New PayPal Gang: 10 Interns, 100 Billion Dollars

Author: Xiaobing
On October 19, 2026, Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang posted a selfie on X with a caption of just seven words: got the HRT gang back together!

The comments section exploded.

This seemingly casual group photo hides one of the most outrageous facts in today's tech world: the three people in the photo, along with a few absent classmates, participated together in the inaugural internship program of Wall Street quantitative trading giant Hudson River Trading in the winter of 2015, which only recruited 10 people in total.

Ten years later, the companies founded or led by these 10 interns have a combined valuation of over $100 billion.

On the right side of the photo is Wang himself, 29 years old, founder of Scale AI, who was lured to Meta by Mark Zuckerberg for $14.3 billion last year to serve as Chief AI Officer, steering Meta's Super Intelligence Lab.

On the left is Jeff Yan, founder of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange built by an 11-person team with zero funding, which made a profit of $900 million last year, with a project valuation reaching $76 billion.

In the middle is Scott Wu, founder and CEO of Cognition, whose AI programming agent Devin is growing its enterprise customer base at a rate of 50% per month, with the company's latest valuation at $48 billion.

The last time the three were in the same room together was probably still that winter of 2015, in the trading company's office by the Hudson River.

Winter by the Hudson River

The bond among these geniuses began in high school.

Jeff Yan and Scott Wu both won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), with Wu winning gold three times and topping the competition in 2014 with a perfect score. Alexandr Wang was a regular at the American Computer Olympiad and Math Olympiad, and they repeatedly met at various summer camps and training teams, in a circle small enough that almost everyone knew each other.

In the winter of 2015, these competition prodigies scattered across Harvard and MIT were brought together by a common name: Hudson River Trading.

HRT is one of the world's top quantitative trading firms, headquartered in New York, with a daily trading volume that once accounted for over 15% of the U.S. stock market.

In the winter of 2015, HRT attempted to recruit interns for the first time. The spots were extremely limited, with only 10 available. Jeff Yan was a junior at Harvard at the time, Scott Wu was a freshman, and Alexandr Wang was a freshman at MIT.

The design of this internship program was itself very "quantitative": lasting three weeks and conducted in a competition format, with rankings in each round. According to Jeff Yan's later recollection, the top two in every round were always him and Scott Wu.

But perhaps the most historically significant moment of this internship was not the trading competition itself. According to an in-depth interview with Jeff Yan by Colossus magazine, it was during his internship at HRT that he first heard about Bitcoin through the recommendation of two former partners. Although he did not act on it immediately, he soon found the Ethereum white paper and read a description: a computer that runs globally and cannot be shut down, that seed grew into Hyperliquid years later.

Also that winter, 19-year-old Alexandr Wang said something at his birthday party to his Harvard and MIT classmates that would be quoted repeatedly:

"Why can't it be us?"

Three Paths, One Origin

After leaving HRT's office, these young people chose completely different tracks. But they share a common underlying logic: reconstructing a traditional industry with algorithmic thinking.

Alexandr Wang: From Data Labeling to Zuckerberg's AI Brain

After leaving HRT, Wang made a surprising decision: to drop out of MIT.

In 2016, at the age of 19, he co-founded Scale AI with Lucy Guo, doing something that sounds anything but sexy: labeling training data for AI. But Wang's judgment was extremely precise: he skipped over specific AI applications and directly bet on the "shovels" of the entire AI industry.

As the AI wave swept the globe, Scale AI became a core supplier for giants like OpenAI, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. By 2021, the company's valuation soared to $7.3 billion, making 24-year-old Wang the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. In a 2024 funding round, Scale AI's valuation reached $13.8 billion, backed by Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta.

Then came the deal in June 2025 that shook Silicon Valley. Meta acquired 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion, with an overall valuation of $29 billion. As a core condition of the deal, Zuckerberg required Wang to join Meta as Chief AI Officer, leading the newly established "Meta Super Intelligence Lab."

