Matthieu Schulz joins Deviation Capital

Venture capital is hiring product people straight out of the AI coding wars now. That’s the real news here. Deviation Capital launched on May 5 as a spinout of Two Sigma Ventures, and one of its first visible moves was bringing in Matthieu Schulz from Cognition to help build the firm’s San Francisco presence. That sounds like a normal team hire. But it lands differently once you look at where Schulz just came from and what happened to Windsurf over the past year. ### What is Deviation, exactly? Deviation is the newly independent version of Two Sigma Ventures. It starts life with roughly $2 billion in assets under management and an active portfolio of 79 companies, while staying closely tied to Two Sigma through a technical expert council and continued backing from the parent ecosystem. Basically, this is not a tiny emerging manager trying to find its footing — it is an established venture platform getting a new name and a wider lane. ### Why does Schulz matter? Because he is not just another associate with a spreadsheet and a sourcing list. Schulz’s public bio places him at Cognition after Windsurf, and his background is unusually operator-heavy for someone moving into investing this early. He also founded and exited Orsay, and his profile shows recent work around AI software-development” but “which layer of the stack actually keeps the value?” ### Why does Windsurf keep showing up? Because Windsurf became the cleanest recent example of how messy this market has gotten. In July 2025, Cognition said it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark, brand, business, and remaining team. But that came just after Google struck a separate $2.4 billion licensing-and-talent deal tied to Windsurf and hired away CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and other senior R&D staff. ### So what actually got split up? Basically — everything that used to travel together in a startup sale. Leadership went one way. Parts of the technical talent went another. The core product, brand, and broader operating business went to Cognition. That is the important backdrop for Schulz’s move. If you helped build product inside one of these companies, you now have firsthand experience with how value leaks, concentrates, or gets repackaged when distribution channels collide. ### Why would a VC firm want that perspective? Because early-stage AI investing has become much more operational. The old playbook let investors underwrite a team, a market, and some growth. The new one asks weirder questions — who owns the model relationship, who owns the user workflow, who owns the enterprise contract, and what happens if those pieces get peeled apart in a deal. Someone who just lived through Windsurf and Cognition has seen, but it fits the hire. ### Why San Francisco? Deviation says Schulz will help build out the new San Francisco office. That matters because the center of gravity for AI application companies — especially coding tools — is still heavily concentrated there. If Deviation wants to compete for seed and Series A deals in technical startups, it needs people on the ground who can talk product with founders, not just price rounds from New York. ### Is this a one-off hire or a signal? It looks more like a signal. Deviation also brought in Jonathan Golden as a founding partner, and the firm is clearly framing itself as a venture platform built for technical founders. Adding Schulz alongside the San Francisco expansion suggests the firm wants more operator judgment in the room — especially around AI software. ### Bottom line? This is a personnel move, but it points at a bigger market truth. In AI coding tools, talent, IP, product, and distribution no longer stay bundled for long. Deviation just hired someone who saw that unbundling happen from the