The New PayPal Mafia: How 10 HRT Interns Built Over $100 Billion in Valuation

[[**10 interns at Hudson River Trading in 2015; ten years later, the companies they founded or run have a combined valuation of over $100 billion, including Scale AI (acquired for $14.3 billion), Hyperliquid ($76 billion market cap), Cognition ($48 billion valuation), and more. This group of competition prodigies is using algorithmic thinking to rebuild traditional industries, and they are being called the new generation of the "PayPal Mafia."**

**Key Points**

**1. The entrepreneurial paths of three core figures** Alexandr Wang founded Scale AI, focused on AI data labeling, and later Meta acquired a partial stake for $14.3 billion, with Wang himself becoming Meta's Chief AI Officer; Jeff Yan founded the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, with zero funding and an 11-person team generating annual profits of over $900 million and a market cap of $76 billion; Scott Wu founded the AI coding company Cognition, whose product Devin has annualized revenue approaching $1 billion and a valuation of $48 billion.

**2. More achievements from the same intern cohort stand out** Among the same cohort of interns, Jesse Zhang founded the AI customer service company Decagon at a $4.5 billion valuation; Johnny Ho co-founded the AI search engine Perplexity at a valuation of about $30 billion; Demi Guo founded the AI video platform Pika at a $470 million valuation; Steven Hao joined Cognition as CTO, with a personal net worth of about $1.3 billion.

**3. Competition backgrounds and quantitative trading are the shared springboard** This group met in high school through the International Olympiad in Informatics and the International Mathematical Olympiad, and the HRT internship program brought them together. Quantitative trading training gave them the ability to extract signals from massive data and build self-optimizing systems, becoming the key springboard from the competition world to the startup world.

**4. The era has given nerds a stage** The competition geeks once categorized as "nerds" now stand at the center of the stage, relying on algorithmic thinking and engineering ability, in an age when AI has become the underlying operating system. Their way of breaking down problems is highly consistent: find an inefficient system and rebuild it with algorithms and engineering, thereby achieving disruption across different tracks (AI data, on-chain finance, software engineering, search, and more). 2026-10-19 15:37 The New PayPal Mafia: 10 Interns, $100 Billion Shenchao TechFlow Quick Overview

This article comes from the WeChat public account: Shenchao TechFlow, author: Xiaobing, cover image from: AI-generated

On October 19, 2026, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang posted a selfie on X with a caption of only seven words: got the HRT gang back together!

The comments section exploded.

This seemingly casual group photo conceals one of the most outrageous facts in today's tech world: the three people in the photo, plus several old classmates who were not present, all took part in the inaugural internship program of Wall Street quantitative trading giant Hudson River Trading in the winter of 2015, and that program recruited only 10 people in total.

Ten years later, the companies founded or run by these 10 interns have a combined valuation of over $100 billion.

On the right of the photo is Wang himself, 29, founder of Scale AI, who was recruited by Zuckerberg last year at a cost of $14.3 billion to join Meta as Chief AI Officer, overseeing Meta's superintelligence lab.

On the left is Jeff Yan, founder of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange built by an 11-person team with zero funding, which last year had $900 million in profit and a project market cap of as high as $76 billion.

In the middle is Scott Wu, founder and CEO of Cognition, whose AI coding agent Devin is growing enterprise customers at a rate of 50% per month, and whose company has a latest valuation of $48 billion.

The last time the three of them appeared in the same room at the same time may have been that winter in 2015, in the trading company office by the Hudson River.

Winter by the Hudson River

The fate of this group of prodigies began already in high school.

Jeff Yan and Scott Wu both won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and Wu won gold three times, topping the field with a perfect score in 2014. Alexandr Wang was a regular at the USA Computing Olympiad and the USA Mathematical Olympiad. They met repeatedly at various summer camps and training teams, and that circle was so small that almost everyone knew each other.

In the winter of 2015, these competition teenagers scattered across Harvard and MIT were brought together by one shared name: Hudson River Trading.

HRT is one of the world's top quantitative trading firms, headquartered in New York, and its average daily trading volume once accounted for more than 15% of the U.S. stock market.

In the winter of 2015, HRT tried recruiting interns for the first time. The quota was extremely small—only 10 people in total. Jeff Yan was a junior at Harvard at the time, Scott Wu was a freshman, and Alexandr Wang was a freshman at MIT.

The design of this internship program was itself very "quantitative": it lasted three weeks and was run as a competition, with rankings in every round. According to Jeff Yan's later recollection, the top two in every round were always him and Scott Wu.

