Wu: Cognition flew to recruit's parents' home to negotiate full-time hire
Scott Wu · Inside Devin: The AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code this year | Scott Wu · May 4, 2025 · at 1:18:19
Scott Wu, co-founder and CEO of Cognition, recounts the extreme measures Cognition took to recruit a talented MIT junior engineer whose parents wanted him to finish his degree.
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“We flew to North Carolina went straight from the airport to his parents' house, had dinner with him and his parents. We talked a lot, you know, it's a really, really nice Gujarati family. We kind of gave them some gifts and just talked to them about it and tried to understand, or it's like, what would it take and what will we need to make work? And they just said, you know, it's, it sounds like a great opportunity, but we really want our son to be able to graduate, right? And we talked that through, and we figured out a setup, basically, where he could work for us, essentially full-time, but then come in for his required classes and do what he needed to do to get the diploma, basically, but no more than that.”
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