Founder of Cognition: AI Founders Almost All Come from Competitive Programming, Entrepreneurship is Becoming Like "Math Poker"

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, Colossus Magazine published a three-hour-long interview with Cognition founder Scott Wu. During the interview, the reporter asked Scott Wu a very interesting question: why are the leading figures in the AI industry almost all from the competitive programming circle?

The reporter likened this to the early 20th-century "Martians of Budapest": von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, the Hungarian-Jewish geniuses who later reshaped physics, born in almost the same era, attended almost the same schools, participated in almost the same math competitions, and eventually met at Los Alamos to create the atomic bomb.

Applied to today's AI community, this analogy is not exaggerated at all. Among Wu's IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics) teammates, Alexandr Wang founded Scale AI, Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity, Jesse Zhang founded Decagon, and Jeffrey Yan founded Hyperliquid. Looking further out: OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman was a Math Olympiad top 24 finisher and Chemistry Olympiad silver medalist; OpenAI Research Director Mark Chen coached the U.S. IOI team with Wu; OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki was an old competitor of Wu's in international competitions; and Anthropic founder Dario Amodei was on the U.S. Physics Olympiad team.

Wu's explanation is simple: competitions filter for two things, a sharp mind and a refusal to give up. He used the word "salty" to describe himself, saying he always wanted to beat everyone since he was young, even if his opponents were several years older. Those with a sharp mind and a competitive spirit, after a few years of exploration, will inevitably catch up in terms of product intuition, team leadership, and business acumen.

As for why everyone almost simultaneously ventured into entrepreneurship, Wu said the biggest contributor was Alexandr Wang. The two became best friends in high school on Google Hangouts and even worked on a startup idea document together. Wang was the first in their circle to truly embark on entrepreneurship, prompting the others to follow suit once they saw him take the leap. Wu said, "Many people simply didn't know that entrepreneurship was an option. We were lucky to go through these experiences together and see each other grow."

He also made an analogy: entrepreneurship is becoming like poker. Early poker masters relied on intuition and street smarts, but now the tables are full of math whizzes. AI entrepreneurship has also reached this stage, where founders with a strong technical background are more sought after than those who are just good storytellers because the crux lies in tackling hardcore technical challenges.