20VC: Cognition CEO Scott Wu on Acquiring Windsurf: The Process, The Deal, The Rationale | Did Google Overlook a Goldmine in the Core Asset and Did Founders Leave a Sinking Ship | How Cursor and Cognition Deal with Ever Increasing Reliance on Anthropic

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) - Cognition CEO Scott Wu on Acquiring Windsurf

Release Date: July 18, 2025

In this pivotal episode of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), host Harry Stebbings engages in an in-depth conversation with Scott Wu, Co-Founder and CEO of Cognition, regarding their recent strategic acquisition of Windsurf. This acquisition has significant implications for the AI and software engineering landscapes. The discussion delves into the motivations behind the deal, the execution process, the evolving role of AI in software development, and the competitive dynamics within the industry.

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1. Introduction to the Acquisition

Harry Stebbings opens the discussion by highlighting the rapid turnaround of the episode, emphasizing the urgency and commitment of the 20VC team to address timely topics. The primary focus is on Cognition's acquisition of Windsurf and its ramifications.

Harry Stebbings [02:46]: "Did the team get screwed over? What happens from here? How does it fit into Cognition's Grandmaster plan?"

2. Discovery and Initiation of the Acquisition

Scott Wu outlines how Cognition became aware of the opportunity to acquire Windsurf almost simultaneously with the broader market.

Scott Wu [03:19]: "We found out honestly on Friday, the same time everyone else did, that all of this was happening and that this was the split and that it was Google."

The conversation underscores the complementary strengths of both companies, particularly Cognition's focus on core engineering and product teams and Windsurf's robust go-to-market, marketing, finance, and operations teams.

Scott Wu [03:19]: "There's a very naturally complementary lean... the product of the team and the business... we're going to do this and announce it by Monday morning."

3. Rationale Behind the Acquisition

Scott emphasizes that the decision to acquire Windsurf was driven by the immediate need to provide clarity to customers and the team amidst uncertainty about Windsurf's future.

Scott Wu [06:07]: "Look, there's a ton of value here, but everyone's wondering what's going on and we need to be able to give them a clear answer as soon as possible."

The swift execution was likened to a bank entering receivership, necessitating quick decision-making to stabilize the situation.

4. Impact on the AI and Software Engineering Space

The discussion transitions to the broader implications of the acquisition and the current state of AI in software engineering. Scott articulates concerns about the evolving covenant of founders staying with their ventures through turbulent times.

Scott Wu [08:46]: "I think there's an unspoken covenant that as a founder, you go down with the ship, for better or for worse. It's changed a bit over the last year and I think it's a bit disappointing, to be honest."

He posits that AI represents one of the most significant technological shifts, surpassing even the internet in potential impact.

Scott Wu [09:03]: "AI already would be bigger than that [the Internet]."

5. The Talent War and AI Dependencies

Harry raises concerns about the intense competition for talent, referencing Meta's hiring spree, to which Scott responds by contextualizing the reasonableness of such moves within the AI boom.

Scott Wu [09:03]: "AI already would be bigger than that... there's so few people that are really just determining the trajectory of AI."

6. Foundation Models vs. Application Layers

A significant portion of the conversation revolves around the balance between foundational AI models and their application layers. Scott advocates for differentiation in various layers and the necessity of both foundation labs and application-focused companies.

Scott Wu [11:24]: "It accrues wherever you are able to establish real differentiation in your space."

He further elaborates on how Cognition's focus is on optimizing specific capabilities within software engineering, complementing what foundation labs provide.

7. Developer Efficiency and Future of Software Engineering

The dialogue shifts to developer tools and the transformative potential of AI in enhancing engineering productivity. Scott envisions a future where AI agents play a pivotal role in programming, transitioning from traditional coding to more intuitive, intent-driven interactions with computers.

Scott Wu [19:07]: "Agents have to get to the point where they are basically that high touch and that kind of understanding of context."

He anticipates that skills will increasingly center around problem-solving, solution architecture, and strategic decision-making rather than routine coding tasks.

8. Marketing and Growth of Devon

Harry and Scott discuss the growth trajectory of Devon, Cognition's product, addressing concerns about its market presence compared to competitors like Devlin and Lovable.

Scott Wu [23:37]: "Usage of Devon has actually grown something like 5 to 10x... it's really focused on specifically engineers, on engineering teams trying to do their work and to go faster that way."

Harry suggests enhancing the personal brand of Scott Wu and improving marketing strategies to better communicate Devon's value proposition.

Harry Stebbings [44:50]: "Devon fall into the Nike bucket... you and Devon fall into that similar bucket of human enhancement."

9. Future Outlook and Industry Consolidation

When prompted about the future landscape of AI models and potential consolidation, Scott remains cautious, suggesting that while consolidation is inevitable, multiple winners will likely emerge due to the diverse applications and verticals.

Scott Wu [38:04]: "I think the consolidation happens and I think in total we probably end up with something like two to six players."

10. Final Thoughts and Vision

In concluding segments, Scott shares his vision for the integration of IDEs and AI agents, aiming to create a seamless developer experience that balances automation with human oversight.

Scott Wu [31:13]: "Figuring out what is that combined experience of IDE and agent... it's going to transition into being more of like a technical architect."

He also touches upon innovative AI training methodologies, emphasizing the shift from data quantity to quality and the pivotal role of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in advancing AI capabilities.

Scott Wu [35:12]: "Quality of data over quantity... RL on agent trajectories... solve any benchmark."

11. Personal Insights and Traits

In a personal exchange, Scott highlights his emotional calmness as a trait he's most proud of, attributing it to his ability to remain composed during high-stress situations—a crucial quality during the acquisition process.

Scott Wu [43:48]: "I'm proud that I'm just able to stay composed in the situation."

Harry encourages Scott to leverage his strengths in marketing to build a stronger personal brand, aligning Cognition's narrative with its innovative products.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Scott Wu [03:19]: "There's a very naturally complementary lean... the product of the team and the business."

