Alex
Dengler
Engineering
Recruiter
I sort of fell into recruiting. I started at an agency because I needed to pay rent, eventually ended up at Google, moved to Singapore to build teams across Southeast Asia, then London, Uber, Amsterdam, New York, and somewhere in between, I made a movie about my dad where Christian Bale (AKA Batman) played him, opened two cafés with my wife, and started a matcha company. I guess you could say I’ve never been particularly good at staying in one lane.
When I interviewed at Cognition, I told Scott: “If you’re looking for someone who’s spent the last five years doing traditional SF tech recruiting, there are far better people for the job than me. But I like to build things – and I want to help build Cognition.” And for some reason, they hired me.
Talent density. What does that even mean? Sure, you may have heard of our roster of IOI gold medalists (currently 20, for those keeping track). But at Cog, talent density shows up in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with someone’s resume.
We have professional line dancers, world-class pianists and beatboxers, Melee champions, and decorated race car drivers.
What makes Cognition Cognition is that everyone seems to have some unexpected thing they’re ridiculously good at.
For me, that means recruiting the world’s best researchers with the same tactics I used to convince Christian Bale to play my father in a movie.
One of our core values is “It’s fun being on the Avengers.” It’s silly, but true: everyone has their thing, and you’re constantly discovering another dimension to someone you already thought was impressive (like when one of our Deployed Engineers moonlighted as a pyrotechnician, using Devin to program fireworks shows across the Bay Area!).
Good hires are exceptional at what they were hired to do. But quickly, I learned “talent density” at Cognition means surrounding ourselves with people who don’t really know how to do anything halfway.
And the funny thing is, people like that tend to know other people like that. Nearly 50% of Cognition came through referrals. That still blows my mind. People here genuinely want to work with people they love working with. Their best friends, their siblings, their former co-founders… even their spouses! Entire pockets of the company have worked together, built together, or simply knew someone exceptional and convinced them to join. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
When people are this excited about the people around them, recruiting becomes something everyone does. Scott still meets every engineer we hire. He’s flown across the country to meet a candidate for breakfast. We’ve had candidates who were supposed to start somewhere else the next day spend a Sunday drinking our chef’s Hailey Bieber Erewhon smoothies with our engineers in the office – and join us instead.
In a way, it feels like college after college. Someday, all the late nights, ridiculous stories, and people around us right now will be memories.
And what a joy it’ll be to remember even this.