Scott Wu
Co-founder & CEO, Cognition. On 10 shows, 16 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@ScottWu46 ↗LinkedIn ↗devin.ai ↗Wikipedia ↗
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, an applied AI company known for developing the autonomous coding agent Devin. He previously co-founded the networking platform Lunchclub and won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics.
10shows
16appearances
239statements
35resolved
29supported
0contradicted
83%fully supported
76said about them ↓ Everything Scott Wu said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wu: Using venture capital to undercut AI rivals is a smart bet
“And so fundamentally they sh they're using capital as a weapon to kill competitors. To gain market share and they'll figure it out down the line. And I think that's like, honestly, it's a pretty good bet in this moment.”
Wu: Usage-based software companies must meter out performance optimizations to protect revenue
“Add a company that's a user-based company, take like a snowflake. That engineer is not allowed to ship that optimization. Why? Because basically if you decrease the cost of computation by 50% overnight, suddenly your revenue on your like one of two, you know, …”
Wu: Fewer than 10,000 researchers drive the vast majority of AI progress
“Somewhere in between those two is right. You know, I think there are at least a hundred folks that, that, that, that are, that really matter in making a lot. A lot of differences. Certainly less than 10,000 and probably a good bit less than that, if I had to g…”
Wu: AI application layer talent competition is fiercer than at foundation labs
“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.”
Wu: AI will make software engineers 10x faster within three years
“Look, I think in three years, there's no reason that shouldn't be a 10 X.”
Wu: AI will make 30 million global software engineers 10x more efficient
“There are thirty million software engineers in the world. You know, we're going to make them all 10 X more efficient over these coming years. We're going to be writing 10 X more code.”
Wu: Future software engineering will replace coding with expressing intent
“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.”
Wu: Private AI foundation labs will far exceed $500B aggregate valuation
“If you add all their valuations today, what is that? Like, 500 B, something like that? I think that's gonna go way up in the next five years.”
Wu: Anthropic has quadrupled its revenue since reaching a $60B valuation
“Well, Anthropic has quadrupled their revenue since they were valued at sixty billion, so it seems like a fair one to pick.”
Wu: The AI foundation model market will consolidate to two to six players
“I think the consolidation happens, and I think in total we probably end up with something like Two to six players.”
Scott Wu Denies Windsurf Was a Shell, Retained Product and Team
“Obviously there were all these stories breaking out on Twitter and everything going on and people were saying, well, you know, the thing that's left is just a shell. And we looked at it and we said, well, actually, I don't know if that's right. You know, it's …”
Wu: Reinforcement learning will eventually beat any benchmark with a clear feedback loop
“I think the natural conclusion of RL, which is what we're kind of getting to, is you basically can solve any benchmark, which is insane to think about... Which means like, if you have a clean set of environments, if you have a good feedback loop to decide what…”
Wu: Devin routinely delivers 6x to 20x efficiency gains for enterprise customers
“We pretty routinely see spots where we can make things like anywhere from six X to 20 X more efficient.”
Wu: Within five years, software engineering will just be describing what to build
“And I think that's kind of what we're going to get to over the next, I'll call it like five or so years is a point where Software engineering. We might even still call it software engineering or programming or whatever, but it's, it really is just you telling …”
Wu: Students should still study computer science despite AI coding advances
“People ask me all the time, you know, it's my son or daughter is, 16, you know, should they even be studying computer science? And I always say, yeah, absolutely. And I think the reason is because these are, you know, the concept level things that actually all…”
Wu: Lowering barrier to coding will drastically increase total software built
“And I think we're going to see something similar here where it's, you know, imagine, imagine the w w w what we will do, you know, when we get to the point where everyone can just build products and websites and apps and whatever it is of that level of quality …”
Wu: The duration of autonomous AI coding tasks doubles every three months
“And the crazy thing is over the last like three, four years, that number has basically, it's doubled approximately every three months.”
Wu: Raw intelligence is no longer the bottleneck in AI
“I think what it kind of shows, I would say is actually, I think we're at a point now where intelligence actually isn't the bottleneck, if that makes sense. You know, I think these models are capable of solving some really, really hard problems.”