• Scott Wu [08:46]: "I think there's an unspoken covenant that as a founder, you go down with the ship, for better or for worse."

• Scott Wu [09:03]: "AI already would be bigger than that [the Internet]."

• Scott Wu [11:24]: "It accrues wherever you are able to establish real differentiation in your space."

• Scott Wu [19:07]: "Agents have to get to the point where they are basically that high touch and that kind of understanding of context."

• Scott Wu [35:12]: "Quality of data over quantity... RL on agent trajectories... solve any benchmark."

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Conclusion

This episode provides a comprehensive look into Cognition's strategic maneuvers within the AI and software engineering sectors. Scott Wu's insights reveal a nuanced understanding of the industry's current dynamics and future trajectories. The acquisition of Windsurf positions Cognition to leverage complementary strengths, enhancing their product offerings and market reach. Furthermore, the discussion underscores the transformative potential of AI in software development, the critical importance of talent acquisition, and the evolving nature of developer tools. Scott's forward-thinking perspectives offer valuable takeaways for entrepreneurs, investors, and tech enthusiasts alike.

Transcript

[Scott Wu]

I think there's an unspoken covenant that as a founder you go down with the ship for better or for worse. It's changed a bit over the last year and I think it's a bit disappointing, to be honest. I think there's some real truth to your point that often there are actually a lot of really valuable pieces that get left behind in AI code. To be truly honest, if there was zero progress, the world would still be entirely different.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now you want to know how real time this episode is. It was recorded about 12 hours before you're listening to it. It was record late on Thursday night and yes, 20 VC team worked through the night to edit it and turn it around. That is commitment for you. The only thing that anyone wants to talk about this week is Cognition by Windsurf.

[Unknown]

What happened?

[Harry Stebbings]

Did the team get screwed over? What happens from here? How does it fit into Cognition's Grandmaster plan? What does it mean for the space in terms of who wins Cursor versus Cognition versus Claude Code? We unpack it all today with Scott Wu, Co Founder and CEO at Cognition.

[Unknown]

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[Harry Stebbings]

Scott, I am so excited for this. Dude. I was literally just telling you it is a cool prep when you get to call up like, Vinod Khosla, Joe Lonsdale, and you call them and you're like, hey, what should I ask? And they're just like, ah, I love this guy. So thank you so much for joining me.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's. It's been a crazy few days for us all.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's been pretty insane. I just want to start present day and work our way around. Did you learn about the potential ability for you to acquire Windsurf and how did that opportunity arise?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, we found out honestly on Friday, the same time everyone else did, that all of this was happening and that this was the split and that it was Google. And. And here's what happens next, and here's what happens with the team. And we were kind of talking about it, which is, you know, on the Devon side. I think in a few ways it seems to be a pretty natural fit one, because I think obviously there was an incredible, you know, team left behind. And if anything, I think what we have at cognition, I would say, is especially focused on the core engineering and product team. Whereas obviously, like, you know, I think Windsurf has built an amazing go to market team marketing, team finance, operations. And then similarly, in terms of the products, you know, we found that actually it was. There's a very naturally complementary lean. And so we reached out cold Friday evening, and our first conversation was Friday night, just take me to it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Then you reach out to Jeff and you're like, hey, figure something's going down. Should we jump on a call?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, we basically said, look, it's seems like there's enough here that it's worth having the conversation and talking about it. We got on the call together, we were talking about, you know, the ways to partner and what things would look like. I think what we came to pretty quickly, I always think about these things in terms of what is the correct way that things should happen here. And I think from Windsurf's perspective, the way that we kind of saw it was, you know, you could talk about the. The product of the team and the business, right? And what is the right thing for each of those. And I think for the business, the thing that. That you have to call it is sooner the better. You could do this, and you could have, like, you know, months of diligence and everything. And that has apparently happened multiple times already, you know, in Windsurf's company history. And I think in this particular case, I think it's. Everyone is scrambling. You know, all the customers want to know what's going on. The whole team is. Wants to know what's going on. Everyone in Silicon Valley is reaching out to them, saying, hey, like, I heard the news, you know, you want to come interview here? And so we kind of just came to the conclusion, look, a month long is not the way to do this. I mean, even like a week long, you know, it's. It's. It is Friday night now. We want to have something ready to go by Monday. I'll pause because it sounds like you have that.

[Unknown]

I'm just.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you look at, like, scale, it's like, you know, there's a husk left behind which kind of deteriorates, and you're seeing that deteriorate in real time. Why did you believe that this was inherently different and that the husk was not a husk? It was actually a treasure chest of value in a way that was different.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah. So there was definitely this conversation online, right, about all the best researchers left, and there's just nothing left behind. And we were. I don't think so. Is basically how we felt about that. And we looked at it, and, I mean, it's an amazing product that a lot of people use. It's the entirety of the customer book as well. It's all of the code, a lot of the data, and the proprietary ip. And then obviously, it's a really incredible team. I think it's an interesting state in the sense that you could call it perhaps like a somewhat incomplete piece. I mean, as it turns out for us, we had the very nice complement of what were the pieces that were needed. Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

Those pieces are the rationale that lead to the decision, how do you actually execute it? How does that work in process?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we came to them and we said, look, I think there's a very natural partnership here. I think the team pieces are very complimentary. I think there's a lot we can do on the product. The thing that just seems absolutely clear from both of our sides is if we're going to do something, we want to be ready to do this and announce it by Monday morning. You know, it kind of reminds me of like, the bank goes into Receivership, Friday night, you got to have an answer, you know, by, by Sunday and by Monday morning. Right. And I think we thought of this as a similar situation, which is, look, there's, there's a ton of value here, but everyone's wondering what's going on and we need to be able to give them a clear answer as soon as possible that we are going to do this, we're going to support the product, we're going to make sure everything's going smoothly and running smoothly and so on. And so that's what we came to and we gave them our honest take of, like, here's what we think we can do together. We are not going to have time to get to go as deep into the diligence and details as we would like to, but I think at a high level we at least are in a position to understand the business very well. Get to a verbal agreement on Saturday, hash out all the details and the terms and the legal on Sunday, get everything signed and done on Monday morning and then we're ready to announce like that's, there's no other way to make this work out. And Jeff and Graham and Kevin and, and the whole crew, honestly, like, I mean, it's a huge shout out to them because they really, they really worked around the clock for, for their team.

