“Interview with Scott Woo​​(Part Two)””, “Future-changing!”

Yeah, you know, it's... And by the way, I could say, you know, so you're quite good at math yourself, actually. We did the digits of pi, you know, and the Rubik's cube, and so, you know, I think we had a lot of the same hobbies. I think...

Yeah, you know, there was a group of folks, especially in the US, actually, a lot of the people that I grew up with in these math competitions. I grew up in a small town, and there weren't a lot of people who did this kind of math and science and programming in the same way. And the first time I met other people who were like that was when I went to these big competitions, and I met other people from across the United States or across the whole world even who had the same interests. And many of those people actually turned out to be very entrepreneurial as well. And so, you know, one of my best friends at the time was Alexander Wang, who founded Scale AI. Another one of my closest friends is a guy named Johnny Ho, who started a company called Perplexity AI.

Yeah, yeah. So when we were, you know, 12 or 13 years old, we all met, you know, we were the same age, we did these competitions. Jesse Zhang started a company called Decagon, for example. And a lot of these, you know, many of the folks at OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, you know, today as well. And it was funny because I don't think we ever could have predicted it ourselves, even. But yeah, I think that... I also think that entrepreneurship is kind of infectious, you know, and so once a couple of us started, you know, thinking about starting a company or doing something like that, a lot more people started to feel like, you know, why not, right? And it's really fun. I feel very fortunate to have had that community as a kid because, you know, when we were 12 or 13 years old, we never thought that we would go and start companies and so on, but I've really enjoyed it since then.

Yeah, yeah. I think the community is very important, and I think since then I've gotten to see, I guess, you know, a lot of the benefits of it, which are that there really is a lot more to do and a lot more to build. And I think in AI today things are moving so fast that, you know, any meaningful new addition that you can bring in, it really does change the landscape of what's possible. And I think I've been really inspired by seeing a lot of my friends who have built great companies and built great ideas, and, you know, that's... I've always been excited to try to do the same.

So I use a lot of Devin. So in total, my total Devins might be more than 24 hours.

And no, what I'd say is a little bit of everything. I think the most important, actually, is recruiting, because I think building a really great team is the most important part of any project or company or team. And so that's probably the biggest thing. Other than that, it's a lot of time thinking about just the core product and the core strategy questions. You know, we have a lot of tough questions all the time of what should we build next in Devin, or what should we focus on, or how do we solve this particular capabilities problem, or, you know, what are the right partners and people that we should work with, for example. And I think figuring out a lot of this core strategy is a lot of what I spend my time on besides recruiting.

Yeah, you know, it's... I feel very fortunate to get, honestly, most or all of the team is better than I am, I feel, and so it's a lot of fun to work with such really great people. I think a lot of how we think about it is really forming the whole company around the team that we want to have, if that makes sense. You know, we have had several times actually where we changed the whole direction of the company in order to make it the right fit for the right person who we really wanted to be a part of the team. And to give a simple example, you know, over half of our team today actually have founded a company before themselves. And so it's a fun mix for us because most of us have known each other for a long, long time, you know, 10 years, and more than half of us have founded companies of our own. And this is kind of a fun one of like, you know, this one is going to be the big one.

So we're all on site every day. Yeah.

In the office, and yeah, we have a lot of late nights. Well, I mean, we're all engineers, you know, and I feel like our optimal schedule is to work late at night, and so we do a lot of that.

Oh, you know, we have arguments, of course. Yeah. And I think it's fun, I think, in the sense that everyone has a lot of respect for everyone else, and also everyone cares a lot. And so I think the fights are more about disagreement about, well, what is the most important thing that we should do? What is the most important thing? Rather than any kind of, like, you know, political battles or anything like that, because we really are just kind of in a room together trying to build something nice and great.

Yeah.

Yeah. So one thing I'll say is we do this every six weeks where we take the whole team for an offsite. So we fly the whole team together for a few days to a different location. We have a big house together, and we all work together out of that and just kind of come up with ideas. And we do this, you know, it's every six weeks, which has been a lot of fun. We've gotten to fly to a lot of destinations around the area. And I think it helps a lot, actually, because I think it's just a good mental reset for people. So actually, it's funny because a lot of our launches, you know, like Devin 2.0 or, you know, the initial Devin generally available launch, they came from these offsites. And so basically we had, you know, four days of offsite, and we said, okay, at the end of the four days we have to launch this. And it was a lot of late nights, very, very busy work, you know, all of us in the house together, but that's kind of how we've often done this.

Yeah. I mean, I think code itself is obviously very important to all of us because we are all coders too. And I think that, you know, so many systems in the world really just rely on software, right? Much more of the world is software than it was not that long ago. You know, even a few decades ago is already very, very different. And I think that the ability to produce much more software is, in many ways, I think the most motivating thing for us because there really is so much more code to write and there's so much more to build.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think I'm qualified, honestly, to give advice on management.

I think that a lot of the best people, they know better than I do, you know, what is the best way to use their time. And so I think from our perspective, it's honestly a lot of how we've thought about these things is to...

Yeah. And I think it only works because, you know, we're lucky enough to have people who are so capable and also so high agency.