Nick
Wong

For the last few years, I’ve been starting companies. Most recently, my cofounder Mary and I were building a compliance implementation services company. It was profitable, we had paying customers, and I had committed to running it. So when friends at Cognition began urging me to come work with them, it wasn’t even a question: That makes no sense. I have a company to run.

Then, within a few days of each other, both Stephen Cornwell (an FDE) and Calvin (VP of Customer Engineering) mysteriously booked time to “catch up.” They told me to try Devin. Calvin suggested Cognition could acquire my company – and that the team I would join was full of former founders. Today, 130+ people across the company are former founders.

That got my attention.

Being a founder is romanticized from the outside. From the inside, I’ll say firsthand, it can be incredibly lonely and stressful. The idea of working alongside people who had also seen behind the curtain, who understood what it felt like to be responsible for every problem, whether or not it belonged to you, was deeply appealing.

After meeting other former founders at Cog, I realized joining wouldn’t mean giving that up.

Soon, Mary and I found ourselves walking up the large stairs of the SF office for our first day.

My title is Special Projects Engineer, which naturally raises the question: What am I expected to do? The best answer I’ve found is: find problems and solve them.

So I started looking for problems.

One became obvious almost immediately. More people across Cognition were starting to use Devin to build internal tools, and that energy was exactly what we wanted: anyone, technical or not, could spot a problem and use Devin to solve it! But as those tools began touching sensitive company data, we needed a secure environment to build and deploy them with the right guardrails.

So I asked, Who should own building that environment? Picture three engineers pointing at one another like the Spider-Man meme. We had brilliant people tackling different parts of the problem, but ownership was fragmented. As we scaled, we needed to bring those efforts together and think about security holistically.

I had found my problem.

The easiest response would have been to slow everyone down, lock down access, add layers of approvals, and essentially become public enemy #1. But as a founder, I refused to accept the usual tradeoff between moving quickly and building safely.

That led me to build Devin’s Playground: a secure environment where anyone at Cognition can use Devin to build and deploy internal apps with the right protections already in place. People could keep experimenting and solving problems without putting sensitive company information at risk (everything from CogHub, our Devin-native company intranet, to a coffee-ordering app, the Cog merch store, and recruiting tools!).

Playground solved an internal need, but it also revealed something much bigger. The same agentic capabilities that introduced entirely new security questions could also help solve them. Devin could investigate vulnerabilities, determine whether they were actually exploitable, and fix them. Lo and behold, a couple of experiments later, Devin for Security was born.

What started with me asking who owned an internal tools environment has grown into now leading much of our work across security and governance products (if you also obsess over infrastructure and platform primitives, join me!).

Security has a reputation for being rigid and overly serious. But that balance is one of my favorite things about Cog: we don’t take ourselves nearly as seriously as we take the work.

One night, in honor of one of our bald sales leaders, everyone changed their Slack photos to bald versions of themselves – including our CEO, Scott. Slack group chats have never been more confusing. That same energy carries into my favorite Cognition tradition: Funky Friday, when the office commits to an increasingly specific theme each week (we nominate options in #funky-fridays each week and then vote as a company!).

The person to my right is Mary, my co-founder, and now, my wife! Talk about working with people you love (and there are actually two other Cog couples at the company).

The day after our wedding, we went straight to the company offsite on a ranch, where the team surprised us with celebrations and we spent the weekend line dancing with our coworkers. Best honeymoon ever.

Many of my closest friends were already here when I joined, and now I have even more. Sometimes I have to remind myself that they’re technically my coworkers!

I joined Cognition to keep building like a founder without having to build alone. The ownership, intensity, and magic stayed the same – it just became a little less lonely.