when-i-was-nine-years-activity-7480660748705157120-EBoW)
  > "i learned to program when i was nine years old, writing little programs in basic on a ti-83 calculator in baton rouge, louisiana."
  > "the ultimate form factor of software engineering was not going to be an autocomplete or a text assistant. it was going to be a full operating ai software engineer"
- 2026-09-08 — do it all with devin (post, scott, cognition blog): 'do it all with devin' — the >$2b series e at $48b led by a16z and accel; andreessen's companion post repeats the 13%→90% production-code arc and notes a16z is backing wu 'for the second time.' [source](https://cognition.com/blog/series-e)
- 2025-08 — cognition ceo scott wu on acquiring windsurf (podcast, scott, cheeky pint): john collison's cheeky pint interview — a segment literally titled 'i think we have agi'; sixth-grade math competitions with alexandr wang, the windsurf weekend, the 'moneyball-ification of everything.' [source](https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/cognition-ceo-scott-wu-on-acquiring)
  > "i think we have agi"
- 2025 — scott wu on the david senra show (interview, scott, david senra): the david senra episode — the nine-person founding team of mostly-repeat-founders, the hyperscaler ambition, and the founder-as-search-algorithm self-description. [source](https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/scott-wu)
  > "we want to go for it all. we want to be a generational business. we want to build a hyperscaler"
  > "it's like a tree search… that's the only thing i do in my life."
- 2026 — the wu tapes (interview, scott, colossus): colossus's 'the wu tapes' — the long q&a: born 1996 in his own telling, the ioi cohort that became scale, perplexity, and decagon founders, and a claimed '$445 million of revenue run rate in its first 18 months' (self-reported). [source](https://colossus.com/article/scott-wu-tapes-cognition/)
  > "so that we can stop living in minecraft survival mode and start living in minecraft creative mode"
- 2025 — what comes after code (podcast, scott, ai & i): every's ai & i — 'cognition's ceo on what comes after code': cs fundamentals, rl for coding agents, and the argument that 'we may already be living with agi.' [source](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cognitions-ceo-on-what-comes-after-code/id1719789201?i=1000728258296)
- 2026-07 — devin writes 95% of our code (interview, scott, sourcery): the sourcery podcast at raise summit — 'devin writes ~95% of our code' (self-reported), the single-weekend windsurf negotiation, the dmv as the next target, and the origin story traced to a mongodb error in 2023. [source](https://www.sourcery.vc/p/breaking-devin-writes-95-of-our-code)
- 2025 — inside devin (video, scott, youtube): the 'inside devin' interview — an eng team of ~15 each running ~5 devins, a quarter of prs committed by devin then with >50% expected by year-end, the 'eight pivots' admission, and the devin name origin. [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0ZNhA0rvE)
- 2025 — a golden age of software engineering (podcast, russell, hg orbit): russell kaplan on hg's orbit podcast — 'a golden age of software engineering': the software-abundance thesis, 'talent is everything,' and a business he describes as doubling every ~70 days (self-reported). [source](https://hgcapital.com/insights/orbit-podcast/a-golden-age-of-software-engineering)
- 2026 — the 72-hour deal, retold (video, jeff, neo show): jeff wang on the neo show — the 72-hour windsurf weekend from the inside, and the agent-era org chart: reorgs every two or three months as pm/design/qa roles collapse into 'full stack engineers… talking to agents all day.' [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNQLawiYhQE)
- 2025-07 — the context-engineering notes (interview, walden, linkedin): walden's context-engineering conversations — circulated mostly as other people's notes (jason liu's linkedin summary is the canonical record) rather than a talk of his own. [source](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jxnlco_notes-on-context-engineering-w-walden-yan-activity-7351256030409879553-9d5b)

## controversies

- 2023–2026 — when did cognition start: the founding-date drift — august 2023 (wikipedia's body, senra's notes, mungomash) versus november 2023 (wikipedia's infobox, wu's linkedin) versus 'incorporated ~january 2024' (bloomberg's launch piece) versus an outlier january 2023 fan bio. scott wu's own birth year splits 1996 (his words to colossus) versus 1997 (wikipedia). reaction: the dossier keeps both dates visible rather than picking one; the working synthesis is that work began in h2 2023 and incorporation landed ~january 2024. (sources: [founding aug/nov 2023 discrepancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI), [ceo since nov 2023](https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-wu-8b94ab96), [ashlee vance launch feature](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-12/cognition-ai-is-a-peter-thiel-backed-coding-assistant), [long q&a](https://colossus.com/article/scott-wu-tapes-cognition/), [fan bio; jan-2023 founding claim (outlier)](https://yespress.io/scott-wu))
- 2024–2026 — the numbers are the company's own: the self-reported ledger — swe-bench 13.86%, '16x faster timelines,' arr $1m→$73m→$492m→~$900m, '89–95% of code written by devin,' the productivity guarantee's own estimator, swe-1.5/2 performance — every load-bearing number is company-published. steven hao's bio is reconstructed from linkedin and speaker bios; walden yan's thiel fellowship and anysphere stint rest on community directories. reaction: no external audit exists; the dossier marks each number self-reported rather than reconciling them silently. (sources: [scott wu launch post](https://cognition.com/blog/introducing-devin), [scott wu: >$400m at $10.2b post](https://cognition.com/blog/funding-growth-and-the-next-frontier-of-ai-coding-agents), [$1b+ at $26b](https://cognition.com/blog/series-d), [ai productivity guarantee](https://cognition.com/blog/ai-guarantee), [employment list incl. meteor, d.e. shaw, dropbox, quora](https://success.ai/profile/steven-hao-7874977468), [compiled leadership bios](https://mungomash.com/orgs/cognition/leadership/))
- 2025-08 — the 80-hour memo: the culture memo — three weeks after promising 100% financial participation and 'one boat,' cognition laid off 30 windsurf staff and offered ~200 others nine-month buyouts conditioned on six office days and 80+ hour weeks: 'we don't believe in work-life balance—building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn't possibly separate the two.' reaction: wu publicly owned the posture — 'many of us literally live where we work,' 'we're proud of how we work, we understand it's not for everyone' — and bi headlined it 'i live for these moments.' critics read bait-switch; wu reads filter. (sources: [original reporting on layoffs/buyouts](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/cognition-offers-buyouts-newly-acquired-windsurf-staff), [30 laid off; ~200 buyouts](https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/05/three-weeks-after-acquiring-windsurf-cognition-offers-staff-the-exit-door/), [verbatim we dont believe in work-life balance… memo](https://winbuzzer.com/2025/08/05/cognition-ais-culture-reset-offers-nine-month-buyouts-to-windsurf-staff-demands-80-hour-weeks-xcxwbn/), [extreme performance culture](https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/this-ai-startup-just-told-its-staff-to-leave-with-a-check-if-they-cant-take-the-heat/91224532), [i live for these moments](https://www.businessinsider.com/cognition-ceo-scott-wu-windsurf-deal-ai-jeff-wang-google-2025-8))

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

Canonical page: https://hraness.com/cognition/people


Published by @ben in profile revision 1.
Original document: https://hraness.com/cognition/people
Original credited author: Hraness
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

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````