Hyperliquid founder's circle exposed: this group of "Olympic gold medalists" is dominating the Silicon Valley AI scene

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Yesterday, a feature interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan on Colossos magazine went viral across the internet (Read more: 11 people, zero funding, earning $900 million annually: The crazy life of Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan).

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 quant trading giant “Hudson River Trading” (HRT), which selected 10 interns. Aside from Jeff Yan, who chose the crypto track, many of his peers from that cohort are now prominent figures in AI, including Meta AI division head Alexandr Wang, Decagon founder and CEO Jesse Zhang, and Cognition founder and CEO Scott Wu.

Odaily note: Photo of the interns shared by Jesse Zhang from that cohort

According to Scott Wu’s own additional disclosure, the HRT internship wasn’t the start of their friendship; many of them had already met in high school through Olympiad competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and others have all won gold medals), and within that small circle, there are even more notable names, including but not limited to Perplexity co-founder and CSO Johnny Ho, Pika co-founder and CEO Demi Guo, and Steven Hao, a former partner of Alexandr Wang at Scale AI…

During Jeff Yan and Scott Wu’s growth phases, the “PayPal Mafia,” represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, had already made waves in the business world, prompting others to seek out the next similar network. The small circle of Jeff Yan and his peers also discussed this topic; at 19, Alexandr Wang once told his friends, “Why can’t it be us?”

Ten years later, it seems Alexandr Wang’s bold ambitions are coming true. Leveraging AI, this group of young people by Hudson River is stirring up the era in their own way.

Alexandr Wang: Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Brain

Alexandr Wang is perhaps the most well-known among this circle. Born in 1997 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He is of Chinese immigrant descent; his parents were physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory — the site where the United States secretly developed its first atomic bomb during WWII.

From a young age, Alexandr Wang was passionate about math and programming. In 2013, he qualified for the Math Olympiad Program, in 2014 for the US Physics Team, and in 2012 and 2013, he reached the finals of the US Computing Olympiad.

In 2015, Wang dropped out of MIT and a year later founded Scale AI, which annotated data used to train AI in computer vision and audio transcription. Riding the wave of AI’s explosion, Scale AI’s valuation soared, reaching $7.3 billion in 2021. With a 15% stake, Wang’s personal wealth surpassed $1 billion.

In June 2025, Meta, which had fallen behind in AI competitions, invested $14.3 billion to acquire 49% of Scale AI. Mark Zuckerberg’s condition was that Wang, then only 28, had to join Meta. Wang immediately joined Meta, taking charge of the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Meta’s AI development team.

On the night of April 8, Zuckerberg’s bold gamble paid off as MSL officially released its first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model supporting tool invocation, visual chain reasoning, and multi-agent orchestration. It is Meta’s most powerful model to date, and during training, MSL observed predictable scale improvements in pretraining, reinforcement learning, and inference testing phases.

Scott Wu: Olympiad Genius, Creator of a Billion-Dollar AI Startup

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

After high school, Wu attended Harvard University but dropped out after two years. During his undergraduate years, he was part of Harvard’s ICPC team in 2016, which won a gold medal and ranked third overall.

In 2019, Wu co-founded Lunchclub, a social platform, serving as CTO. In 2023, he co-founded Cognition with friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both Olympiad gold medalists), serving as CEO.

In 2024, Cognition launched Devin, the world’s first autonomous AI software engineer capable of coding, testing, deploying, and breaking down complex tasks for collaboration, outperforming GPT-4 on the SWE-bench benchmark. In May of the same year, Cognition raised $175 million led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with a post-money valuation of $2 billion; by September 2025, it raised another $400 million, pushing its valuation to $10.2 billion.

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

Johnny Ho: Net worth $2.1 billion, once aimed to acquire TikTok and Chrome

Like Scott Wu, Johnny Ho, a Harvard graduate, also won three IOI gold medals, 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 is an AI search engine offering conversational search with citations and related question suggestions.

By March 2023, Perplexity’s monthly visits reached 10 million; by April 2024, monthly active users hit about 15 million. That year, Perplexity launched aggressive fundraising, raising $5 million in its fourth round at the end of the year with a valuation of $9 billion; in July 2025, it completed a $100 million Series D at a valuation of $18 billion.

Notably, Perplexity has made several bold “whale swallowing” acquisition proposals (with venture capital willing to fund), including a 2025 bid to acquire TikTok, aiming to merge Perplexity, TikTok’s US operations, and new capital partners into a new entity, and in August 2025, proposing to Google to buy its core product Chrome for $34.5 billion.

According to Forbes, Perplexity’s current valuation is $20 billion, and Johnny Ho’s personal wealth has reached $2.1 billion.

Jesse Zhang: AI startup in three years, valuation $4.5 billion

Jesse Zhang, born in 1997 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been a “competition fanatic” since high school — twice selected for the US Math Olympiad Program (MOP), a finalist in Intel STS, and participated in MIT’s RSI research project. At Harvard, he completed four years of coursework in just three.

In 2018, Jesse Zhang co-founded Lowkey, a gaming highlight sharing platform, which received seed funding from Y Combinator and Series A from a16z. In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Pokémon GO developer Niantic, though the purchase price was not disclosed.

In 2023, Jesse Zhang and partner Ashwin Sreenivas founded Decagon, focusing on automating enterprise customer service with AI agents to reduce high labor costs and improve efficiency.

By June 2024, Decagon had quickly raised $35 million, including a $5 million seed led by a16z and a $30 million Series A from Accel. Four months later, it raised $65 million in Series B; in June 2025, a Series C of $131 million pushed its valuation to $1.5 billion; by January 2026, Series D brought in $250 million, with valuation soaring to $4.5 billion. Revenue also grew rapidly, surpassing $30 million annually by the end of 2025.

Demi Guo: Hangzhou-born AI video generation pioneer

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

She won a silver medal at the 2015 IOI. She graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s in mathematics and a master’s in computer science, then dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program to focus on entrepreneurial ventures in generative AI video content.

In April 2023, Demi Guo co-founded Pika with Chenlin Meng, serving as CEO. Pika develops video generation AI tech, with core products including Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 supporting 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and film styles, offering features like video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.

Before launch, Pika completed $20 million seed funding; in November 2023, it raised $35 million in Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; in June 2024, at a $470 million valuation, it closed an $80 million Series B with Spark Capital, Greycroft, Lightspeed, and celebrity Jared Leto participating.

Steven Hao: AI tech genius with over $1 billion net worth

Steven Hao, a MIT mathematics graduate, also won an IOI gold medal. He was a partner of Alexandr Wang at Scale AI and now serves as CTO at Scott Wu’s Cognition. Both companies have been detailed earlier.

Forbes estimates Hao’s personal wealth at $1.3 billion at just 30 years old.

Epilogue: We may be witnessing a new legend

I’ve thought about giving this small circle a new nickname similar to “PayPal Mafia,” maybe calling them “Hudson River Mafia,” or a broader “Olympiad Mafia”… Though the background and story are entirely different, they seem to share the same core spirit as the “PayPal Mafia” — behind high-stakes camaraderie, what truly connects them is a shared pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and systemic reconstruction, along with a deep foresight about where the future begins.

The new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped into the spotlight. The challenge before them is “how AI will reshape the world,” a far more difficult question than Olympiads. This is their battlefield, and their stage.