Michael
Beyne

Early on at Cognition, our Head of Employee Experience noticed someone spending a lot of time hanging around the coffee bar with me. She laughed and said she was impressed: he was one of our founders, and apparently one of the hardest people in the company to get time with. I had no idea. We’d just been talking over coffee.

That’s what I’ve always loved about coffee. You can walk into a room knowing nobody and already have a reason to talk to someone. I’ve built a lot of my life around that.

“Head of Coffee at an AI company” was never on the career plan. I got my first barista job in college in Iowa and pretty quickly fell into the community around it. I remember going to a barista competition and watching people from different coffee shops, restaurants, and bars show up for each other. I was brand new, but I already knew: Oh, I want to be part of this.

That feeling took me through opening a shop with a friend, roasting, wholesale, and eventually working for a coffee company based in Berlin. That job involved a lot of travel, but I kept finding myself in San Francisco. Eventually, one introduction led to another, and I met the Cognition team.

From behind the bar, you get to watch a lot of the company happen. People visit from Japan, Singapore, London, and all around the world, and sometimes I get to watch teammates meet in person for the first time! Someone stops by for a coffee, somebody else joins, and suddenly there’s a little group hanging around. The coffee gets everyone there, but pretty quickly, the conversation becomes about everything else. It’s so special.

The coffee bar travels with them, too. Someone will Slack me from Amsterdam or Tokyo asking where to get coffee. A few days later, they’re back with a bag they found, and we’re brewing it for everyone at the bar. I love that someone can discover something halfway around the world and think, I should bring this back for the office.

When people hear I work in “corporate”, they imagine a lot of mundane coffee orders. Honestly, it’s the opposite. People here want to try everything. We change roasters and coffees regularly, and people come up every morning asking what’s on pour-over, where it came from, and what’s different about it. Just when we learn someone’s usual, they surprise us with a request for something new.

Everyone here shares that curiosity, and that’s what makes Cog a pretty great place. You can care deeply about something very specific, and someone will happily spend a couple minutes asking you questions about it.

That dedication goes both ways. People find ways to bring what they do into my world, too. One engineer used Devin to build “Club Coffee,” an app where people can order their favorite coffee from their desks and get notified when it’s ready to pick up. Game changer.

People come to the bar deep in a problem, excited about something they just shipped, or grabbing a coffee before getting back to a project they can’t put down. I like knowing the coffee bar is where people come to fuel up and head back to what they’re excited to build.

The company and my team have grown enormously since my first day, but what means the most are the friendships that started across the bar. That’s what has kept me in coffee all these years: I care about getting the espresso right, but it’s the people and how they make you feel that stay with you.

I came to Cognition to build the world’s best coffee program. Somewhere along the way, it became a place that felt like home. And now, I get to help make it home for others, too.