But the most historically significant moment of this internship may not have been the trading competition itself. According to an in-depth interview with Jeff Yan by Colossus magazine, it was during his HRT internship that Yan first heard about Bitcoin, through introductions from two former partners. Although he did not act immediately at the time, he soon found Ethereum's yellow paper and read a description: a computer run jointly by the whole world that no one could shut down. That seed grew into Hyperliquid a few years later.

Also that winter, Alexandr Wang, then only 19, said something to the Harvard and MIT classmates sitting around the table at his own birthday party that was later quoted repeatedly:

"Why can't it be us?"

Three paths, one origin

After walking out of HRT's offices, these young people chose completely different tracks. But they shared one underlying logic: using algorithmic thinking to rebuild a traditional industry.

Alexandr Wang: From data labeling to Zuckerberg's AI brain

After leaving HRT, Wang made a decision that surprised everyone: he dropped out of MIT.

In 2016, at age 19, he co-founded Scale AI with Lucy Guo. What the company did sounded not sexy at all: labeling data for AI training. But Wang's judgment was extremely precise: he skipped specific AI applications and bet directly on the "shovels" of the entire AI industry.

As the AI wave swept the globe, Scale AI became a core supplier to giants such as OpenAI, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2021, the company's valuation soared to $7.3 billion, and Wang, at 24, became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. In its 2024 funding round, Scale AI reached a valuation of $13.8 billion, backed by Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta.

Then came the deal that shook Silicon Valley in June 2025. Meta acquired 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion, at an overall valuation of $29 billion. As a core condition of the deal, Zuckerberg required Wang himself to join Meta as Chief AI Officer, leading the newly established "Meta Superintelligence Labs."

A 28-year-old young man became the overall commander of the AI strategy of the world's largest social media empire.

Jeff Yan: From quantitative trader to builder of on-chain financial infrastructure

If Wang chose the "shovel business" of AI, Jeff Yan chose the hardest-core path in the crypto world: rebuilding trading infrastructure.

After graduating from Harvard, Yan did not rush to start a company. He worked at Google and then at a self-driving car company, while never stopping his observation of the crypto world. In 2020, he founded Chameleon Trading, a cryptocurrency market maker. This experience gave him a deep understanding of the structural flaws of centralized exchanges, and the collapse of FTX gave him the decisive push.

In 2022, Yan disbanded the Chameleon team and began building Hyperliquid with his own funds, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange running on a blockchain. No VC investment, no token presale, an 11-person team, starting from zero.

This "anti-VC" path is almost unheard of in the crypto industry. Yan's confidence came from the trading profits accumulated by Chameleon, and even more from a quantitative trader's extreme pursuit of product: latency must be low, throughput must be high, and user experience must approach or even surpass that of centralized exchanges.

ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher once said that Hyperliquid's trading activity "exceeds that of Nasdaq."

Today, Hyperliquid is one of the companies with the highest profit per employee in the world. Last year, the company's mere 11 employees generated more than $900 million in profit. Founded only four years ago, the company has reached a market value of $76 billion.

Scott Wu: The man who lets AI write code itself

Scott Wu has the most terrifying competition record of this group. Three IOI gold medals, winning the championship with a perfect score in 2014, a MathCounts national champion, and third place in Google Code Jam. After studying at Harvard for two years, he dropped out and co-founded the AI social networking platform Lunchclub.

But what truly made him famous across Silicon Valley was Cognition, which he co-founded at the end of 2023 with Steven Hao and Walden Yan (the three together hold 5 IOI gold medals). In March 2024, Cognition released Devin, billed as "the world's first AI software engineer," capable of independently planning, writing, testing, and deploying code.

Devin sparked enormous controversy in the tech world, but the market gave its own answer: Cognition's valuation soared from $350 million in early 2024 to $10.2 billion in September 2025, and then to $26 billion in May 2026 (raising $1 billion), while annualized revenue exploded from $5.4 million in mid-2024 to nearly $500 million in mid-2026.

By September 2026, annualized revenue was approaching $1 billion, and the latest valuation was reportedly $48 billion. Wu himself says that more than 90% of Cognition's internal code is now written by Devin itself.

A three-year-old startup whose valuation went from $350 million to $48 billion, a more than 130-fold increase.

More than three people

There are only three people in that selfie today, but this circle is far larger than one photo can contain.

According to Scott Wu himself, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of this group's friendship. As early as high school, many of them had already gotten to know one another through various Olympiad competitions. And the names extending out from that small circle each occupy a place on today's tech landscape.

Jesse Zhang, one of the same cohort of HRT interns. His previous social gaming company Lowkey was acquired by Niantic (the developer of "Pokémon Go"). In 2023, he founded the AI customer service agent company Decagon, focused on replacing enterprise customer service with AI. Less than three years after founding, the company's valuation has reached $4.5 billion, with clients including giants such as Duolingo and Hertz, and in 2026 it was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30.

