The "PayPal Mafia" of the AI era, from an internship to worth billions.

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Yesterday, Colossos magazine's special interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan went viral online (see "Jeff Yan's Hyper Life").

In the interview, Jeff Yan revealed a little-known story—during his junior year at Harvard, he participated in the first internship program of the quantitative trading giant Hudson River Trading (HRT), where a total of 10 interns were selected. Apart from Jeff Yan, who chose the cryptocurrency path, many of his fellow interns have now become well-known figures in the field of AI, including Alexandr Wang, head of Meta's AI business line, Jesse Zhang, founder and CEO of Decagon, and Scott Wu, founder and CEO of Cognition.

Odaily note: Group photo of this internship cohort shared by Jesse Zhang

According to additional disclosures from Scott Wu himself, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of their friendship; many of them met during high school through Olympic competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and several others have won gold medals), and that small circle included more impressive names, including but not limited to Johnny Ho, co-founder and CSO of Perplexity, Demi Guo, co-founder and CEO of Pika, and Steven Hao, Alexandr Wang’s former partner who founded Scale AI...

During the growth phase of Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and others, the "PayPal Mafia," represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, was already making waves in the business world, and people began to seek the next similar special network. Jeff Yan and others in their circle discussed this topic, with 19-year-old Alexandr Wang asking his friends, "Why can't it be us?"

Ten years later, Alexandr Wang's bold claim seems to be coming true. Leveraging AI, this group of young people by the Hudson River is shaking up this era in their own way.

Alexandr Wang: Zuckerberg’s AI Brain

Alexandr Wang might be the most well-known person in this small circle. Born in 1997 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he is a descendant of Chinese immigrants, with parents who worked as physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory—the first atomic bomb in the United States was secretly developed there during World War II.

From a young age, Alexandr Wang was passionate about mathematics and programming; he qualified for the Math Olympiad program in 2013, obtained qualification for the U.S. Physics Team in 2014, and competed in the finals of the U.S. Computer Olympiad in 2012 and 2013.

In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT and founded Scale AI the following year, to annotate data for training AI in computer vision and audio transcription. Riding the wave of the AI boom, Scale AI's valuation soared, reaching $7.3 billion by 2021, and with a 15% stake, Alexandr Wang’s net worth also surpassed $1 billion.

In June 2025, with Meta clearly falling behind in the AI race, they acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion, on the condition that the soul of Scale AI, then just 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, must join Meta. Alexandr Wang then joined Meta, where he began overseeing the AI development team "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL).

On the night of April 8, Zuckerberg's gamble paid off when MSL officially launched its first in-house AI model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is a native multi-modal reasoning model that supports tool invocation, visual chain thinking, and multi-agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has released to date, where MSL observed predictable scalable improvements during pre-training, reinforcement learning, and testing phases.

Scott Wu: Olympiad Master, Creator of a $10 Billion AI Startup

Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana with a background of Chinese immigrants. During his growth, Scott Wu actively participated in programming and mathematics-related competitions, winning three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, including first place in 2014.

After graduating from high school, Scott Wu entered Harvard University but dropped out two years later. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a team member in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), where the team won a gold medal and ranked third overall.

In 2019, Scott Wu co-founded the social platform Lunchclub as a co-founder and chief technology officer. In 2023, he co-founded Cognition with friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both of whom are Olympic gold medalists), where he serves as CEO.

In 2024, the Cognition team launched the world's first autonomous AI software engineer, Devin, which can independently complete coding, testing, and deployment, while supporting the decomposition and collaboration of complex tasks; in the SWE-bench benchmark test, it significantly outperformed GPT-4. In May of the same year, Cognition secured $175 million in funding, led by Founders Fund under Peter Thiel, with a post-money valuation of $2 billion; in September 2025, Cognition raised another $400 million, bringing its valuation to $10.2 billion.

As of early 2026, Cognition's annualized revenue level has reached $400 million.

Johnny Ho: A Fortune of $2.1 Billion, Once Considered Acquiring TikTok and Chrome

Like Scott Wu, Harvard graduate Johnny Ho has won three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, including ranking first with a perfect score in 2012.

