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The Wu Tapes
The competitive programming network behind Scale, Perplexity, and Hyperliquid also produced Cognition, now hitting $445M ARR in 18 months.
What: Scott Wu, greatest American IOI gold-medalist and part of the competitive programming network that includes Scale's Alexandr Wang, Perplexity's Johnny Ho, Decagon's Jesse Zhang, and Hyperliquid's Jeffrey Yan, founded Cognition in November 2023. Devin, their autonomous AI software engineer, hit $445M ARR in 18 months while doubling usage every eight weeks, raising at $25B. Customers include US Army, Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz. SWE-Bench performance improved from 13% at March 2024 launch to 90% today.
Why it matters: Competitive programming excellence predicts AI founder success because the same skills—pattern recognition, deep CS fundamentals, seeing many moves ahead—let olympians identify model readiness 18 months before consensus and ship aggressively while others wait for perfect benchmarks, compounding leads that become insurmountable.
Decoder
- IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics): Annual international programming competition for high school students, the most prestigious competitive programming contest globally.
- SWE-Bench: Benchmark for AI coding agents measuring the percentage of real GitHub bugs they can autonomously fix without human help.
Original article
Scott Wu is the founder and CEO of Cognition, an AI agent coding lab and one of the fastest-growing companies of any kind in history. He is also known for his math prowess: Wu is the greatest American gold-medalist of all time at the International Olympiad in Informatics. His career began when he was just in second grade, when he competed in a middle-school math competition at just seven years old. This article contains an interview with Wu where he discusses his early childhood and life, AI, Cognition, humanity, his fears, and more.
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