The "PayPal Mafia" of the AI era, from an internship to a net worth of billions
Original | Odaily Planet Daily Azuma
Yesterday, the special feature interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan by Colossos magazine went viral online (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 internship program of the quantitative trading giant "Hudson River Trading" (HRT), where a total of 10 interns were selected. Apart from Jeff Yan, who chose the cryptocurrency track, several of his fellow interns have now become well-known figures in the AI field, including Alexandr Wang, head of Meta AI's business line, Jesse Zhang, founder and CEO of Decagon, and Scott Wu, founder and CEO of Cognition.
Odaily Note: Group photo of the interns shared by Jesse Zhang
According to Scott Wu's own additional disclosure, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of their friendship; many of them had already met during high school due to the Olympic competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and several others have won gold medals), and that small circle included many other notable 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 partner at Scale AI...
During the growth phase of Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and others, the "PayPal Mafia," represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, was making waves in the business world, and people began to look for the next similar network of special relationships. Jeff Yan and his circle had discussed this topic, and 19-year-old Alexandr Wang once asked his friends, "Why can't it be us?"
Ten years later, Alexandr Wang's bold words seem to be coming true. Leveraging AI, this group of young people by the Hudson River is stirring up 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 worked as physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory—where the first atomic bomb was secretly developed during World War II.
From a young age, Alexandr Wang was passionate about mathematics and programming. He qualified for the Math Olympiad program in 2013, earned a spot on the U.S. Physics Team in 2014, and reached the finals of the U.S. Computing Olympiad in both 2012 and 2013.
In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded Scale AI a year later, which annotates data used for training AI in computer vision and audio transcription. Riding the wave of the AI boom, Scale AI's valuation soared, reaching $7.3 billion in 2021, and Alexandr Wang, holding 15% of the shares, saw his net worth surpass $1 billion.
In June 2025, Meta, clearly lagging in the AI race, spent $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, with the additional condition that Alexandr Wang, then just 28 years old and the soul of Scale AI, must join Meta. Alexandr Wang subsequently joined Meta, taking charge of the AI development team "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL).
On the night of April 8, Zuckerberg's gamble 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 reasoning, and multi-agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has released to date, and during training, MSL observed predictable scalable improvements in reasoning during pre-training, reinforcement learning, and testing phases.
Scott Wu: Olympiad Master, Creator of a $10 Billion AI Startup
Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to a family of Chinese immigrants. Growing up, Scott Wu actively participated in programming and mathematics competitions, winning three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, including first place in 2014.
After graduating from high school, Scott Wu attended Harvard University but dropped out two years later. While studying at Harvard, he was a member of the university team that won a gold medal in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), achieving a total ranking of third.
In 2019, Scott Wu co-founded the social platform Lunchclub as co-founder and CTO. In 2023, he co-founded Cognition with friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both Olympic gold medalists), serving as CEO.
In 2024, the Cognition team launched the world's first autonomous AI software engineer, Devin, which can independently write, test, and deploy code, and supports the breakdown and collaboration of complex tasks, significantly outperforming GPT-4 in SWE-bench benchmark tests. In May of the same year, Cognition raised $175 million in funding led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, achieving a post-money valuation of $2 billion; in September 2025, Cognition raised another $400 million, with the company's valuation soaring to $10.2 billion.
By early 2026, Cognition's annualized revenue level had reached $400 million.
Johnny Ho: $2.1 Billion Net Worth, Once Considered Acquiring TikTok and Chrome
Like Scott Wu, Harvard graduate Johnny Ho has 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 is positioned as an AI search engine company that provides conversational search engine services, displaying citation sources for its answers and offering 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 began aggressive fundraising, raising $5 million in its fourth funding round at the end of the year, achieving a valuation of $9 billion; in July 2025, Perplexity completed another $100 million funding round, raising its valuation to $18 billion.
Notably, Perplexity has initiated several bold acquisition proposals at the "elephant swallowing snake" level (with venture capitalists willing to fund), including a bid to acquire TikTok in early 2025, intending to merge Perplexity, TikTok's U.S. operations, and new capital partners into a new entity, and in August 2025, proposing to Google to spend $34.5 billion to acquire its core product, the Chrome browser.
According to the latest data from Forbes, Perplexity's current valuation has reached $20 billion, and Johnny Ho's personal wealth has reached $2.1 billion.
Jesse Zhang: Three Years in AI Entrepreneurship, Valuation of $4.5 Billion
Jesse Zhang was also born in 1997 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Starting in high school, Jesse Zhang was a typical "competition fanatic"—he was selected for the U.S. Math Olympiad program (MOP) twice, reached the finals of the Intel STS, and participated in MIT's RSI research program. 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, which 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, with the specific acquisition price not disclosed.
In 2023, Jesse Zhang and partner Ashwin Sreenivas co-founded Decagon, focusing on automating enterprise customer service with AI agents to solve the high labor costs and low efficiency of customer service centers.
In June 2024, the newly established Decagon quickly secured $35 million in funding, including $5 million in seed funding led by a16z and $30 million in Series A funding led by Accel; four months later, Decagon raised $65 million in Series B funding; in June 2025, it raised $131 million in Series C funding, with its valuation soaring to $1.5 billion; in January 2026, it raised $250 million in Series D funding, with its valuation skyrocketing to $4.5 billion... Alongside the rising valuation, Decagon's revenue capability has also increased, with the company disclosing an annual revenue capability exceeding $30 million by the end of 2025.
Demi Guo: 95-Post in
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