The Rise Of A Great Nerd King

THE FIRST time I met Scott Wu was back in 2015. This was before the rest of the world had seen him performing heroic math feats on X or talking up his coding agent Devin. It was before the profiles and the podcasts that discussed his poker-playing exploits and daring acquisitions. Back then, Wu was all of 18 years old and, I must say, did not come off as a future titan of Silicon Valley.

Wu at 18 looked and behaved much the same as he does at 29. He seemed nice and unassuming despite obvious and prodigious intellectual gifts. He was skinny and had prescription-maxxing glasses that he’d push back up his nose several times during a conversation. He was A Thing even back then, but in a much smaller circle – that of competitive software programmers.

Some of you will know that competitive programming exists, while many of you will not. But it’s true. There are people who go to coding competitions where they must solve math, physics and software riddles as fast and as elegantly as possible. The people who excel at these competitions tend to be nerds among nerds, and, as a young man, Scott Wu reigned as a great nerd king. He won all sorts of medals at international coding competitions and achieved the status not just of Grandmaster but Legendary Grandmaster in another set of popular coding contests.

Wu had grown up in Baton Rouge, the son of chemical engineers who left China for the US in the 1980s. The standard story is that Wu’s parents came to America to further their education, but there’s a little more to the tale. “I don’t really ever talk about this, but we kind of came to America actually indirectly because my dad played Go,” Wu says. “My dad was a tournament Go player, and one of his professors really liked playing against him. His professor eventually came to America and then wrote my dad and said, ‘I’m here now. It’s actually really great. And I’ll help you do your visa application; I’ll help you apply for school here.’ The reason that they became friends is because his professor really enjoyed learning from him in Go.”

With these competitive instincts in his blood, Wu followed his older brother Neal into math and coding contests around seventh grade. Both boys would spend several hours after school practicing for the competitions, and they viewed these repetitions mostly as fun. “It felt more like a hobby than a sport,” Scott told me back in 2015. “It never felt forced or like we were drilling problems.” The Wu brothers simply enjoyed solving problems and figuring out ways to make algorithms go faster and faster and faster.

Scott’s academic record and competitive programming skills helped him get into Harvard. He put school off, however, to take a job in Silicon Valley at Addepar, a financial software start-up that made hiring competitive programmers a priority. Wu found himself among his friends and almost peers.

It’s hard to know what will become of a bright, hardworking 18-year-old, but Wu presented as the sort who would end up as a top-flight engineer at a large tech company. This is to say that he did not ooze entrepreneurial bloodlust. He seemed too earnest and decent and placid to command troops of engineers and engage in the general Silicon Valley bullshittery required of running a start-up.

This is to say, I misread Scott Wu.

MY NEXT encounter with Scott Wu came in early 2024. He’d created a start-up called Cognition, and it had built a coding agent called Devin.