In August 2022, Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski, and Denis Yarats. Perplexity positions itself as an AI search engine company that provides conversational search engine services, displaying citation sources for its answers and suggesting related questions.

In 2023, Perplexity reached 10 million monthly visits; by April 2024, its monthly active users had grown to about 15 million. In the same year, Perplexity began aggressive fundraising, securing $5 million in its fourth round of funding by the end of the year, reaching a valuation of $9 billion; by July 2025, Perplexity completed another round of funding of $100 million, increasing its valuation to $18 billion.

Notably, Perplexity initiated several bold "elephant swallowing a mouse" acquisition proposals (with venture capitalists willing to fund), including an acquisition offer directed at TikTok in early 2025, aiming to merge Perplexity, TikTok's U.S. operations, and new capital partners into a new entity, and in August 2025, proposed to Google to spend $34.5 billion to acquire its core product, the Chrome browser.

According to the latest data from Forbes, Perplexity's current valuation has reached $20 billion, while Johnny Ho's personal wealth has reached $2.1 billion.

Jesse Zhang: AI Entrepreneurship in Three Years with a Valuation of $4.5 Billion

Jesse Zhang, also born in 1997, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. From high school, Jesse Zhang was a typical "competition fanatic"—he was selected for the U.S. Math Olympiad (MOP) twice, reached the finals of the Intel STS competition, and participated in MIT's RSI research program. After entering Harvard, Jesse Zhang completed four years of college courses in just three years.

In 2018, Jesse Zhang co-founded the gaming highlight sharing platform Lowkey, which received seed round investment from Y Combinator and Series A funding from a16z. In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Niantic, the developer of Pokémon GO, although the specific acquisition price was not disclosed.

In 2023, Jesse Zhang and partner Ashwin Sreenivas co-founded Decagon, focusing on automating enterprise customer service with AI Agents, solving problems of high labor costs and low efficiency in customer service centers.

In June 2024, the newly established Decagon quickly secured $35 million in funding, including $5 million from a16z in the seed round and $30 million from Accel in the Series A round; four months later, Decagon raised $65 million in Series B funding; in June 2025, Series C funding brought in $131 million, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion; and in January 2026, Series D funding reached $250 million, driving its valuation to $4.5 billion... Along with the rising valuation, Decagon's revenue capability increased, and by the end of 2025, the company reported annual revenue exceeding $30 million.

Demi Guo: A 95-Generation Pioneer in AI Video Generation from Hangzhou

Demi Guo was born in 1999 in Hangzhou, China, and moved to Silicon Valley, USA, with her family during childhood.

Demi Guo won a silver medal at the 2015 International Olympiad in Informatics. She graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer science, then dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford University to focus on entrepreneurship in generative AI video content creation.

In April 2023, Demi Guo co-founded Pika with Chenlin Meng, where she serves as CEO. Pika focuses on developing AI technology for video generation, with core products including Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 models that support the generation of 3D animations, cartoons, and movies, as well as offering features like video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.

In terms of financing, Pika completed $20 million in seed funding before the official launch; then in November 2023, it secured $35 million in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; in June 2024, Pika completed $80 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $470 million, led by Spark Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and actor Jared Leto.

Steven Hao: An AI Tech Guru Worth Over $1 Billion

Steven Hao, who graduated from the mathematics department at MIT, has also won a gold medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He was a partner of Alexandr Wang at Scale AI and is now the CTO of Scott Wu's Cognition. Both companies have been detailed earlier, so there’s no need to elaborate further.

Forbes data shows that at just 30 years old, Steven Hao's personal wealth is estimated to have reached $1.3 billion.

Conclusion: We May Be Witnessing a New Legend

I have thought about giving this small circle a new name similar to "PayPal Mafia," maybe calling them the "Hudson River Mafia," or a broader term like "Olympiad Mafia"… Although the historical background and story direction are completely different, they seem to share the same spiritual core as the previous generation’s "PayPal Mafia"—behind high competition friendships, what truly connects them is a shared pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and system reconstruction capabilities, along with a profound foresight of where the future begins.

A new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped into the spotlight. What lies ahead of them is a much more challenging question than the Olympiad: "How will AI reshape the world?" This is their battlefield, and it is also their stage.

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