Talent strategy: hiring former founders

Scott Wu and Russell Kaplan, co-founders of Cognition, are leading one of the fastest-growing, talent-dense AI companies. Their mission: make expert software engineering ubiquitous. What does a world of software abundance look like? How is Cognition delivering massive productivity gains inside some of the largest companies and organizations? And can AI finally modernize the broken, $100 billion government IT systems?

We discuss these and other timely topics with Scott and Russell. Scott was a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and world champion at age 17. After high school, we hired him at Addepar, where he became a top software engineer. Russell began his career as a machine learning engineer on Tesla’s Autopilot team before selling his video data company, Helia, to Scale AI. In 2023, Scott and Russell co-founded Cognition, and a year later, they shocked the technology world with the release of Devin, the first AI software agent.

We begin our conversation by discussing the incredible collection of young talent at Cognition, and why the next generation has new advantages in the AI era. Next, we catch up on Cognition’s explosive growth: Devin usage in the first few months of 2026 already surpassed all of 2025. Scott reveals that Cognition engineers no longer write code and explains how they’re able to test and ship new products faster than ever before. Then, we dive into the new era of software abundance and what it means if everyone has access to high-quality engineering, from modernizing large legacy enterprises to supercharging small businesses. We also discuss Cognition’s recent foray into government services and its work to modernize complex outdated systems. Finally, we explore the talent flywheel that has drawn so many former founders to Cognition, and why Scott and Russell believe we’re moving from Minecraft “survival mode” to “creative mode” — where the only limit to building is imagination itself.

00:00 Episode intro

01:35 Why technical talent & execution matters in AI

06:10 Do young people have an edge in the AI era?

08:26 Cognition’s rapid growth

11:55 The new era of software abundance

14:30 Cognition engineers don’t type code anymore

19:20 “Never sleep while Devin is idling”

21:25 The case for AI disinflation

23:50 How Devin generates 12X productivity gains

28:25 Cognition for government / taking on complex, broken systems

36:40 The AI race / competition with Anthropic

39:00 Forward deployed engineers?

43:40 How fast are LLMs improving?

47:10 AI-led small business explosion

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