Johnny Ho, a three-time IOI gold medalist and Harvard alumnus. He met Scott Wu and Jeff Yan in high school. In a 2013 photo of the U.S. IOI team, he stands shoulder to shoulder with Steven Hao and Scott Wu.

After leaving the competition circuit, Ho worked as a quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital, then joined Quora as an engineer. In 2022, he co-founded the AI search engine Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas and others, and currently serves as co-founder and chief strategy officer. Perplexity's latest funding round reportedly values it at about $30 billion, and it is redefining the trillion-dollar search engine market.

Demi Guo (Guo Wenjing), a "genius girl" from Hangzhou and a 2015 IOI silver medalist. With a bachelor's in mathematics and a master's in computer science from Harvard, she was once the youngest full-time researcher at Meta AI Research. In 2023, she dropped out of her PhD program at Stanford and co-founded the AI video generation platform Pika with classmate Chenlin Meng, reaching a valuation of $470 million and more than 16 million users. She interned at HRT and Quora—the same circle again.

Steven Hao, a 2014 IOI gold medalist and a graduate of MIT's mathematics department. He was an early core engineer under Alexandr Wang during the Scale AI period, and later joined Scott Wu's Cognition as co-founder and CTO. According to Forbes estimates, the 30-year-old Hao's personal net worth has reached about $1.3 billion, making him the youngest American on the 2026 Forbes 400 list.

From Hao's trajectory, the "talent flow" within this circle is clearly visible: he brought the engineering experience and understanding of AI data accumulated at Scale AI into Cognition. And Cognition's three founders Wu, Hao, and Walden Yan together hold 5 IOI gold medals; they poured the algorithmic thinking honed in competitions directly into the core architecture of AI coding agents.

Why has a quantitative trading firm become a cradle of founders?

This is no coincidence.

When Wang retweeted that 2015 intern group photo in early October this year, he added a note: "HRT 2015 intern class is the new-gen PayPal Mafia."

The story of the PayPal Mafia is well known. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks and others came out of the same company and went on to found Tesla, Palantir, LinkedIn, Yammer and other companies, defining the tech landscape of the past decade.

But the HRT cohort and the PayPal Mafia have one fundamental difference. The bond of the PayPal Mafia was a company and a shared entrepreneurial experience. The bond among the HRT group is earlier and deeper: what they share is a way of thinking.

What does it mean to come from a competition background?

It means that since their teens they have been trained to approach problems with an optimal-solution mindset, with an almost obsessive pursuit of efficiency and an intuitive understanding of complex systems. Quantitative trading firms are a natural amplifier of this way of thinking: at HRT, they learned how to extract signals from massive noise, how to make decisions within millisecond-level time windows, and how to build systems that can optimize themselves.

Jesse Zhang wrote in an article: "The generation that grew up doing math, programming and science competitions accounts for a disproportionate share of today's founders."

Quantitative trading firms are precisely the key springboard for this group between the competition world and the startup world. Jane Street, Citadel, DE Shaw, Two Sigma—similar stories stand behind all these names, but the concentration in HRT's 2015 class is indeed unusually high.

10 interns, at least 4 of whom became unicorn founders, with their companies valued at more than $100 billion combined—this "talent conversion rate" exceeds that of tech giants such as Google and Meta, which are known for producing AI talent.

The deeper reason may lie in this: what these quantitative trading firms provide is not only technical training, but also an instinctive understanding of market structure. Wang applied this understanding to AI data infrastructure, Yan to on-chain financial infrastructure, Wu to the automation of software engineering, Zhang to the reconstruction of customer service, and Ho to upending the search engine.

The problems they solve are different, but the way they break them down is identical: find an inefficient system and rebuild it with algorithms and engineering capability.

Geniuses always meet early. But what is truly moving about this story is not how smart they are. Competition gold medals proved that long ago. What is moving is that the era has finally turned to the page that belongs to them.

Ten years ago, what was the image of this group? Math competition champions, programming geeks, invisible presences in social settings. In the hierarchy of any American high school, they were all lumped under the same word: nerd. For a long time that word was not a compliment; it meant eccentric, boring, out of step with the mainstream.

But the world after 2024 has given nerds an unprecedented stage.

Wang, Yan, Wu, Zhang, Ho, Guo, Hao—these Chinese surnames that are awkward for white people to pronounce—have moved from the Olympiad arena to the center of the era's stage.

The nerds who were once despised have finally ushered in their golden age. AI industry signal channel: Frontier Tech

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