Factory CEO just accused his VC board advisor of spying for Cognition
Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of the AI coding startup Factory, said in a post on X on Wednesday that he fired VC Chris Degnan from role as a board advisor. Grinberg alleges that Degnan shared confidential information with Factory’s biggest competitor, Cognition. Two hours later, Degnan announced on both X and LinkedIn that he has joined Cognition as its chief revenue officer.
- ▪Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of the AI coding startup Factory, said in a post on X on Wednesday that he fired VC Chris Degnan from role as a board advisor.
- ▪Grinberg alleges that Degnan shared confidential information with Factory’s biggest competitor, Cognition.
- ▪Two hours later, Degnan announced on both X and LinkedIn that he has joined Cognition as its chief revenue officer.
3 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 1 hour. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Factory AI vs. Cognition (Devin) board tussle — Ycombinator
- ▪ Factory AI vs. Cognition (Devin) — X (formerly Twitter)
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/factory-ceo-just-accused-his-vc-board-advisor-of-spying-for-cognition/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:39:09 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-30T20:42:01.972Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-30T20:42:01.972Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wNiiCVHt6Rt4 · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of the AI coding startup Factory, said in a post on X on Wednesday that he fired VC Chris Degnan from role as a board advisor. Grinberg alleges that Degnan shared confidential information with Factory’s biggest competitor, Cognition. Two hours later, Degnan announced on both X and LinkedIn that he has joined Cognition as its chief revenue officer. Degnan was Snowflake’s first sales hire and later spent 11 years as the data company’s chief revenue officer. He has spent the last five months as a partner with RPT Partners, a Newport Beach, California-based investor in Factory. Degnan’s LinkedIn account also says he is a go-to-market advisor to startups for the much bigger venture firm Iconiq, a role that dates back to October of last year.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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