Daniella
Grimberg

I interviewed at Cognition on a Sunday, at a house in Atherton, or what was supposed to pass as an “office”. I was there for twelve hours. They asked me to take off my shoes, then had me put them back on at least ten times so we could walk endless loops around the town while they grilled me on the hardest problems I’d ever solved. By the time I was on my way to the airport, I called my mom and remember thinking, What is this place?

Then Calvin called. “We’d love to have you join the team. Can we meet right now?” I thought being at the airport at 11 PM meant we’d just talk the next day, but I thought wrong. He showed up to SFO’s Terminal 3 to extend the offer to me in person. Is this what working at Cognition is like?

At the time, Cog was maybe 35 people. During the interview, I asked Calvin one question: What does failure look like in this role? He responded, Asking for permission. If you need to ask before you do things, you’re probably going to fail here. The classic early-stage bravado – easy to say at 35 people, much harder to sustain at scale. But eight months and 400 more people later, that directive hasn’t changed one bit.

One of my customers is in South America, where I’ve now been more than 20 times. When we started, there were five Devin users, and I was closely supporting each of them through every PR they merged. Then five users became hundreds, and eventually thousands. At that point, I had lost control – in the best possible way. I could no longer respond to every developer’s individual Whatsapp message; I had to build a system that helped thousands of people succeed without me.

So I came up with Devin Day: a day to celebrate and bring together our community of power users, ending in a competition to find the best Devin use cases. In an overexcited effort to bring our users prizes, I packed 150 shirts, 60 hats, 60 totes, and three pairs of AirPods into 4 suitcases, mixed in with my clothes, and got on a 10 hour plane.

I didn’t pause to think about logistics, customs, or any of the other operational hurdles one would expect to encounter. There was no time! We were still piecing together the event at the eleventh hour, and at one point, I even called a candidate during his onsite week (before he signed his offer) to help me book the entertainment. I told him that on his first day, when someone asked, What have you shipped?, booking a band for 500 users would be a pretty great answer. Our users went all in, even using Devin to generate videos explaining why their use case should win. Somehow, it all came together.

Since then, my scope has only gotten bigger. Across Cog, our Sales team, deployed engineers, platform engineers, and enablement team have cumulatively traveled close to 18 million miles across 30+ countries working side by side with our customers.

Watching a developer’s eyes light up when they realize they can suddenly do something they were never able to do before is what makes me, and all of us, excited to do what we do everyday. I’ve walked into a room and our power users start clapping and yelling, “Devin is here!” These are people who have spent years staring at projects they wanted to tackle but couldn’t. Suddenly, they can!

It sounds silly, but that magic hasn’t gone away. We just crossed $1B in annualized revenue, but we’re still a remarkably lean team (a few dozen customer engineers, even fewer core engineers, and an operations team that might be better described as a 5-person friend group), which means there are always more problems to solve than people to solve them.

The Cognition Champions Summit I hosted two months ago started the same way: I wanted to bring ~20 of our biggest power users together, so I pinged Calvin looking for the event-planning team. He said we didn’t have one, but that didn’t stop me. I roguely reached out to Shruti, one of our first BizOps hires, on her first week. She wasn’t an event planner either, but was equally obsessed with the idea and excited to make it happen.

Champions spanned the U.S., Canada, the UK, Spain, Brazil, and Poland, representing enterprises including Goldman Sachs, Santander, Itaú, Dell, The Access Group, AngelList, EBANX, Comarch, Intact, and DeNA.

Neither Shruti nor myself became event planners after this, but we did become great friends, and grew even more convinced of the work we do and the people we do it with. No one is ever going to hand you a perfectly scoped project or tell you exactly what to do. And because there’s so much happening, people are genuinely excited when someone sees an opportunity and just owns it (our #kudos Slack channel is always going off with everyone celebrating each other’s wins!).

We’ve long since outgrown that house in Atherton, but the feeling I had walking out after those twelve hours hasn’t changed.

Some things in life you don’t think, you just feel.