20VC: Cognition CEO Scott Wu on Acquiring Windsurf: The Process, The Deal, The Rationale | Did Google Overlook a Goldmine in the Core Asset and Did Founders Leave a Sinking Ship | How Cursor and Cognition Deal with Ever Increasing Reliance on Anthropic

Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the world’s first AI software engineer. On Friday last week they pulled off the acquisition of the year, acquiring Windsurf, following their licensing agreement with Google. Previously a world-class competitive programmer, he was a gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a member of the U.S. Math and Physics Olympiad teams. Before Cognition, he was a founding engineer at Scale AI, helping shape the early AI infrastructure stack.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Why are founders walking away instead of going down with the ship?

01:05 – How did Cognition pull off the $220M Windsurf deal in just 72 hours?

04:45 – What really happened behind closed doors the weekend Windsurf was acquired?

07:15 – Did Google overlook a goldmine in the Windsurf team and IP?

09:00 – Who are the 100 people that secretly shape the future of AI?

12:30 – Can application startups ever gain leverage over foundation model giants like Anthropic?

14:15 – Is coding about to be replaced by simply describing what you want?

17:30 – 50% of new code is AI-written. Where does that go next?

20:45 – “We’ve gone from 0 to $80M ARR in 6 months. Quietly.”

25:00 – Are IDEs and agents just the training wheels for the real future of software engineering?

28:20 – If you could only back one—OpenAI or Anthropic—who’s the better bet?

30:00 – Why has Cognition kept its insane growth a secret… until now?