The "PayPal Mafia" in the AI era: From an internship together to becoming billionaires

Yesterday, an exclusive interview with Jeff Yan, the founder of Hyperliquid, in the magazine "Colossos" went viral across the internet (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 - phase internship program of the quantitative trading giant "Hudson River Trading" (HRT). At that time, a total of 10 interns were selected. Except for Jeff Yan, who chose the cryptocurrency track, many of his fellow interns have now become well - known figures in the AI field, including Alexandr Wang, the head of Meta's AI business line, Jesse Zhang, the founder and CEO of Decagon, and Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition.

Note from Odaily: A group photo of that year's interns shared by Jesse Zhang

According to additional disclosures by Scott Wu himself, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of their friendship. As early as in high school, many of them had met through the Olympic competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and several others had all won gold medals). There were also many other well - known names in that small circle. These include but are not limited to Johnny Ho, the co - founder and CSO of Perplexity, Demi Guo, the co - founder and CEO of Pika, and Steven Hao, Alexandr Wang's former partner in founding Scale AI...

During the growth stages 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 look for the next similar special network. The small circle of Jeff Yan and others also talked about this topic. At the age of 19, Alexandr Wang once said to his friends, "Why can't it be us?"

Ten years have passed, and Alexandr Wang's bold words seem to be coming true. With the help of AI, these young people by the Hudson River are stirring up this era in their own way.

Alexandr Wang: The AI Brain of Zuckerberg

Alexandr Wang may be the most well - known person in this small circle. In 1997, Alexandr Wang was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He is of Chinese immigrant descent, and his parents were physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb in the United States was secretly developed during World War II.

Alexandr Wang has been passionate about mathematics and programming since childhood. He qualified for the Mathematical Olympiad Program in 2013, made it onto the US Physics Team in 2014, and reached the finals of the US Computer Olympiad in 2012 and 2013.

In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The following year, he founded Scale AI, which annotates data for training AI in computer vision and audio transcription. Riding on the wave of the AI boom, the valuation of Scale AI soared. By 2021, its valuation had reached $7.3 billion, and Alexandr Wang, who held a 15% stake, had a net worth of over $1 billion.

In June 2025, Meta, which was clearly lagging behind in the AI competition, spent $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI. Zuckerberg's additional condition was that Alexandr Wang, the soul of Scale AI and only 28 years old at the time, must join Meta. Alexandr Wang then joined Meta and began to be in charge of Meta's AI development team, the "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL).

On the night of April 8th, Zuckerberg's bold bet paid off. MSL officially released its first self - developed AI model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model that supports tool invocation, visual chain - of - thought, and multi - agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has ever released. During the training process, MSL observed predictable large - scale improvements in the model during pre - training, reinforcement learning, and the inference phase of testing.

Scott Wu: A Grandmaster in Olympiads, the Creator of a Billion - Dollar Valued AI Startup

Scott Wu was born in 1997 with a Chinese immigrant background in Louisiana. During his growth, Scott Wu actively participated in programming and mathematics competitions and won three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, taking first place in 2014.

After graduating from high school, Scott Wu entered Harvard University but dropped out two years later. During his undergraduate studies at Harvard College, he participated in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) as a member of the school team. The team won a gold medal and ranked third overall.

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

In 2024, the Cognition team launched Devin, the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. This product can independently write, test, and deploy code, support the decomposition and collaboration of complex tasks, and significantly outperforms GPT - 4 in the SWE - bench benchmark test. In May of the same year, Cognition received $175 million in financing led by the Founders Fund under Peter Thiel, with a post - investment valuation of $2 billion. In September 2025, Cognition raised another $400 million, and the company's valuation soared to $10.2 billion.

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

Johnny Ho: With a Net Worth of $2.1 Billion, Once Intended to Acquire TikTok and Chrome

Like Scott Wu, Johnny Ho, who graduated from Harvard, won three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, 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, providing a conversational search engine service. Its answers show citation sources and offer related question suggestions.

In 2023, Perplexity's monthly visits reached 10 million. By April 2024, its monthly active users had reached approximately 15 million. In the same year, Perplexity started a crazy financing process. In the fourth financing at the end of the year, it raised $5 million, and its valuation reached $9 billion. In July 2025, Perplexity completed another new round of $100 million financing, and its valuation rose to $18 billion.

It is worth mentioning that Perplexity has launched several bold acquisition proposals of the "David vs. Goliath" level (and venture capitalists are willing to fund them). These include an acquisition offer to TikTok in early 2025, aiming to merge Perplexity, TikTok's US business, and new capital partners into a new entity, and a proposal to Google in August 2025 to buy its core product, the Chrome browser, for $34.5 billion.

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

Jesse Zhang: Three Years of AI Entrepreneurship, Valued at $4.5 Billion

Jesse Zhang was also born in 1997 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since high school, Jesse Zhang has been a typical "competition maniac" - selected for the US Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP) twice, shortlisted for the Intel STS finals, and participated in the RSI research project at MIT. After entering Harvard, Jesse Zhang completed four years of college courses in just three years.

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

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

In June 2024, the newly - established Decagon quickly received $35 million in financing, including a $5 million seed round led by a16z and a $30 million Series A round led by Accel. Four months later, Decagon raised another $65 million in Series B financing. In June 2025, it raised $131 million in Series C financing, and its valuation soared to $1.5 billion. In January 2026, it raised $250 million in Series D financing, and its valuation had skyrocketed to $4.5 billion... Along with the rising valuation, Decagon's revenue - generating ability has also increased. As of the end of 2025, the company's disclosed annual revenue - generating ability has exceeded $30 million.

Demi Guo: A Post - 95s from Hangzhou, a Pioneer in AI Video Generation

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

Demi Guo won a silver medal in 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 she dropped out of the doctoral program at Stanford University and focused on entrepreneurship in the field of generative AI video content creation.

In April 2023, Demi Guo co - founded Pika with Chenlin Meng, and Demi Guo serves as the CEO. Pika focuses on the development of video - generating AI technology. Its core products include the Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 models, which support the generation of 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and movie styles, and provide functions such as video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.

In terms of financing, Pika completed a $20 million seed - round financing before its official launch. Then, in November 2023, it completed a $35 million Series A financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In June 2024, Pika completed an $80 million Series B financing 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 Technology Guru with a Net Worth of Over $1 Billion

Steven Hao, who graduated from the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also won a gold medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He was Alexandr Wang's partner at Scale AI and has now joined Scott Wu's Cognition as the CTO. Both companies have been introduced in detail earlier, so there is no need to repeat them here.

According to Forbes data, Steven Hao, who is only 30 years old, is estimated to have a personal wealth of $1.3 billion.

Epilogue: We May Be Witnessing a New Legend

I've thought about giving this small circle a new name similar to the "PayPal Mafia", such as the "Hudson River Mafia" or the more inclusive "Olympiad Mafia"... Although the historical background and storylines are completely different, they seem to share the same spiritual core as the previous - generation "PayPal Mafia". Behind their friendship from the Olympiads, what truly connects them is a common pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and system - reconstruction ability, as well as a profound prediction of where the future lies.

A new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped onto the stage. In front of them is the far more difficult question of "how AI will reshape the world" than the Olympiads. This is their battlefield and their stage.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Odaily" (ID: o - daily), author: Azuma, published by 36Kr with authorization.