A 28-year-old became the commander of the AI strategy for the world's largest social media empire.

Jeff Yan: From Quant Trader to Builder of On-Chain Financial Infrastructure

If Wang chose the "shovel business" of AI, Jeff Yan opted for the hardest path in the crypto world: rebuilding trading infrastructure.

After graduating from Harvard, Yan did not rush to start a business. He worked at Google and a self-driving car company while continuously observing the crypto world. In 2020, he founded Chameleon Trading, a cryptocurrency market maker. This experience gave him a deep understanding of the structural flaws of centralized exchanges, and the collapse of FTX gave him a decisive push.

In 2022, Yan disbanded the Chameleon team and began using his own funds to build Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetual contract exchange running on the blockchain. No VC investment, no token presale, an 11-person team starting from scratch.

This "anti-VC" path is almost unheard of in the crypto industry. Yan's confidence comes from the trading profits accumulated by Chameleon, and even more from the extreme pursuit of product quality by quantitative traders: low latency, high throughput, and user experience that approaches or even exceeds centralized exchanges.

ICE's CEO Jeffrey Sprecher once stated that Hyperliquid's trading activity "surpassed that of Nasdaq."

Today, Hyperliquid is one of the most profitable companies per capita in the world. Last year, the company's 11 employees generated over $900 million in profit. Founded just four years ago, its valuation has reached $76 billion.

Scott Wu: The One Who Lets AI Write Code

Scott Wu is the most formidable competitor among this group. Three IOI gold medals, crowned with a perfect score in 2014, a MathCounts national champion, and third place in Google Code Jam. After studying at Harvard for two years, he dropped out and co-founded the AI social networking platform Lunchclub.

But what truly made him famous in Silicon Valley was the founding of Cognition at the end of 2023 with Steven Hao and Walden Yan (the three collectively hold 5 IOI gold medals). In March 2024, Cognition launched Devin, touted as the "world's first AI software engineer," capable of independently planning, writing, testing, and deploying code.

Devin sparked significant controversy in the tech community, but the market provided its own answer: Cognition's valuation skyrocketed from $350 million in early 2024 to $10.2 billion in September 2025, and then to $26 billion in May 2026 (raising $1 billion), with annual revenue surging from $5.4 million in mid-2024 to nearly $500 million in mid-2026.

By September 2026, annual revenue was approaching $1 billion, with the latest valuation reportedly reaching $48 billion. Wu himself stated that over 90% of Cognition's internal code is now written by Devin.

A three-year-old startup, with a valuation increase from $350 million to $48 billion, rising more than 130 times.

More Than Three People

The selfie today features only three people, but this circle is much larger than a single photo can contain.

According to Scott Wu, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of this group's friendship. Many of them had already met through various Olympiad competitions in high school. The names that extend from that small circle each occupy a place in today's tech landscape.

Jesse Zhang, one of the HRT interns. His previous social gaming company Lowkey was acquired by Niantic (the developer of Pokémon Go). In 2023, he founded Decagon, an AI customer service agent company focused on replacing enterprise customer service with AI. The company has been established for less than three years and has reached a valuation of $4.5 billion, with clients including Duolingo and Hertz, and was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2026.

Johnny Ho, a three-time IOI gold medalist and Harvard alumnus. He met Scott Wu and Jeff Yan in high school. In the group photo of the U.S. IOI team in 2013, he stood alongside Steven Hao and Scott Wu.

After leaving the competition circle, Ho worked as a quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital and then joined Quora as an engineer. In 2022, he co-founded the AI search engine Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas and others, currently serving as co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. Perplexity's latest funding round reportedly valued the company at about $30 billion, redefining the trillion-dollar search engine market.

