Scott Wu

It's kind of there's so many unicorns and so many huge, fast-growing companies today that it's obviously difficult to predict what's gonna be relevant in the future.

But, uh, some names that stood out from our reporting and our discussions were Scott Wu at Cognition.

Um, he's been described to me as the nerd-in-chief of Silicon Valley.

[laughs]

That's up from just $26 billion in May and $10 billion back in September.

Founder Scott Wu was inspired to start Cognition on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI.

In just two and a half years, he's created nearly $50 billion in wealth from scratch.

Ask yourself this, what have you accomplished in the last 30 months? RADAR RAPIDFIRE If you don't like human voices, then you're gonna love Eleven Labs, the voice AI company that builds tools for generating and cloning human speech.

Following SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor for 60 billion, there were rumors that they would pursue Cognition as well.

CEO Scott Wu strongly denied the chatter at the time, and this fundraising round certainly gives Cognition more runway to continue building their coding agent Devin and pursuing their thesis.

In an announcement post, they wrote, "We're still at the dawn of the self-driving software era.

In this next chapter, agents will become proactive by default, software will improve itself, and even resource allocation will become intelligent as compute budgets self-allocate towards the highest impact use cases.

Remember, last year was the year of the IMO gold medals from both Google, DeepMind, and OpenAI.

We talked to Scott Wu about this, who's coming on the show later today.

Huge raise for cognition.

Scott made the prediction on TBPN early in 2025 that he believed that artificial intelligence would be able to achieve gold at the IMO, the International Math Olympiad, in 2025, and he was right.

Um, I mean, we also have Greg Brockman joining the show, so we'll ask him about advances in math, what's going on with Navier-Stokes, the back and forth there.

He's joining at 1.10 p.m. Pacific, so stay tuned.

And we have Scott Wu as well, who is an IMO gold medalist and a fantastic mathematician.

He can, of course, comment about this because he, at Cognition, is in a unique position of both being incredible at math, but also like... cognition's whole business is not in the theoretical math space.

I mean, if you're not shipping, and this was the cognition.

Remember when that went, what's his name, the CEO? Scott Wu.

Yeah, when he hired Windsurf and fired up the people, he's like, we have to work seven days a week at our company.

I'm sorry, right? It's just, and the folks that can't do it, it's not all the amount of hours you work, but you have to be out accelerating your competition in terms of the rate at which you ship software because they're all gonna be compound startups.

JP Morgan is not going to increase its software purchase budget 10x.

So the other thing that's going to happen is, if everyone is making software more quickly, And there's some expansion in the software spend from end customers, which I agree, but not nearly as much as the expansion in production.

Then Jason Vision is correct, and Scott Wu was right.

I want to bring it back to your question, Harry.

What, what if the whole thing just doesn't work at all? But you know, I think that's a risk you have to take.

I just talked to Scott Wu from Cognition, and you know, he, they're throwing all kinds of crazy money at him.

You know, and just this huge, like, a million people are trying to acquire him a- as a person or the entire company, and his whole thing is like, "Yeah, but this is, like, the biggest opportunity of my life." He's like, "I couldn't live with myself if I didn't at least try."

Yeah.