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Jeff Yan is just one of them: this group of Olympiad geniuses is recreating the "PayPal Mafia"

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The new generation of entrepreneurs has taken the stage. Before them lies the far more challenging question than any Olympiad: How will AI reshape the world?

Original Title: "The 'PayPal Mafia' in the AI Era, From Internship to Billionaire"

Yesterday, the "Colossos" magazine's featured interview with Jeff Yan, the founder of Hyperliquid, went viral across the internet (see "A World Beyond Worlds: Wearing Only One Outfit, Cutting Your Own Hair, Sharing Billions with Strangers, the Story Behind Hyperliquid").

In the interview, Jeff Yan revealed a little-known story — during his junior year at Harvard, he participated in the inaugural internship program at the quantitative trading giant Hudson River Trading (HRT), where a total of 10 interns were selected.

In addition to Jeff Yan, who chose the cryptocurrency track, several of his fellow interns from the same year have now become well-known figures in the AI field, including Alexandr Wang, Head of Meta AI, Jesse Zhang, Founder and CEO of Decagon, and Scott Wu, Founder and CEO of Cognition.

Odaily Note: Group photo shared by Jesse Zhang of the interns from that year

And according to Scott Wu's own disclosure, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of their friendship. Back in high school, many of them had already met through the Olympiad competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and several others have all won gold medals). Within that small circle, there are even more prominent 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, former partner at Scale AI founded by Alexandr Wang...

During the growth of individuals like Jeff Yan and Scott Wu, the 'PayPal Mafia' led by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel had already been dominant in the business world, prompting people to search for the next similar special network. Jeff Yan and his peers had also discussed this topic, and 19-year-old Alexandr Wang once said to his peers, "Why can't it be us?"

Ten years have passed, and Alexandr Wang's bold claim seems to be coming true now. Leveraging AI, this group of young people from the Hudson River is stirring this era in their own way.

Alexandr Wang: Zuckerberg's AI Brain

Alexandr Wang may 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. His parents were physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory—during World War II, the first atomic bomb in the U.S. was secretly developed at that laboratory.

From a young age, Alexandr Wang has been passionate about mathematics and programming. He qualified for the Mathematics Olympiad Program in 2013, earned a spot on the U.S. Physics Team in 2014, and made it to the finals of the U.S. Computing Olympiad in 2012 and 2013.

In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT and founded Scale AI a year later, which annotates data used to train AI for computer vision and audio transcription. Riding the wave of the AI boom, Scale AI's valuation soared, reaching $7.3 billion in 2021, making Alexandr Wang, who owns 15% of the company, a billionaire.

In June 2025, Meta, significantly lagging in the AI race, acquired 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion. The additional condition set by Zuckerberg was that Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old soul of Scale AI, had to join Meta. Alexandr Wang then joined Meta and took charge of Meta's AI development team, the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

On the night of April 8, Zuckerberg's gamble paid off as MSL officially released its first in-house AI model, Muse Spark.

Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model that supports tool invocation, visual chaining, and multi-agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has released to date. During the training process, MSL observed a predictable scale-up of the model in the pre-training, reinforcement learning, and testing inference stages.

Scott Wu: Math Olympiad Star, Billionaire Valuation AI Trailblazer

Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to Chinese immigrant parents. Growing up, Scott actively participated in programming and math competitions, winning three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, including a first-place finish in 2014.

After high school, Scott Wu enrolled at Harvard University but dropped out two years later. During his time at Harvard, he was part of the university team that won a gold medal at the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), ranking third overall.

In 2019, Scott Wu co-founded the social platform Lunchclub and in 2023, he, along with his friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both Olympiad gold medalists), founded Cognition, where he currently serves as the CEO.

In 2024, the Cognition team launched the world's first autonomous AI software engineer, Devin. The product is capable of independently writing, testing, and deploying code, supporting task decomposition and collaboration, and outperforming GPT-4 in SWE-bench benchmark tests. In May of the same year, Cognition raised $175 million led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, valuing the company at $2 billion. In September 2025, Cognition secured another $4 billion in funding, skyrocketing the company's valuation to $10.2 billion.

As of early 2026, Cognition's annual revenue has reached $4 billion.