Demi Guo, a "genius girl" from Hangzhou, is a silver medalist at the 2015 IOI. She holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer science from Harvard and was the youngest full-time researcher at Meta AI Research. In 2023, she dropped out of the Stanford PhD program and co-founded the AI video generation platform Pika with her classmate Chenlin Meng, which is valued at $470 million and has over 16 million users. She has interned at HRT and Quora, and is part of the same circle.

Steven Hao, a gold medalist at the 2014 IOI, graduated from the MIT Department of Mathematics. He was an early core engineer during Alexandr Wang's time at Scale AI and later joined Scott Wu's Cognition as co-founder and CTO. According to Forbes estimates, 30-year-old Hao has a personal net worth of approximately $1.3 billion, making him the youngest American on the 2026 Forbes 400 list.

Hao's trajectory clearly illustrates the "talent flow" within this circle: he brought the engineering experience and understanding of AI data he accumulated at Scale AI into Cognition. The three founders of Cognition, Wu, Hao, and Walden Yan, collectively hold 5 IOI gold medals, and they infused the algorithmic thinking honed in competitions directly into the core architecture of AI programming agents.

Why Have Quantitative Trading Firms Become Cradles for Founders?

This is not a coincidence.

When Wang retweeted a group photo of interns from 2015 at the beginning of October this year, he added a comment: "HRT 2015 intern class is the new-gen PayPal Mafia."

The story of the PayPal Mafia is well-known. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, and others emerged from the same company to create Tesla, Palantir, LinkedIn, Yammer, and other companies, defining the technological landscape of the last decade.

However, there is a fundamental difference between this group from HRT and the PayPal Mafia. The bond among the PayPal Mafia is a company and a shared entrepreneurial experience. The bond among the HRT group is earlier and deeper; they share a way of thinking.

What does it mean to come from a competitive background?

It means they have been trained since their teenage years to solve problems with optimal solutions, possess an almost obsessive pursuit of efficiency, and have an intuitive understanding of complex systems. Quantitative trading firms are natural amplifiers of this way of thinking: at HRT, they learned how to extract signals from massive noise, make decisions within millisecond time windows, and build self-optimizing systems.

Jesse Zhang wrote in an article: "The generation that grew up doing math, programming, and science competitions occupies a disproportionately high share among today's founders."

Quantitative trading firms serve as a crucial springboard for this group transitioning from the competition circle to the entrepreneurial circle. Jane Street, Citadel, DE Shaw, Two Sigma—these names are backed by similar stories, but the concentration from the HRT class of 2015 is indeed exceptionally high.

Out of 10 interns, at least 4 became unicorn founders, with a combined company valuation exceeding $100 billion. This "talent conversion rate" surpasses that of tech giants like Google and Meta, known for producing AI talent.

The deeper reason may lie in the fact that these quantitative trading firms provide not only technical training but also an instinctive understanding of market structures. Wang applied this understanding to AI data infrastructure, Yan to on-chain financial infrastructure, Wu to software engineering automation, Zhang to customer service reconstruction, and Ho to search engine disruption.

They solve different problems, but their approach to deconstructing problems is remarkably similar: find an inefficient system and rebuild it using algorithms and engineering capabilities.

Geniuses always meet early. But what truly makes this story moving is not how smart they are. Competition gold medals have long proven their intelligence. What is moving is that the era has finally turned to the page that belongs to them.

What was the image of this group ten years ago? Math competition champions, programming geeks, invisible people in social settings. In the hierarchy of any American high school, they were categorized under the same term: nerd. That term was not a compliment for a long time; it meant quirky, boring, and out of touch with the mainstream.

But the world after 2024 has given nerds an unprecedented stage.

As AI becomes the underlying operating system for all industries, and as code itself begins to write code, those who can master all of this are precisely those who have lived in algorithms and formulas since childhood.

Wang, Yan, Wu, Zhang, Ho, Guo, Hao—these Chinese surnames that sound awkward when pronounced by white people have moved from the arena of competitions to the center stage of the era.

The nerds who were once looked down upon have finally welcomed their golden age.