Wu: Aspiring engineers should absolutely still learn to code
“And first of all, the question of, you know, whether you should still learn the code, my answer would be absolutely yes. I think to a large extent, you know, computer science, when you take computer science classes and when you learn these fundamentals, sure, …”
Wu: 10x engineering speed will yield over 10x more code
“I think in a kind of zero sum view, you might say, well, we're gonna be 10 times faster at software engineering, and so it means that we're gonna need 10 times fewer software engineers, right? But I think in practice, what really is gonna happen is actually, w…”
Wu: Agentic workflows will unlock 200% to 1,000% software engineering gains
“I think we're going to shift more and more towards this agentic workflow because, you know, that's in some ways it's kind of like that the way to really get to that, you know, 200%, 500%, a thousand percent gains that, that, that, that we'll be getting to with…”
Wu: Generative AI challenges traditional startup advice on niche focus
“One of the, I would say the most common pieces of startup advice out there, I would say is, you know, focus on a really niche cohort, you know, do things that don't scale, you know, make, make, make one use case that's really great. And then you grow from ther…”
Wu: Developers will eventually modify products directly instead of viewing code
“I think the one that we'll get to over the course of several years is probably something where you don't even look at the code at all. And you're actually just looking at your own product and you're just able to look and specify and say, Hey, you know, This bu…”
The other half of the tape: Scott Wu's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 74 times in 34 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Senra 15John Coogan 9Molly O'Shea 6CJ Desai 5Harry Stebbings 4Dylan Patel 4Joe Lonsdale 3Rory O'Driscoll 2
Statements about Scott Wu, by other people (2)
Staniszewski: Cognition can become one of the future hyper AI companies
“Well, Scott, I think they should build independent company too. I think they have an opportunity to be one of the hyper AIs of the future or however you call the hyper clouds of the future.”
Partovi: Neo flew out parents of Neo Scholars for a weekend event
“This year, We actually created a, an event called parents weekend, where we flew out the parents of the neo scholars all for like a weekend long of like talks by Scott Wu from cognition and other, you know, other people who, whether they dropped out or started…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
TBPN 28
David Senra 15
Sourcery 11
20VC 6
Latent Space 4
No Priors 4
American Optimist 3
the a16z Podcast 21 more shows
2026 45 mentions in 18 episodes 3 per episode
- Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
- Hyperscalers Are Out of Capacity? | MongoDB CEO · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- SpaceX-Cursor Deal, ChatGPT Images 2.0, Fake Bear Scam | Diet TBPN
- OpenAI Cracks Navier-Stokes, Tech Trailers, AI Jobs Apocalypse on Hold | Diet TBPN
- NVIDIA Crushes Quarter | OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor | Instinct Hits $2.5B Valuation
- Stripe's $8B OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600B in Revenue?
- Jake Paul on Going From YouTube to Boxing to Investing | a16z ft. Anti Fund
- Building a Power Company for the Next 50 Years | Zach Dell, Base Power
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 19 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- No Priors Ep. 127 | With SemiAnalysis Founder and CEO Dylan Patel
- ELON MUSK's New Grok 4 Is Here! - We Break it Down
- Weekly Recap: Casey Neistat, OpenAI Cracks Math, The Future of ChatGPT, Apple x F1, Intel Layoffs
- Weekly Recap: Grok 4 Launch, Texas Floods, Web Browser War, Top Signals, Meta Smart Glasses
- AI to AE's: Grit, Glean, and Kleiner Perkins' next Enterprise AI hit — Joubin Mirzadegan, Roadrunner
- Wednesday’s Diet TBPN
-
Dan Sundheim of D1 Capital on the art of public market investing - Lovable CEO, Anton Osika: The State of Foundation Models, Grok vs OpenAI, and Replit vs Bolt · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Scott's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 1 | 35 | 100% 5/5 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| AMERICAN OPTIMISTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 3 | 34 | 63% 5/8 | full record on American Optimist → |
| CHEEKY PINTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 1 | 32 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Cheeky Pint → |
| a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 1 | 29 | 100% 4/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 4 | 27 | 100% 2/2 | full record on TBPN → |
| DAVID SENRALEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 1 | 22 | 75% 3/4 | full record on David Senra → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 1 | 19 | 100% 5/5 | full record on 20VC → |
| SOURCERYLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 1 | 16 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Sourcery → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 1 | 15 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Latent Space → |
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cognition | 2 | 10 | 100% 1/1 | full record on No Priors → |