The 'PayPal Mafia' of the AI era, from internships to billion-dollar fortunes

Author: Azuma

Source: Odaily Planet Daily

Yesterday, a feature interview with Jeff Yan, founder of Hyperliquid, by Colossos magazine went viral across the web (see 'Jeff Yan's Hyper Life' for details).

In an exclusive 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), with a total of 10 interns selected. Apart from Jeff Yan, who chose the cryptocurrency track, many of his fellow interns have now become prominent 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: This group photo of interns was shared by Jesse Zhang.

According to additional disclosures by Scott Wu, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of their friendship; as early as high school, many of them had already met through the Mathematics Olympiad competitions (both Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and others had won gold medals). That small circle also included several other well-known 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 when he founded Scale AI...

During the growth phase of Jeff Yan and Scott Wu, the 'PayPal Mafia,' represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, had already made waves in the business world, and people began searching for the next similarly influential network. Jeff Yan's small circle had also discussed this topic, with 19-year-old Alexandr Wang telling his peers: 'Why can't it be us?'

Ten years have passed, and Alexandr Wang's bold statement seems to be coming true today. Leveraging AI, this group of young people from the banks of the Hudson River is making their mark on the era in their own way.

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

Alexandr Wang has been passionate about mathematics and programming since childhood. In 2013, he qualified for the Mathematical Olympiad Program, in 2014 he qualified for the U.S. Physics Team, and he reached the finals of the USA Computing Olympiad in both 2012 and 2013.

In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a year later founded Scale AI, which annotates data used to train 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, making Alexandr Wang, who owned 15% of the shares, a billionaire with a net worth exceeding $1 billion.

In June 2025, Meta, which had clearly fallen behind in the AI race, spent $14.3 billion to acquire 49% of Scale AI. Zuckerberg’s condition was that — Alexandr Wang, the key figure behind Scale AI, who was only 28 at the time, must join Meta. Alexandr Wang subsequently joined Meta, taking charge of Meta's AI development team, the 'Superintelligence Lab' (Meta Superintelligence Labs, MSL).

On the night of April 8, Zuckerberg's bold bet paid off as 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. It is the most powerful model Meta has released to date. During training, MSL observed predictable scaling improvements in pre-training, reinforcement learning, and reasoning during testing phases.

Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to Chinese immigrant parents. Growing up, Scott Wu actively participated in programming and math competitions, winning three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, including securing the top position in 2014.

After graduating from high school, Scott Wu attended Harvard University but dropped out after two years. While an undergraduate at Harvard College, he was part of the university team that competed in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), where they won a gold medal and ranked third overall.

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

In 2024, the Cognition team launched Devin, the world's first autonomous AI software engineer, capable of independently completing code writing, testing, and deployment, while supporting task decomposition and collaboration on complex tasks, demonstrating significantly superior performance to GPT-4 in SWE-bench benchmark tests. In May of the same year, Cognition raised $175 million led by Founders Fund, founded by Peter Thiel, bringing its post-money valuation to $2 billion. In September 2025, Cognition raised another $400 million, increasing its valuation to $10.2 billion.

By early 2026, Cognition’s annualized revenue reached $400 million.

Like Scott Wu, Johnny Ho, who graduated from Harvard, won the International Olympiad in Informatics three times, ranking first in 2012 with a perfect score.

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 services, citing sources for its answers and offering relevant follow-up suggestions.

By 2023, Perplexity's monthly traffic had reached 10 million; by April 2024, its monthly active users had grown to approximately 15 million. In the same year, Perplexity began aggressive fundraising. In the fourth round of financing at the end of the year, it raised $500 million, reaching a valuation of $9 billion; in July 2025, Perplexity completed another $1 billion funding round, raising its valuation to $18 billion.

Notably, Perplexity initiated several bold acquisition proposals akin to 'a snake swallowing an elephant' (with venture capitalists willing to back them), including an offer to acquire TikTok in early 2025, proposing to merge Perplexity, TikTok’s US operations, and new capital partners into a single entity. In August 2025, it proposed to acquire Google's core product, Chrome browser, for $34.5 billion.

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

Jesse Zhang, also born in 1997, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since high school, Jesse Zhang was a typical 'competition enthusiast' — twice selected for the USA Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP), a finalist in Intel STS, and participated in MIT’s RSI research program. After entering Harvard, Jesse Zhang completed a four-year university curriculum in just three years.

In 2018, Jesse Zhang co-founded Lowkey, a platform for sharing gaming highlights, which secured seed funding from Y Combinator and Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Niantic, the developer of Pokémon GO, with the acquisition price undisclosed.

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

In June 2024, Decagon, newly established, quickly secured $35 million in funding, 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 its Series B round. In June 2025, it completed a Series C round of $131 million, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion. By January 2026, the company had completed a Series D round of $250 million, with its valuation skyrocketing to $4.5 billion. Alongside the rising valuation was Decagon's increasing revenue capability; by the end of 2025, the company reported annual revenue exceeding $30 million.

Demi Guo was born in Hangzhou, China, in 1999 and moved to Silicon Valley, USA, with her family during her 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. She later dropped out of Stanford University’s doctoral program to focus on entrepreneurship in generative AI for video content creation.

In April 2023, Demi Guo co-founded Pika with Chenlin Meng, where Demi serves as CEO. Pika focuses on developing AI technology for video generation, with core products including Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 models, which support 3D animation, anime, cartoons, and cinematic style generation, offering features like video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.

On the funding side, Pika completed a $20 million seed round before its official launch. It then raised $35 million in Series A funding in November 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In June 2024, Pika closed an $80 million Series B round at a valuation of $470 million, led by Spark Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and actor Jared Leto, among others.

Steven Hao, who graduated from the mathematics department of MIT, also won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He was previously a partner of Alexandr Wang at Scale AI but has now joined Scott Wu's Cognition as CTO. Both companies have been introduced earlier, so there is no need for further elaboration here.

According to Forbes, Steven Hao, aged just 30, is estimated to have amassed a personal fortune of $1.3 billion.

I once considered giving this small circle a new name similar to the 'PayPal Mafia,' such as calling them the 'Hudson River Mafia' or the broader 'Olympiad Mafia'... Although the historical context and story trajectories are completely different, they seem to share the same spiritual core as the previous generation’s 'PayPal Mafia'— behind the bonds formed in high-level competitions lies a shared pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and system reengineering capabilities, along with a profound foresight into where the future begins.

The new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped into the spotlight. What lies ahead of them is the far more challenging question than Aosai: 'How will AI reshape the world?' This is their battlefield and also their stage.

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