[Harry Stebbings]

Were they left in the lurch by this deal?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, so, so I think they had known about, I think they had known about the previous thing, you know, maybe a few days in advance. It was not a ton of advance notice. And I think they were honestly really thoughtful with how they went about it, which is, look, here are the options. We can operate as an independent company. We can go and raise a new round of venture capital now that there are actually no investors or we can find someone who we think are going to be the right partners to work with. But either way, you know, it's going to be, we're going to have to do this quickly and we're going to have to figure out what we think is the right long term fit for it.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think most people see this as a really epic deal make from you, respectfully, and I mean total hat tip and respect to you for it. The question that I have is, and actually I think it was Ruchi at South park who asked this, but she said, was this a Google blunder by leaving such a valuable asset up for grabs and not seeing the true value also in the asset?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, I think there's some real truth to your point that often there are actually a lot of really valuable pieces that get left behind.

[Harry Stebbings]

Given that you've been through this deal structure that's different and novel, do you think this becomes a new norm for how companies are acquired and how people join companies today?

[Scott Wu]

I think there's an unspoken covenant that as a founder, you go down with the ship, for better or for worse. It's changed a bit over the last year, and I think it's a bit disappointing, to be honest.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is the talent war getting a little bit out of hand when you look at Meta's hiring spree? And just how much is it getting out of hand?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, maybe. Crazy opinion, controversial opinion, but I actually think it's quite reasonable, is my view. And the reason I say that is because AI, I think we are truly on the cusp of the greatest technology shift in our lives. That's already clear. Even if you froze all the capabilities today. And then the question was just if you said there were no new research breakthroughs, no new discoveries, you don't even have to bet on that. And you just said, all right, we're going to grow products and figure out how to build the right experiences and get those out to users and meet users where they are in all these different verticals all over place the. The world. I think it would still be the biggest thing. You know, I think the biggest thing, in my mind the biggest technology shift in our lives has been the Internet. You know, I think there are some others which are obviously pretty massive as well, the mobile phone, the personal computer and so on. But yeah, you know, I think even if you froze all the capabilities today, I think AI already would be bigger than that. And the thing that's crazy about AI, and by the way, I don't think it's going to freeze. I think it's going to keep moving even faster. But the crazy thing about AI is there really are so few people that are really just determining the trajectory of AI. But I think in aggregate, I think the view is right, which is, you know, there's so few people.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm so sorry. I'm totally agree. In terms of what is it like a hundred? Is it like 10,000? Just what quantum is it?

[Scott Wu]

It's a great question. Somewhere in between those two is right. There are at least 100 folks that really matter and making a lot of differences. Certainly less than 10,000 and probably a good bit less than that, if I had to guess.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, so we've got like 100 to a thousand is kind of a range there. Do you need those people? Unless you're working on the most cutting edge frontier models, if you're in the application layer, which is very hard, I'm not denning it, but like, do you need them if you're in the application layer?

[Scott Wu]

I think the level of talent and the fierceness of competition is in many of these is actually like greater even in the application layer, which is crazy to say because I think the competition in the foundation labs is extremely strong.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you think like, holy shit, anything can happen style, which it is today. One of the shits that could happen, that's very obvious to I think me and everyone is the dependency now around Anthropic, obviously Windsurf, when I had Varun on the show, they were very much reliant on them then. And then they got cut off when the OpenAI deal was done. Is the reliance on Anthropic greater than it's ever been?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, look, we work very closely with Anthropic. I think Anthropic is a great company and I think the foundation labs in general are great companies. People always ask this question about, you know, where does the value accrue in AI? Does it. Is it chips? Is it semiconductors? Is it foundation models? The application layers, the infra layer? I think the boring but true answer is it accrues wherever you are able to establish real differentiation in your space. And I think there will be a lot of spaces for which that's the case. I think the foundation labs as businesses will do extremely well. I think the thing that we own is, and that we spend all of our time on, I think is actually a nicely complementary piece which is in some ways really thinking about how to best optimize for very particular capabilities within software engineering and how to deliver and ship like a really great product experience around that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you not want, though, the developer products for these foundation models to commoditize? Because then you gain leverage. If Anthropics and Claude continues to be so much better than it is, their leverage is gone. Do you not want that commoditization?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, look, I mean, I think it's. To be honest, I mean, I think whether we want it or not, it seems like folks are pushing ahead in the foundation model space and making a ton of progress. We've seen a lot of launches even in the last week or two. Right? I mean, there's Kimi and Grok and a ton of great progress that's been happening. And I think that is the natural way of things, which is there will be competition in that layer and I think some folks will especially in Particular verticals and use cases be able to establish differentiation. There will be competition in our layer and then some folks will be able to establish differentiation. As this equilibrium develops, I think it is just naturally the case that folks in these layers want to collaborate and figure out the right ways to work together. As long as that holds, why would.

[Harry Stebbings]

Anthropic want to collaborate when they could just own it? Sorry, I'm a vc, so I'm naive.

[Scott Wu]

No, no, of course, of course. I love it. Hitting me with all the hard questions. Look, I think the answer at the end of the day what we focus on is very, very different. The kinds of questions that we think about, for example, on both the dev and the windsdurf side, by the way, is how should humans and AI work together to produce code? It's one thing to just kind of solve for generally smarter and smarter base models, it's another thing to teach your specific model. All right, here's how to go to Datadog and pull up the logs for this thing. And here's how you debug a front end live. And here's our representation of the code base which we're learning and iterating over time and so on. There are a lot of different verticals to work in and to solve for. I think we have parts of this equation and I think the foundation labs have parts of this equation. But I think the truth is you really need both.

