Salima
Ghadimi

I joined Cognition when we were ten people. My introduction to the company was a phone call in the middle of the night telling me to go to an apartment in Manhattan. The address was said once and never texted to me, so I had to remember it and hope I showed up at the right place.

There were shoes everywhere and 20 people running around inside. I couldn’t tell who worked there, who lived there, or who was interviewing – and no one knew who I was either. Eventually, someone said, “Oh, you’re the new person. We need your help,” handed me a Ramp card, and that was my onboarding.

It was the day of the Devin demo launch. At my first stand-up, Steven Hao, now our CTO, asked, “Wait, who are you?” I introduced myself, and we moved directly into the question we still ask every new hire on their first day: What have you shipped today? The message was clear: even on your first day, you could have an outsized impact here.

Within my first week, our landlord tried to evict us. We made an emergency move into a penthouse a block away, loading our laptops onto a hotel luggage cart and wheeling them down 57th Street. That penthouse became our next office, which we shared with a real estate company and several barking dogs.

My role became to do whatever needed doing. As Cog grew, I eventually had to decide where I could make the biggest difference. I worked on our first contracts, onboarded customers, thought through pricing, and spent more and more time with our sales team. I started to fall in love with GTM – not just the act of selling, but everything it takes to earn a customer’s trust and make them successful.

That became the obvious next chapter for me.

That mindset of maximizing impact for the customer has shaped Cog from the beginning, and has become a core company value. Our engineers and researchers fly to meet our customers (one of them was so impactful, she got offered a job there! Thankfully, she didn’t take it). Our sales team encourages new product features. Even our ops & people teams work backward from the customer, opening offices for our growing markets in London, Singapore, Japan, and Sao Paulo in weeks notice.

My favorite example of this is Ryan Bai, who joined Cognition straight out of high school, and has quickly become a favorite engineer among our customers! He’s worked directly with 20+ customers and led the engineering behind our AI Productivity Guarantee, turning their feedback and usage data into an AI system that estimates Devin’s output in human-equivalent engineering hours. Ryan also happens to have an incredible fashion sense, defined by the iconic red hoodie he wears daily (don’t worry, he has a few he rotates between).

Take Joey Goret, an incredible sales rep who has also stepped in as our interim recruiting coordinator. Or Jack Meigel, a Deployed Engineer who helps tens of thousands of developers at major financial institutions and still spends half his time interviewing candidates. That sense of shared responsibility to be the best, and in turn recruit the best, is what I love about Cog. And nowhere is it more visible than in our New York office.

New York grew out of our early sales culture, so there’s plenty of rah-rah energy (our pull-up bar competitions tend to spark a lot of excitement in #gymnition!), and it’s only getting rowdier. I’ve watched the office grow from a handful of us working wherever we could find space to nearly 90 people squeezed into a SoHo office built for around 40. It’s nearly impossible to find a room for a call, but I still look forward to walking in every morning. People keep showing up because they genuinely want to be together. Well, the weekly Bad Bunny happy hour probably helps too.

Two years later, I lead our GTM Operations team. I’m no longer wheeling laptops in luggage carts, but the instinct behind that moment – to step in, solve the problem, and do whatever it takes – still defines how we show up for our customers every day.

Actually, I take that back. At Cognition, GTM isn’t something you choose – everyone is GTM.