Johnny Ho: $21 Billion Net Worth, Once Eyeing TikTok and Chrome Acquisition

Like Scott Wu, Harvard graduate Johnny Ho has won the International Olympiad in Informatics gold medal three times, achieving a perfect score and first place in 2012.

In August 2022, Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski, and Denis Yarats. Perplexity is positioned as an AI search engine company that provides conversational search engine services, with answers displaying citation sources and offering related question suggestions.

In 2023, Perplexity's monthly traffic had already reached 10 million; by April 2024, Perplexity's monthly active users had reached about 15 million. In the same year, Perplexity embarked on a frenzy of fundraising, raising $5 in its fourth financing round at a valuation of $9 billion by the end of the year; in July 2025, Perplexity once again completed a $100 million new financing round, pushing its valuation up to $18 billion.

Notably, Perplexity had made several "elephant in the room" level bold acquisition proposals (with venture capital willing to fund), including a bid to acquire TikTok in early 2025, aiming to merge Perplexity, TikTok's US operations, and a new capital partner into a new entity, as well as a proposal to Google in August 2025, offering $34.5 billion to buy its core product, the Chrome browser.

According to the latest data from Forbes, Perplexity is now valued at a staggering $20 billion, and Johnny Ho's personal wealth has reached $2.1 billion.

Jesse Zhang: AI Entrepreneur for Three Years, Valued at $4.5 Billion

Jesse Zhang, also born in 1997, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Starting in high school, Jesse Zhang was a typical "competition maniac" – selected for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad Project (MOP) twice, a finalist in the Intel STS, and participated in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's RSI research project. 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 with friends, which received seed funding from Y Combinator and Series A funding from a16z. In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Pokémon GO developer Niantic, with the specific acquisition price undisclosed.

In 2023, Jesse Zhang and partner Ashwin Sreenivas co-founded Decagon, focusing on automating enterprise customer service with AI agents to address the high labor cost and low efficiency issues in customer service centers.

In June 2024, the newly established Decagon quickly raised $35 million, including a $5 million seed round led by a16z and a $30 million Series A led by Accel; four months later, Decagon raised another $65 million in Series B; in June 2025, a $131 million Series C funding round valued the company at $1.5 billion; in January 2026, a $250 million Series D funding round skyrocketed the valuation to $4.5 billion... Accompanying the valuation surge was Decagon's revenue capability, with the company's disclosed annual revenue exceeding $30 million by the end of 2025.

Demi Guo: Hangzhou Post-95, AI Video Generation Pioneer

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

In 2015, Demi Guo won a silver medal in the 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 the Stanford University doctoral program to focus on entrepreneurship in generative AI video content creation.

In April 2023, Demi Guo co-founded Pika with Chenlin Meng, where Demi Guo serves as CEO. Pika focuses on the development of video-generating AI technology, with core products including the Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 models, supporting 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and movie-style generation, offering features like video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.

On the funding front, Pika had already raised $20 million in seed funding before its official launch; then in November 2023, it raised $35 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; in June 2024, Pika raised $80 million in Series B financing at a $470 million valuation, with Spark Capital leading, and participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and actor Jared Leto.

Steven Hao: Billionaire AI Tech Guru

Steven Hao, who graduated from the Mathematics Department of MIT, also won the gold medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He was once a partner of Alexandr Wang at Scale AI and has now joined Scott Wu's Cognition as the CTO. Both companies have been detailed earlier, so we won't go into that again here.

According to Forbes data, the 30-year-old Steven Hao's personal wealth is now estimated to have reached $1.3 billion.

Epilogue: We May Be Witnessing a New Legend

I have thought about giving this small circle a new name, similar to the "PayPal Mafia," such as calling them the "Hudson River Gang" or a more widely encompassing "Olympiad Gang"... Although the era and story are completely different, they seem to share the same spirit core as the previous generation's "PayPal Mafia" — behind the camaraderie forged in high-level competitions lies a common pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, system refactoring ability, and a deep anticipation of where the future begins.

The new generation of entrepreneurs has now taken the stage. In front of them is the much more challenging question of "How will AI reshape the world" compared to the Olympiad. This is their battlefield and their platform.