[Harry Stebbings]

You preface that one with you can ask the hard questions. So fuck it, it's the end of the day in the uk, so I'm using that as an excuse. What percent of your revenue goes to anthropic, do you think? Ballpark.

[Scott Wu]

I have to pass on that one.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's like with children, you know, where they'll push and they'll see how far they can go.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you speak about that progress and the incredible progress that we've seen, some think that it will take the same route as self driving cars where there is this kind of plateauing and then we'll see again another inflection point. What gives you such confidence that we will see the continual progression in models that we've seen over the last 12 months, over the next 36 months.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah. So I'll give you two thoughts there. The first thought is there's very strong signs of this continued progression, largely because, by the way, there's a lot of specific work which is, you can call it research, you can call it engineering, you can call it infra or whatever you like, but there's a lot which is Roughly that we know the techniques and we have a lot more to do to go and scale this. You know, it's RL for example, is I would say the biggest breakthrough of the last year and a half. Call it. It's crazy to think that you roughly can solve any benchmark. It sounds insane to say, but that's really what RL is converging on, which is basically if you have a clean enough set of. Here are exactly the behaviors that I want. Here are the environments that you need to be able to operate in. Here's what it means to succeed or fail. You can just train a model that does that and naturally that is just such a powerful capability which I think is going to be applied to more and more spaces. And so I think we will see that progression. The other thought I would give though, and I mean this truly sincerely, is there are a lot of spaces and a lot of different things going on in AI, in AI code. To be truly honest, if there was zero progress, the world would still be entirely different. You know, I think there are a lot of spaces that are early today that you see AI making progress. It's getting better and better and you're going to the next step and the next step in code. You are just slower as a software engineer if you're not using AI. That is the truth and it is a no brainer already today. And look, I think it will be more of a no brainer and I think we'll be able to make engineers even more efficient and you know, be able to do even more with code. But I think that is already the case.

[Harry Stebbings]

So many things to unpack there, dude. Do you think tools like Devon and others make 1x engineers? 10x engineers or 10x engineers, 100x engineers? If I were to put you in one camp.

[Scott Wu]

Interesting. It actually really does depend tool by tool. I do think that the product experiences for the 1x to 10x and the 10x to 100x or even the 0x to 1x or whatever you want to call it are somewhat different project experiences.

[Harry Stebbings]

I've interviewed Benioff at Salesforce, I interviewed Vlad at Robinhood, both very recently and they Both said that 50% of their net new code is created by AI. Would you agree with that in what you see with your customers and peers? 1 and then where will that be in three years time?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, absolutely. People often talk about the percent of code that's written. I think the obvious thing to call out is. Well, it's a little odd because for one you have to Factor in how important each line of code is, right? If it's just like a ton of proto buffs, then that's one thing versus a lot of the core business logic is another thing. And then two, of course is written with the help of AI is one thing, but how much? And so, and for those reasons we often like to think about in terms of like how much faster is an engineer using all these tools, you know, and an engineering using the best AI tools and you know, who really understands how to get value out of them. How much are they doing in one hour versus how much they would do in one hour with no access to AI. And I would say that something in that range of 1.5 to 2x feels right to me today in aggregate. Look, I think in three years there's no reason that shouldn't be a 10x. The thing that's really fun, by the way, is I think we're going to have more than 10x more code. Something I've been saying recently is I keep track of every time in my daily life where software fails me. We've become conditioned to be okay with it. But the truth is it happens all the time. You know, you think about products out there and you know, the way I like to say it is there are, I say, this top tier of products which are in some sense, like, I'll call them the best made products in the world. And I'm thinking of like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and so on. And you can really feel every little detail that they've done with a ton of care. You know, it's, they're streaming in tons and tons of data and it's always super efficient, it never goes down and it's super reliable. The algorithm basically knows you better than you know yourself. And that is like, call it like hundreds of millions of hours of engineering time, you know, that went into building that, that piece of software, right? And then you kind of go down to the next layer of the next order of magnitude of software that has tens of millions of hours spent and then single digit millions and so on, and you see the differences really quickly. I mean, when you're logging into your bank or when you're dealing with your healthcare, working with your insurance and trying to get things going, or when you're trying to go and navigate your customer list or things like that. And the truth is all the Software can be 10x better. And I think there actually is 10x more of it. And I think that's one of the fun things in code is that it really does have this Jevons paradox, when.

[Harry Stebbings]

You think about that developer efficiency. What are agents not able to do today that they really need to be able to do?

[Scott Wu]

So I think there is a real point at which agents are truly able to take over ownership, I guess is how I would describe it of the work that is done. And the way I kind of want to say it is like, look, I think in the future we will get to a point where you're not looking at your code, you know, you're looking at your product. Right. And you're looking at your product. And at the end of the day, code, software engineering, this whole thing is just telling your computer what to do. And code is the language that your computer happens to speak. And that's why we all have to learn how to write code in order to do it right. But I think over time, yeah, you get to the point where you can just say, yeah, like this website, you know, let's add a new tab here and you know, let's put this, this and that information and maybe let's go collect this, this info from the user and we'll save it in the database this way. And you know, this button should be a little bit rounder and you're just able to make those calls and make all those decisions. And I think we'll still call it programming, but I think it's going to transition into being more of like a technical architect, a technical product manager, someone who's really owning these decisions. Agents have to get to the point where they are basically that high touch and that kind of understanding of context that you can give them that level of instruction and they'll just go and do that.

[Harry Stebbings]

In a world like that, what skills become more valuable, what skills become less valuable?

[Scott Wu]

Everything that you do is going to be about essentially this kind of core thing of deciding what is the solution you're going to build, what is the problem that we're facing, what is the solution that we want to build? How exactly do we want to architect that solution? And I think that's going to be the most important skill.

