Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of the agentic-coding startup Factory, said in a post on X on Wednesday that he had fired venture capitalist Chris Degnan from his role as a board advisor, alleging that Degnan shared confidential information with Factory's biggest competitor, Cognition.
Two hours later, Degnan announced on both X and LinkedIn that he had joined Cognition as its chief revenue officer.
Degnan was Snowflake's first sales hire and spent 11 years as the data company's chief revenue officer. For the past five months he has been a partner at RPT Partners, a Newport Beach, California-based investor in Factory, and his LinkedIn profile also lists him as a go-to-market advisor to startups for the much larger firm Iconiq, a role dating to October of last year.
Factory is a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose AI agents carry out programming tasks largely on their own. It raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation this month from Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and others, and counts Nvidia, Blackstone, Royal Bank of Canada, Palo Alto Networks, Adobe and T-Mobile as customers. Grinberg calls Cognition — maker of the Devin coding agent — his biggest competitor. Cognition raised another $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation earlier this month, and counts Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs and Citi as customers.
According to Grinberg, Degnan had earlier admitted to a "casual" conversation with a Cognition executive but assured him he had no interest in working for the competitor — saying he had "made too much money" and was "too lazy to go work for Cognition." On Monday, Grinberg says, Degnan disclosed that he had in fact been in ongoing talks with Cognition.
Grinberg wrote that he fired Degnan on Tuesday: "For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light."
Notably, Degnan's post did not mention Factory, but did say that RPT Ventures and its managing partner, Chad Peets, will now work with Cognition. None of Degnan, Peets or Factory immediately responded to requests for comment. The episode lands as venture conflict-of-interest scrutiny mounts: Andreessen Horowitz is reportedly the subject of a Justice Department probe into its partners serving on competitors' boards.
