The Exchanges

Q I mean, so on this topic, Christian Garrett, I asked him for some questions. One 37. They're big fans. They talked about you in their interview we just did with them, um, with Justin Fishner-Wolson. Um, they're great. So Christian, Christian asks, why do enterprises want third party providers or open source and won't solely rely on the labs, thus their coding tools?

A Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think several reasons. Um, I think first of all, uh, Obviously, the way enterprises work is they want to have long-term partnerships, and frankly, it's just hard to know what's going to happen in the long term, right? Like, who, who even is going to have the best model in six months, or 12 months, or, or whatever, and, and I mean, I think that's very reasonable, you know, like, you don't want to teach all of your engineers, or your entire team, how to use one particular suite, and one particular product, and then find out, oh, actually, it's Turns out people aren't using this one anymore because everyone says this other one is better or something, right? Um, but I think the other reason that it's important, too, is because, as we said, you know, I think for every company or for every team, like, what they care about is, is not how many tokens they're using, it's how much value they're driving, right? And I think it's very important for there to be, um, a, a player that is going and helping them drive all that value and, like, turning that into reality, right? And I, I think in practice it's, um, You know, how, how you organize your teams, how you think about planning, how you think about specs or design, how you do user research. All of these things should be different in the era of AI, right? It's not as simple as like, you know, Throw the tool over the w…

AI assessment note: “who even is going to have the best model in six months”

Q into a single stack. With agentic finance built in. AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens, and close your books in minutes. That's why Sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. What was it like merging the teams together?

A Yeah, um, no, that was a real process, and by the way, one of the things that was tricky about that process is cognition at the time was all of 35 or 40 people, um, and we had a meaningful business with, you know, real traction. We were doing, um, in the range of 70 or eighty million of revenue run rate at the time, um, but it was a very small team. Windsurf, on the other hand, um, because it had kind of, like, scaled up go-to-market and, and set all that up, it was, um, around 200 people at the time. Um, and so, uh, a lot of details to figure out, obviously, and so for, for a few months, I mean, the immediate day of, or week of, all of us were just like, okay, let's just like, right the ship, you know, let's make sure folks know, you know, customers know that we're gonna be there for them, we're gonna be shipping, we're gonna be like, um, you know, taking care of both sides of the product and doing that well, right, and let's just go and deliver. Um, over the first few months, obviously, a lot of it was just like, figuring out how we, um, How we kind of get into a good state, and then, you know, as with all things, it's kind of like, it's much easier to go build these things and do all this, you know, with, with some time. Um, and so, um, you know, we had a lot of little, like, kind of, like, fun offsites, uh, which helped, I think, for people getting to know each other. Ton o…

AI assessment note: “cognition at the time was all of 35 or 40 people”

Q Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army. And you've raised over 2.5 billion to date at a last valuation of twenty six billion. I want to go back in time because cognition played a pretty big role In a redemption story of a company called Windsurf. So, can you bring us back to that moment and how M&A has played a role in the growth?

A Yeah, it's a fun time. I mean, it was all of 11 months ago. Um, but, um, so we, um, and by the way, it's quite topical because I think recently, you know, there's similar news with Cursor. Um, Uh, you know, we at the time kind of heard this news roughly around the same time as everyone else that, hey, this company, Windsurf, which is building a really great IDE, um, that a lot of folks used, individuals, companies, and so on, um, the, some of the team was going to Google, right, and so there was kind of like, uh, you know, uh, acquihire deal almost where, where a number of the researchers on that team were going to Google, right, and there was a company kind of behind, um, that, uh, Um, you know, that still had all the customers, that still had a ready-to-go go-to-market team, a lot of the platform engineering, the product itself, you know, all the details there. Um, but obviously it kind of like, you know, was, was trying to figure out what to do. And that was announced that Friday afternoon. And, you know, we at Cog, at Cognition, we were talking about that internally, and we were kind of, kind of joking about it at first, like, kind of interesting, like, is there, um, and then, you know, as we actually thought about it seriously more, we were like, actually, this is really interesting for us, because, you know, if you think about where we're at, like, you know, we've always …

AI assessment note: “we at the time kind of heard this news roughly around the same time”

Q How did you work through the product integration?

A I mean, it was, it was a lot of steps, for sure. Um, no, I, I mean, I think the, um, One way I'd put it is like, you know, not trying to overly force it, um, and so, you know, for the time being, it was like, there's a Windsurf product, there's a Devon product, both those are great, let's work on both of those, and kind of do the obvious, like, next steps on, on each of these things, um, and then as we kind of had pieces of overlap, just like naturally building them in together, and so it wasn't like, uh, you know, one month later, Windsurf is gone, and that's it, you know, It was like, over the course of the last year even, we've been building all these things, and now it's kind of like, you know, Devon Cloud and Devon Desktop are like, super, super, like, nicely paired together. You can start sessions from one and hand them off to the other. You can work with them all in the same systems, whatever, right? Um, but, but, but it was much more of a gradual thing, and I think, um, One of the things that was interesting for us was a lot of the users of either product were kind of already naturally looking for the other side, right? And so we had a ton of people, for example, who were on the IDE framework, and obviously, you know, right around this time, they were talking about late 25, early 26, is right around when these, these, like, asynchronous agents were really starting to ge…

AI assessment note: “as we kind of had pieces of overlap, just like naturally building them in together”

Q Did you ever think you'd be growing this fast?

A It's a good question. So, what I always think about with this is, I think on the one hand, I think relative to businesses, and, and by the way, it's, it's, it's not just us, it's like our customers have seen this where, similar to our customers in the last six months or so, I've also grown their usage in something in the range of like, 11 to 12 acts, and, um, um, of, of Devin. Um, and, um, the, the way I'd say it is, yeah, on the one hand, I think you, You just, like, think about businesses in the past, you think about the growth of all these tech companies in history, and obviously, it's pretty crazy. Um, on the other hand, you know, when I kind of asked the, the, the question, um, like the first principle of the question, okay, How many people are using coding agents now? How much are they using it for? How much are they getting out of it? Versus like, what do we think they're going to be using and how much of it are they going to be using in, you know, three years or something? I think the rough answer, especially if you look, you know, if we rewind a bit like a year ago, the rough answer a year ago was roughly zero, and the rough answer for, you know, two, three years from now is roughly every software engineer in the world, and probably a lot more than all the Just the software engineers because I think a lot more people will be able to produce code and produce products an…

AI assessment note: “when you take those two points on the curb and you just extrapolate”

Q So why were you guys in D.C. for Independence Day, and what's the D.C. play here?

A Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, I mean, it's, um, look, I think it's like a really, um, obviously it's a really topical thing right now, and I think especially because code is, I think in some ways, like, you know, the, the most kind of, like, mature vertical. I think a lot of folks look to code as kind of like a, an expectation of what's gonna happen in, The rest of the industry and all these verticals, and yeah, I, I think there's been a narrative out there that, oh, like, in order to win, you have to be a lab yourself, or you have to go sell to a lab, and obviously, like, we've just always believed that because there's a lot of value and a lot of power in being independent, um, and you see that in how we work with all, like, you know, we're, we, we're, we're completely model neutral, like, we work with all the different providers, we work with OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, um, Google, so on and so forth. Um, but, but also just like in, in our approach with, with companies and so, um, or, or, or with all the orgs that we work with. So DC, um, um, DC is really exciting for us for a couple reasons. I think one because, um, frankly it's like, you talk about places that need software and that have, you know, things that they want to build but not enough software engineers to build them. DC and, and, and, and government in general might perhaps be the single biggest kind of point of that…

AI assessment note: “places that need software and that have, you know, things that they want to build”