[Harry Stebbings]

There's so many things I want to ask. I do just want to get back before I forget it. You said about the 1 1/2 x more efficient and more productive.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think we are struggling now in a value chasm gap? And what I mean by that is how much do you charge for Devon today per seat? Average.

[Scott Wu]

So it's all usage based. It's essentially by the hour. We try to make things so that they're about 10x cheaper than basically the value of your time.

[Harry Stebbings]

Because if you think about, say, a software engineer being 300 grand a year, give or take 150k, then would be that 0.5x that you are adding.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are these tools going to be sufficiently paid for the value creation that they are enacting?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, value creation is a beautiful thing. And to this point, by the way of where does the value accrue in AI that we were talking about earlier? There are 30 million software engineers in the world. We're going to make them all 10x more efficient over these coming years. We're going to be writing 10x more code. We're going to be doing a lot here. And I think that we could talk about whether it's 5% or 10% or 20% or 30% of the value that actually gets collected by the companies doing this. But honestly, I think the highest order bid is actually less that and more about getting the technology and building the products to a point where everyone is going a lot faster with them.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you look at something that no one sees, that everyone should see, when you think about the future of AI code and the future of software engineering, what does no one talk about that you think more people should be talking about?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, a focus on deep context. It's already better than us, honestly, at these sandbox problems. A lot of the tough questions that we answer today are things like, well, there's this project that we're trying to do today, and it's very similar to what somebody else actually asked Devin a month ago. How do we use that knowledge and kind of improve on that in order to make Devin smarter? Or there's these little things of, like, you want to go test the front end for your code base and make sure everything looks as expected. You should be able to understand, what is that supposed to look like? Or why is this different from what? If you find a bug, you should be able to understand how you found the bug. And that's a lot of the little detail of, honestly, I'll call it the difference between code and software engineering, which is basically working in a large, complex code base, building some intuition and some representation of all the different pieces and how they interact with each other. Learning how to use all the various tools at your disposal to actually understand what's going on and to debug and diagnose. And I think that is actually the big problem, honestly, in AI coding. And I think that's, that's the big thing that folks will work on next the thing that's fun, by the way, it's a very practical problem. You can call it a research problem. Obviously in many ways it is a research problem in terms of like how to push for these capabilities and make these things better. But it's not the kind of thing that you can solve in a sandbox. You know, it's the kind of thing that you actually really just need to think about the practicality of software engineering to get into.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said there about kind of hey, coding agents was what you saw before other people saw what no one was discussing. It's a hard one and I don't know how blunt I can be, but it felt like Devon fell out of the zeitgeist a bit. If we're honest. El Kersor and Windsurf owned consumer attention and owned the brand. Do you think that was a case that Devon just wasn't very good at marketing or do you think that was like a product misstep?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah. So it's funny because I think there's always an external perception and then there's kind of internal what's actually going on with the numbers. Without going too much into detail, what I can can say is that in the last six months between January and now, even aside from obviously the latest deal this week with Windserve, the usage of Devon has actually grown something like 5 to 10x. And that's been the case in both self serve and enterprise. I think the pattern, for what it's worth is it's really like real engineering teams that bring on Devin and they tag Devin all the time in Slack, they tag Devin in linear and so on and they kind of use it and grow it and share it that way. And so in many ways it is not the same kind of single non engineer just going and signing up for an account can immediately just build something really cool with it. People do use it that way, but it's not the majority of our usage. I think the majority is really just kind of like real teams using it. But I think the point that you're saying I think does get to I think an important thing which is that look, IDEs and the IDE experience are obviously they came and they really started working I think about a year before the agent experience really did. You know, I kind of think of agents as having taken off in the last six months or so and I think of ideas as last year when they really started to become kind of like no brainer obvious let's say in terms of the value that they provided. I think what we're kind of seeing is an artifact of that, which is that, yeah, like, folks are more familiar with IDEs because they've been around for a while. You fast forward six to 12 months from now, and I think people will be familiar with agents to the same level that they're familiar with IDES today. And I think it's a 5.

[Harry Stebbings]

10X is mega. It's fantastic. The hard thing is if you compare it to like a rat lid or a lovable. The growth is just fucking nuts. Like, I'm in loveable Scott, and I just look at the numbers and I'm like, what, what, how does that work? Is that not a fair, like, for like, comparison? If you're thinking about growth rates?

[Scott Wu]

The reason I would say that it's not also, actually, I don't even know the. The number. What are. What are their numbers over the last six months or what are the. There.

[Harry Stebbings]

They've gone from basically 0 to 80 million an hour, for what it's worth.

[Scott Wu]

Well, yeah, look, I don't want to get into exact numbers, but even with. With the Windsurf deal aside, like, not including that at all, we've done roughly that as well in the last six to eight months.

[Harry Stebbings]

I stand corrected on my consumers like guys comment.

[Scott Wu]

Which is, I think, an important point to consider, which, by the way, I think these are great companies in your eyes, obviously, I think.

[Harry Stebbings]

But then, I mean, it's a marketing problem, dude. I'm saying this to you now. I hope we can be friends. So I'm projecting forward this relationship as a friend. I would say you guys should be better at selling yourself. That's great.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, well, perhaps we should be. The great news is we've just now inherited a great marketing team and we get to do that. But the only thing I'd call out, I know Andre from jfl from Replay. I've met a lot of these folks before. I think of it as actually quite different products and businesses and so on, which to the point that we were saying earlier is, you know, there are a lot of things, a lot of different products, experiences that you can solve for and code. Right? There's like bringing a 10x engineer to 100x. There's a 1x engineer to 10x. There's, you know, someone who doesn't know how to code. And bringing them to 1X, for better or for worse, replit and lovable, to my understanding at least, are a much more consumer Y lean. Right. And perhaps that's why you hear about them more on Twitter or on YouTube. Or things like that. Whereas Devin is really, you know, it can be, it can be anywhere from startups to some of the biggest companies in the world, but it is really focused on specifically engineers, on engineering teams trying to do, to do their work and to go faster that way. Right. And so, you know, you can see this in how this is all set up. Right. Like most Devon sessions are started through, through Slack or through Linear, and Devin makes these pull requests and GitHub that you go and review and merge. And Devin works with your whole development system. Right. And learns how to get onboarded to your repo and so on. And I think that's kind of one difference there. But with that said, point taken, I take the feedback. Yeah, I think it's a very fair point.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, I'm always here to show you how to do a good tweet. After 10 years, I now know how to do a good tweet. That's all I know.

