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 his role as a board advisor. Grinberg alleges that Degnan shared confidential information with Factory’s biggest competitor, Cognition. Two hours after Grinberg’s post, Degnan announced on both X and LinkedIn that he had joined Cognition as its chief revenue officer. He also subsequently refuted Grinberg’s allegations, saying in a separate X post that he wasn’t fired but resigned when he told Grinberg he was taking the job.
Degnan was Snowflake’s first sales hire and later spent 11 years as the data company’s chief revenue officer. For the past five months, he has been a partner with RPT Partners, a Newport Beach, California, investor in Factory. Degnan is also a go-to-market advisor to startups at the much bigger venture firm Iconiq.
Three-year-old, San Francisco-based Factory is an agentic coding startup whose AI agents can carry out programming tasks largely on their own. The company raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation this month from Khosla Ventures, Blackstone, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and others. Grinberg said he sees Cognition, the maker of the Devin coding agent, as his biggest competitor. Cognition raised another $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation earlier this month.
Grinberg said on X that Degnan had earlier acknowledged having a “casual” conversation with a Cognition executive but had assured Grinberg that he had no interest in working for the competitor. On Monday, however, Degnan apparently disclosed that he had actually been in ongoing talks with Cognition. This caused Grinberg to grow concerned about how much confidential information Degnan had about Factory. He says he fired Degnan as a board advisor on Tuesday. But Degnan disputes that account, saying the last Factory board meeting he attended was weeks before he had “ever spoken” to Cognition and that he hasn’t shared confidential information.
Source: TechCrunch Venture · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing