Scott Wu, Cognition

**David Senra** (0:02)
I want to know why you describe yourself as salty. What does that mean?

**Scott Wu** (0:05)
I've just always been this way. As a kid, I just hated losing. Like my first competitive memory ever is like when I was in second grade, I went to this seventh grade math competition. It was like a middle school competition that was held at the local university or whatever for middle schoolers.

**David Senra** (0:22)
But you were seven.

**Scott Wu** (0:23)
Yeah, I was like seven or eight years old. I was competing in middle school math, and I did the math test and whatever.
Then they were calling out the names of the like, here's who got third place, here's who got second place. I was waiting for my name to get called, and then I was none of them. I just remember being so pissed about that. Yeah. I can't really give you a rational explanation for why it is.

**David Senra** (0:45)
It doesn't have to be rational. How much of your brain is dedicated to competition?

**Scott Wu** (0:49)
I mean, it's all I do, honestly. I don't know. I think the like-

**David Senra** (0:54)
What do you mean it's all you do?

**Scott Wu** (0:55)
Well, I think strategy game, I don't know. The way even building a company feels the same. It's just like you're calculating the moves, you're thinking about, okay, if you do this, and then this happens, and you do that, and here are the different moves, and you're calculating out what comes out to success.
It's like a tree search where you're exploring the different options in the decision tree, and you're trying to figure out how to lead to victory. That's the only thing I do in my life.

**David Senra** (1:17)
So this is basically just you don't have memories when you weren't like this basically?

**Scott Wu** (1:21)
I think that's right. Yeah.
I was a little brother growing up, so my older brother was four or five years older than me, and naturally we would play video games, and similarly, I would just always be super salty there as well. I don't know, it's just like, yeah, it's just always like that.

**David Senra** (1:35)
So, I spent some time with Demis from D-Line, and what was interesting is I draw a lot of similarities between you two, because I also spent some time with you, and I was like, well, they're both really smart, they're both articulate, they have a friendly UI, right? But then underneath that is this ruthlessly competitive drive, and Demis, I think he said this publicly, but I think he said like half his brain is dedicated to competition, and a lot of that comes from his early days in chess.

**Scott Wu** (2:04)
Yeah.

**David Senra** (2:04)
What were you competing in when you were younger, besides math competitions?

**Scott Wu** (2:06)
Yeah. Well, basically everything. So obviously, the main thing was math and programming competitions. And so ever since I was really young, that was like my life. My whole goal was to become like world champion of competitive programming. I would do that all the time as a kid.
The really great thing about these competitions too is, you compete in your school competition, and if you do well enough in that, then you make it qualify for the local or the city competition. And then if you do well in that, then you get to the regional competition and state competition, and then you get to go to the national thing, the international thing. And so, it's a very nice set up where sooner or later, you get to meet people who are like you, basically. When I was a kid, doing these competitions, going for that, it was all I really cared about. Those people that I met through these national, international competitions were honestly more, they were my childhood friends more than the people around me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were. And it was like, we would hang out online, we would talk about math, we would talk about problems. But all the other things too, I played basically all the different competitive games. So like I played a lot of Super Smash Brothers. I used to go to tournaments for Super Smash Brothers, it was a lot of fun. I played Melee, and then I played like Tetris, I played a lot of poker, I played some chess, I was okay at chess, I was not good, I played some Go. My dad was a competitive Go player. My parents came to the US in some sense because of Go, which was kind of a funny coincidence because my dad was in grad school in China, and he had a professor who really liked him. The reason he liked him was because my dad was like a really good Go player. He was like a 7-Dawn at Go, which if you were to call it in chess, would be like 2300 or 2400 rating equivalent or something like that. He would play with this professor on the weekends and stuff, and my dad would generally win, and they would talk about the games and stuff. Then that professor ended up moving to the US to come and teach.