[Scott Wu]

You're the champion. I mean, you're the master at it, I was going to say. So after this, we'll talk and I want to get your tips, dude, honestly.

[Harry Stebbings]

I have so many for you with those numbers. I'm like, wow, dude, you need. Yeah. Anyway, can I ask you. My job as an investor also is to think about market makeup at an end stage because that's where value also kind of accrues in my mind. When you think about that and you think about developer, where the market shakes out, is it that cursor win, bottoms up, developer minds and Windsurf win and Cognition now win top down, large enterprise, super solid blue chip clients, is that how you think that developer market shakes out?

[Scott Wu]

I think the honest answer I would say is I think it's far too early to call on any of these. I'll give you a hot take, which is none of us are that close to the future of software engineering. And I think the future of software engineering is, look, this is going to take place over the next couple years or so, but it really is this version where we call it an IDE or a coding agent or this or that. These are the terms that we use. I think if we're being real about what we're building here and what this is all going towards, I think of this as the next generation of human computer interface is the problem that's being solved here, which is basically, as we said, code software engineering. The whole point of that is just telling your computer what to do at some point. Telling your computer what to do is not going to take place with Code, it is going to take place with you just expressing your intent. And there are a lot of things, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of capabilities, problems to solve to get there. There are a lot of interface problems to get there. But I think that is essentially what we get to, is a simple thing I would say is Tony Stark does not pull up his laptop. Tony Stark goes and talks to Jarvis. Right. I think there is a point at which you just have a very clean connection, ability to express your intent and do these things. People talk about generative ui, people talk about senior single use software and so on. At the end of the day, what it all really boils down to is you to have a very clean connection and able to just being able to tell your computer what to do, and it'll do that for you. And I think if we think about where everyone is today, like, I think there are 10 or 20 levels of what the product experience looks like until we get there. And the fun thing is every level is like two or three months. And so if you kind of just multiply that out, it means we're going to be there in like a few years, you know, if this base keeps going.

[Harry Stebbings]

I believe a common enemy is a very important thing within a company. If I were to push you, Scott, and say, hey, who is the competitor that you most look to think about respect even, who would that be?

[Scott Wu]

Jensen said this once and it always stuck with me. When you have figured out a way for your company to win that means that no one else has to lose, then you will know that you have found your path.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think he's done that? I think that's a huge amount.

[Scott Wu]

I certainly think he's done that. Nvidia is an incredible business. Jensen obviously has done quite well.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's a freaking monopoly.

[Scott Wu]

And I think his point, right, is that I think at the end of the day, there are so many different verticals to serve, there are so many different niches to own, and there are a lot of businesses which of course will work in adjacent spaces and will see things and you'll run into folks on a deal or whatever it is. But at the end of the day, people have the things that they specialize in, and I firmly believe that. I think the thing that's been fun, I think, throughout the history of cognition is for better or for worse. Maybe it's because we're insane, I don't know. But we've always had a pretty unique approach and a pretty unique view about. Here's what we think the future is going to be, here's what we want to build for and that's different from Cursor, that's different from OpenAI or anthropic themselves and how they think about these things and so on. And I think the fun thing about that is there is so much to build on code and I actually truly do think there will be more than one winner.

[Harry Stebbings]

What have you not built that you would most like to build?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, the answer I would give today, which is, I mean, the biggest thing that we've been thinking about in the last few days since this deal, is really in figuring out what is that combined experience of IDE and agent. Because I think there really is something here to what we said earlier. I think years from now all these systems will look so different and we may not even have the same terms for them. But I think in the immediate future, I think both, both IDEs and agents will be an important part of a developer's workflow. And you can imagine all sorts of things of hey, I want to go and plan out a task in the ide, I want to be able to use the intelligence and the retrieval and dev and search and read on the wiki to understand exactly what decisions I need to make or what parts of the code this is going to touch and what things I need to plan out. And then I want to be able to hand that off to an agent, have the agent go do the bulk of the work and then I'm going to go and review the code. And naturally it'd be great to review the code locally in my ide. If there's any touch up that I need to do, I can use that. I can use my NIDE tooling to go and do that. But basically figuring out what is that combined experience where you can go from synchronous to asynchronous to synchronous and be there for whatever parts need you and be able to go and parallelize and do more for the parts that don't need you. I think that's going to be a really fun question to figure out in terms of what happens with the combination of Windsurf and Devon. I think in the immediate short term, obviously, I think, I think there's a lot of Devin to run and a lot of Windsurf to run and we plan on kind of like, we certainly plan on maintaining the philosophy of both of those products, but I think kind of finding that intersection in between of how do you make it a really smooth experience to go between for the folks who use both is going to be the fun one.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, I've so enjoyed this. Yeah, it's just been a really fun conversation. I do want to do a quick fire round, if that's okay. So I'm going to say a short step. Okay.

[Scott Wu]

I have to say I'm a bit under slept and so please pardon me if I need like an extra, you know, one or two seconds for the fire run.

[Harry Stebbings]

How have you been sleeping?

[Scott Wu]

Next question. No, look, I mean, it's. We had some crazy. I see. We had some. We've had some crazy days. And I mean, Saturday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday obviously was figuring out, you know, if there was a deal to be done and making that happen. And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday has been figuring out how we bring the teams together and how we build the really great thing. And obviously, like the immediate thing is going out to the customers and letting them know, look, it's like we're here, you know, we've got the, the engineering, firepower and the work to be able to support things. We're going to make sure you guys have a super solid experience and if anything, we're going to be able to make it better even faster. And figuring out the better you even.

