His house had no family photos, only math trophies
His mother hung every trophy he and his brother won, and pointed at everyone else's.
David Senra · Building The World's First AI Software Engineer | Cognition’s Scott WuThe walls in Scott Wu's childhood home did not hold pictures of his parents. They held old math competition trophies.
Scott Wu, who grew up to co-found the startup Cognition, maker of the AI software engineer Devin, remembers coming home from contests with his brother with another heavy trophy in hand. His mother took each one and put it up on the mantelpiece, where the family would see it every day. It was deliberate. Education mattered to her, and so did being the best, and the house was supposed to show it.
That decorating choice was a lesson in how winning worked in the Wu family. His mother's rule was that other people's trophies were the ones you wanted, and you had better replace them with your own. She would even "put up pictures of other people's trophies," Scott said, and tell her sons to replace them with their own.
She could set that standard because she lived it. When asked whether his mother was the most competitive person in the family, Scott said "she was definitely the most salty," which in his definition means she took offense at the idea of losing. Growing up, she had played on her school ping pong team and studied math, but her drive was more about personality than about any one pursuit.
She turned the same certainty on her sons. When Scott was still tiny, long before he had won much of anything, she told him he was extremely talented and that he was the best. She believed in whatever he wanted to try, and she stayed proud and vocal about it as the math contests piled up.
The interviewer contrasted that with patterns he said he had read about in biographies of famous founders, where fathers told their sons they were worthless or would never amount to much, giving them an inner fire to prove their fathers wrong. Scott's mother belonged to the opposite school. She told him he was special early and gave him confidence before there was evidence.
She kept showing that confidence the same way, by hanging every trophy he and his brother earned on the mantelpiece.
Questions people ask
Who is Scott Wu now?
Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition, a startup whose product Devin acts as an AI software engineer that can take on coding tasks end to end. He grew up competing in math and programming contests and later decided to build AI that could do much of that building work itself.
What is a math competition trophy, and how do kids win them?
In school math contests, students solve timed problems individually or as teams, advancing from local meets to regional, state, national, and international rounds. Top scorers receive medals, trophies, or invitations to the next level. For serious competitors, the season works much like a sport, with rankings, training, and rivalries.