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Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.

My guest today is Brian Chesky (@bchesky), founder and CEO of Airbnb and one of the great consumer founders of the last 20 years. Paul Graham coined "founder mode" based on Brian's experience running Airbnb. This conversation is about what comes after it, what he calls AI founder mode, and how it will force founders to focus even more on the details. We talk about his eleven-star exercise for finding product market fit, why your first hire should be a recruiter, and why Airbnb's $100B IPO became one of the saddest days of his life. Brian still comes across like the 17 year-old at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) who picked to study industrial design. His heroes are all artists. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs, all of whom were working the week they died because they loved what they did. Rick Rubin taught him that an artist is only an artist when they make things for themselves. Now Brian believes AI is the opportunity for all of us to do the same. Enjoy! Timestamps: 1:00 Studying Industrial Design 11:33 AI Founder Mode 17:02 Lack of Consumer AI Companies 22:10 Small Teams and Focused Problems 30:52 The Evolution from Founder to CEO 38:13 The 11-Star Experience 41:07 AI as a Canvas for Creativity 48:17 Detaching from Success 53:12 Founder-Led Moats 58:34 The Next Chapter of Airbnb 1:03:08 What Endures in the Age of AI 1:06:43 Lessons from Bodybuilding 1:10:20 The CEO's No. 1 Job 1:17:01 Activating Talent 1:20:39 The Kindest Thing