[Harry Stebbings]

Up leveled the engineering team. Hey.

[Scott Wu]

And long story short, not a lot of sleep this week.

[Harry Stebbings]

I love it. Okay, dude, what's one widely held belief about AI that you think is completely wrong? Wrong?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, I'll give you a take. Sam Altman had this post 10 years ago called Bubble Theory. He was basically saying this was in his YC days. And he said, you know, everyone here says that all these companies are overvalued and we're in a bubble and it's obviously fun to talk about bubbles and all, but I don't believe that. And I'm going to give you a bet. And he said it looks hilarious, by the way, when you read it in retrospect, which is like, here are the top, you know, YC companies today. And it's literally like Uber and Airbnb and like, you know, whatever. And it's like, today these are worth this much. I predict that five years from now they're going to be worth, worth 3x more. And then it's like, here are these kind of emerging mid level companies and that list was like Stripe and some of these others. And it's like, today this is worth this much. And I predict things will be up at least 3x. And he basically said, everyone says we're in a bubble. If you'd like to go and Bet on that and put your own money down. I am happy to put money on this. I have to say, in AI, I really feel this. I feel this, I think now more strongly than ever, which is over the last two years, people kind of think of it as this gen AI wave. Again, like we're saying, like lots of incremental jumps. But the truth is RL is the master, like the big story. I'd say over the last year or two in capabilities. And I think people have really underappreciated how much is possible with rl.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do people not see with RL that they should see? Because I. Candidly, I don't.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, we've had a few years of, I would call imitation learning before RL, which is. That's what went into GPT 3 and 3.5 and so on, which is basically the. You take the entire Internet and you read the whole Internet and you get a model that sounds like somebody on Reddit. It was crazy. I mean, it was obviously chatgpt, like shocked the world. And it was a huge moment for everybody. But. But yeah, you could kind of see why. Well, you know, talking like the average is not necessarily the thing that you need to do to go build a great, you know, medicine specialist or a great, you know, software engineer or any of these things. And I actually got a lot of the way there, to be fair, more than people might have guessed. But I think that the next big thing with RL is, as we said, you can take any benchmark and solve, Solve it. It's crazy to say, but. But I think the next step of that is honestly an open question for everyone in every application, which is, hey, what is the benchmark? Well, if you're, you're, you're an accountant, you know, the benchmark, I mean, in real world terms, the benchmark is roughly like, all right, you submit returns on behalf of the client and you know, if you get audited by the IRS and something comes up, then, then that was a fail for the rl. And if you don't, then you did a good job. But obviously, you know, you want to be to able to constrain it to shorter feedback cycles than that. And think about what are the ways that you can determine if an agent's work was a success or a failure. But once you have that, it turns out that you can just train agents to do all sorts of things. And that's what we've seen, by the way. I mean, we've seen folks getting gold medals and these international math competitions and things like that with AI. And the truth is that this is really hard stuff, right? And obviously you have to go and apply it to every vertical, but it's going to happen. So I guess on that point, I guess I was just going to say it's like, like you think about the companies today. There's the foundation layer companies, right? There's the application layer. There's a lot of the tooling. I would happily bet. Take all the foundation labs today, right? It's the private ones, right? There's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, there's X. Let's put in SSI. We can include thinking machines in that list as well. If you add all their evaluations today, what is that, like 500B? Something like that. I think that's going to go way up in the next five years. And then if you take all the application layer companies, I think the top ones that come to mind are, you know, there's Perplexity, there's Sierra, there's decagon, there's Harvey, there's us, there's Cursor, there's, you know, and you, you take that list of companies and today that list of companies is probably worth, I don't know, 50 to 100 billion. And I think that's going to go way up in aggregate. And obviously it doesn't mean every single company is going to go up, but I think that the value that we're going to produce is, is, is so.

[Harry Stebbings]

Massive here that you can invest in OpenAI at $300 billion or anthropic at 60 billion. Which one do you choose to invest in?

[Scott Wu]

Honestly, and I mean this sincerely, I think both are great investments.

[Harry Stebbings]

Amazing. You can put money in one.

[Scott Wu]

Oh, man. Anthropic has quadrupled their revenue since they were valued at 60 billion. So it seems like a fair one to pick.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think we will. Have you mentioned there like six in the foundation model there? Do you think we will have six? Do you not think the consolidation already begun?

[Scott Wu]

I think the consolidation happens and obviously there's Google and there's Meta. I think the consolidation happens and I think in total we probably end up with something like two to six players. Three to five seems pretty reasonable, but two, you think just two?

[Harry Stebbings]

You got ChatGPT and OpenAI on consumer and then you've got Anthropic on enterprise.

[Scott Wu]

Really, you think it's just those two?

[Harry Stebbings]

You might have like really tertiary ones. It's just like search or minor ones like your duck, Duck goes of the world. But like.

[Scott Wu]

The DuckDuckGo of AI I'm sure someone's looking forward to winning that elusive title. I think the thing is funny on consumer. I totally agree. Which is chatgpt. I mean, everyone knows just chatgpt as the term. I think there's an interesting effect which is obviously companies want choice and I think this is going to happen in a few spaces as well. Which is always a power law distribution where number one is 75% and number two is 20% and number three is 4% and everyone else combined is 1% or things like that. But I think in terms of folks, in terms of market share, let's say. But in terms of people getting there on capabilities and being able to offer something which is at least competitive enough that 4% or 20% of people would consider it, I think there is reason to believe that there will be at least a few folks that get there for the acquisition.

[Harry Stebbings]

What was the percentage between stock versus cash?

[Scott Wu]

It was a mixture of both. I probably can't comment on the exact split.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm so enjoying this constant game of like push, push.

