Factory accuses Cognition of prying, both deny it
A board dispute between two coding agent companies is being argued on X instead of behind closed doors.
Factory founder Matan Grinberg posted a long statement saying he terminated Chris Degnan from his roles as board observer and advisor after more than a year, accusing him of unethical conduct involving Cognition, the company behind Devin.
Grinberg's account is that Degnan first described a conversation with a Cognition executive as casual and one off, reassured him that he had "made too much money" and was "too lazy to go work for Cognition", then on Monday spent time advising the Factory team on confidential board level matters before calling that evening to say the conversation had actually been formal and recurring. Grinberg also wrote that Cognition engineers feigned interviews with Factory to pry information about its product, and that Cognition then went after people with knowledge of Factory's confidential plans.
Both of the accused answer in public
Cognition CEO Scott Wu replied directly under the post, saying the allegations about Cognition are not true, that Degnan has never brought up Factory's information, and that Cognition would never ask engineers to collect competitor information under the table. Wu said Degnan is an advisor to at least ten companies and told Grinberg he was resigning as an advisor on Monday. He described Degnan as the only person who has built a sales org from the first sales hire to over 3B.
Degnan posted his own correction. He says he was not terminated, he resigned on Monday and told Grinberg he was going to Cognition, and that Grinberg then asked him to consider a full time role at Factory, which he declined. On the board meeting detail, he says the last board meeting he attended was weeks before he had ever spoken to Cognition. He also denies Cognition ever asked for Factory information.
Why anyone outside should care
Gergely Orosz walked through the timeline and noted that Degnan announced joining Cognition as CRO about 50 minutes after the termination post. He is not neutral about the company, pointing back to Cognition's Devin launch claim that the agent got paid on Upwork for real work when, he says, it did not.
Orosz's more useful observation is structural. Fights like this almost never reach a public timeline, so the fact that this one did is itself the signal.
Nobody outside the two companies has evidence for either version. What is verifiable is that the two rival coding agent vendors and the executive in the middle have each put a flatly incompatible account of the same week on X, and that one of them is wrong about who quit whom.
I have a lot of respect for what you’ve built, but competing with integrity doesn’t include posts like yours.
You did not terminate me. I resigned from my advisor position on Monday and told you I was going to Cognition.