[Scott Wu]

Well, I'm very happy to. You can ask all your. I'll push back when I need to push back.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can I be honest? I think you missed a trick with your acquisition video. I'm just gonna.

[Unknown]

I just totally.

[Harry Stebbings]

I didn't know you from shit. Okay, obviously. And I watched it and I was like, no offense, that's a bit personality less. And meeting you, you're like, I'd love to hang out with you. And you're like amazing personality, charisma. You're awesome. I think that an acquisition video could have been more like personable.

[Scott Wu]

That's fair. I agree, dude. We were in between like the lawyers all pulled an all nighter as well, going and getting this because it was like, yeah, I mean we need to get this ready to go. And there's just all the various little things of this turn and this turn. But yeah, it was in between that and in between sorting out all of the questions with the team and then we basically had like 20, 30 minutes to go Just film something real quick. Mike.

[Harry Stebbings]

Oh yeah, dude, you're on chat GPT. Write a script for an acquisition.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, I was gonna say I. I was pretty happy with the output relative to the amount of effort that was put in. But I fully agree that there was. There's more to it.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm 100% with you. My favorite bit was, funnily enough, we did have one competitor who we thought really highly of.

[Scott Wu]

Okay, hit me, hit me. With your hard question. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what did you believe in the world of AI that you have subsequently changed your mind on in the last 12 to 24 months?

[Scott Wu]

I think one thing which is it's just really started to change in the space 24 months ago actually the story was all about data and just more and more and more data. Right. And quantity of data and just figuring out how you get even more. I think that has changed a lot actually towards figuring out a small set of highly curated data for exactly the use case that you care about. And that's been a fun one. You know, I'll just give an example. We a lot of our research work we obviously can't talk about publicly, but we did share one project which was a model that we released called Kevin. And so basically kernel bench is, you know, a benchmark that involves your ability to write CUDA kernels.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm going to be honest, whoever names your products really needs to be fired. Devin and Kevin, no offense dude, like that's not very creative.

[Scott Wu]

We'll work on that, we'll work on that, that. But, but yeah, so, so, so we rolled out Kevin32B and the whole idea is basically with RL on agent trajectories on very specifically CUDA kernel, you know, agent trajectories, you can make it way better than, than the soda based models on this stuff. And this is kind of the, this is a story that we're seeing in a lot of these, which is rather than just this mass volume of data, if you have a very particular use case and a very particular behavior that you're looking for. Honestly it turns out that like a small amount of data and in exactly that vertical and you set up the environments correctly and you set up the feedback loop correctly is more what you need. So it's a lot of compute, not a lot of data I think is what we're seeing. And it's like quality of data over quantity.

[Harry Stebbings]

Would you advise a new young student to study CS today?

[Scott Wu]

Yes, absolutely. If anything I would say I'll give you my hot take. Which is the complaint that we've had all along about schools is they they're supposed to teach you CS and software engineering. You go to school and you learn about garbage collection and algorithms and architecture and everything and then you go on the job and then a lot of what you have to do is debugging JavaScript traces. And I think the thing that's kind of funny is as we said, this fundamental skill set of how you solve problems and how you think from first principles and understanding the model of a computer and understanding a lot of these kind of architectures of how does a database work or things like that. Like those are actually going to be the important things I think going forward. And so, you know, maybe one way to say it is at the end of the day like the degree in CS is more a degree in how to think. And I think that will always be valuable.

[Harry Stebbings]

Scott, I want to finish on one which is I think really important. I've so enjoyed this and I watched this actually TikTok and it said if you want to build a relationship with someone, ask them about the trait within themselves that they are most proud of or they like the most because in future interactions you're able to refer to it and it makes them feel good. I'm intrigued. What trait are you most proud of? What's your favorite trait of yourself and why?

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, that's a fun one. It's. I actually am very curious to hear your answer to this question as well. By the way. I think my answer, funnily enough is I actually would say it's like a surge, emotional calmness, I guess. I'm a very competitive person. I get very frustrated and things like that. But, but I think for. For better for worse, we've been in a lot of stressful situations as you can imagine. We've been in a lot of them in the last six days in particular. But honestly that's been the entire story of the company. It's. This is probably a bit more than average, you know, than an average week, but like not by that much. And I think the. Yeah, I think, I think for better for. I'm proud that I'm just able to stay composed in the situation.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, I love you. You're great. I think you are the most under discussed personality in this business. Like you need to do more. Like the Scott Wu brand needs to be a bigger personal brand.

[Scott Wu]

What do you suggest? I'm looking to you as the interim chief marketing officer at cognition.

[Harry Stebbings]

The thing I think that's nice with your product is actually that you fall into the Nike bucket. And what do I mean by the Nike Bucket? The Nike bucket is their success was they make you feel like a superhero. They tell you that everyone is an athlete, that even if you don't have the skills, you are able to do things you never could before. And I think that you and Devon fall into that similar bucket of human enhancement. And so I think you should tell the stories of that much better. And then I think you should also bluntly very clearly tell the story of your own growth much more deliberately. People want to be part of a rocket ship and gossip is very vicious and it happens when you don't shape the narrative yourself. If you shape the narrative, gossip doesn't really happen because I can't say you're at 20 million in revenue when you're not, you're much higher. And so don't let other people shape your narrative for you.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, no, fair enough. I think there's been a real shift, which is, I think a few months ago it's like we were like, you know, it's almost better if people don't hear that agents are working, you know, and we'd rather it that way. I think in the last few months, everyone and their mother is now trying to do agents anyway, and so we might as well, we might as well be more public.

[Harry Stebbings]

But I also think just for talent, I think for funding, I think people also just want the brand.

[Scott Wu]

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, what a fantastic guest. He put up with some pretty tough questions there, which he was not prepared for. It was an emergency podcast. He was just a fantastic personality.

[Unknown]

If you want to watch the episode.

[Harry Stebbings]

You can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC.

[Unknown]

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[Harry Stebbings]

Appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday.