A new generation of PayPal Mafia? Meta AI's head and Hyperliquid's founder emerged from HRT interns.

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

On October 19, Meta's Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, posted a selfie in the mountains on X with the caption: "got the HRT gang back together!"

The other two people in the photo are Jeff Yan, founder of Hyperliquid, and Scott Wu, co-founder and CEO of Cognition. The three interned at the quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading ten years ago and are now at the forefront of three different fields: AI foundational models, on-chain trading, and AI programming.

The group photo quickly went viral in both Chinese and English online communities. Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong called it the "photo of the century." Some also believe that top quantitative firms are becoming the "Whampoa Military Academy" for Silicon Valley's new generation of founders, essentially screening out a round of talent for Silicon Valley for free.

The winter of ten interns is seen as the starting point of a new generation of PayPal Mafia.

This experience became widely known after an interview with Jeff Yan by the American business magazine Colossus in April of this year.

According to Jeff Yan's recollection, he was selected for HRT's first internship program during the winter of his junior year at Harvard. There were only 10 people in that cohort. The program lasted three weeks and was conducted in a competitive format. He and Scott Wu were almost always the top two in each round.

Among the interns of the same year, besides Jeff Yan and Scott Wu, there was Alexandr Wang, who was studying at MIT at the time, and Jesse Zhang, who later founded the AI customer service company Decagon.

HRT, headquartered in New York, is a well-known high-frequency trading firm on Wall Street. Jeff Yan later stated that he chose quantitative trading because trading is the purest form of real-world competition between real people.

According to Colossus, it was around that time that 19-year-old Alexandr Wang, while talking about the PayPal Mafia at a friend's gathering, asked everyone why it couldn't be us.

Ten years later, this quote is still being cited repeatedly. Looking at the resumes of the three individuals, their paths have been drastically different.

Jeff Yan brought traders' intuition to the blockchain.

Of the three, Jeff Yan is the only one who actually makes a living from trading.

He grew up in California, won a gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad in high school, and then completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics and his master's degree in computer science at Harvard. After graduation, he joined HRT full-time to develop algorithms for US stocks, but left the company eight months later.

In 2020, Jeff Yan founded the crypto market maker Chameleon Trading. After FTX collapsed in 2022, he decided to shut down the original business and lead the team to build their own trading infrastructure, which is Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid runs on a self-built Layer 1 blockchain, with its order book and matching processes all on-chain. It started with perpetual contracts and is gradually expanding to more asset classes. The project was launched with its own funds and has not accepted venture capital.

According to Colossus, the Hyperliquid team consists of only 11 people and generated over $900 million in profit in 2025, making it one of the most profitable organizations per capita in the world.

The market capitalization of HYPE is often used to measure the size of Hyperliquid. Based on a price of approximately $80 on October 19, the fully diluted valuation corresponding to the maximum supply of approximately 1 billion HYPE tokens is close to $80 billion, while the actual circulating market capitalization is only a part of that.

Scott Wu uses competition methods to program AI.

Scott Wu has the most outstanding competitive results among the three.

He was born in 1997 into a Chinese immigrant family in Louisiana and won the International Olympiad in Informatics for three consecutive years from 2012 to 2014.

He left Harvard after studying there for about two years and co-founded the professional networking platform Lunchclub. In 2023, he co-founded Cognition with fellow IOI gold medalists Steven Hao and Walden Yan, and launched Devin, an AI software engineer, the following March.

Cognition subsequently entered a period of rapid expansion. In 2025, the company acquired the AI programming tool Windsurf, and in May of this year, it raised over $1 billion at a valuation of $26 billion.

On September 8, Cognition announced the completion of a Series E funding round exceeding $2 billion, raising its valuation to $48 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. The company stated that its annualized revenue has increased from $492 million in May to nearly $900 million.

Wealth followed. According to Forbes' 2026 list of America's 400 richest people, Cognition co-founder and CTO Steven Hao made the list with a net worth of $5.8 billion, making him the youngest member at 30 years old.

Alexandr Wang went from selling shovels to becoming the center of Meta AI.

Alexandr Wang is probably the most well-known of the three.

He was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1997 to parents who were both physicists at the local national laboratory.

He left MIT shortly after graduation to start his own business, co-founding Scale AI with Lucy Guo in 2016. The company started with data annotation, providing training data and model evaluation services to AI companies, and gradually became an important supplier in the large model industry chain.

In June 2025, Meta acquired approximately 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion, valuing the company at approximately $29 billion. Wang subsequently stepped down as CEO of Scale AI and joined Meta as Chief AI Officer, leading the newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs.

His year at Meta was far from peaceful. According to a New York Times report in March, Zuckerberg restructured the AI team and narrowed Wang's direct oversight, with Wang disagreeing with Meta executives Andrew Bosworth and Chris Cox on AI direction.

The turning point came from the product cycle. Meta Super Intelligence Lab released Muse Spark in April, launched the Muse personal AI assistant application in September, and introduced the Muse Wonder series of models in October.

According to Forbes estimates, Wang's net worth was approximately $3.2 billion as of early October.

The Olympiad circle is the true starting point of this network of relationships.

After the HRT (Human Resources and Technology) claim spread, many people felt that this case demonstrated the strength of Chinese people. However, a more accurate statement is that the pathway of US Olympiad + top universities + quantitative firms is extremely efficient at screening second-generation Chinese Americans/immigrant families, and these individuals have now caught the window of opportunity presented by the simultaneous explosion of AI and blockchain finance.

Scott Wu himself also stated that the HRT internship was not the starting point of this group's friendship; many of them had known each other since high school through the Olympic competitions.

The names that have emerged from this circle are equally impressive. Johnny Ho, co-founder of Perplexity, Demi Guo, co-founder of Pika, and Steven Hao, co-founder of Cognition, all came from the same group of competitors.

From this perspective, HRT is more like a convergence point. Top quantitative firms have long preferred to recruit from Olympiad winners, and these young people were already in the same small circle. That internship simply put them in the same office for three weeks.

Afterward, they went their separate ways into AI, encryption, and software engineering, but their work had similarities. Scale AI rebuilt the AI data supply chain, Hyperliquid rebuilt on-chain exchanges, and Cognition attempted to rebuild the act of writing code itself.

Of course, the fact that four out of ten people became well-known founders only seems remarkable in hindsight. The whereabouts of the other interns are rarely reported, and many more in the competition circle did not pursue the path of entrepreneurship.

But at least on this day, the three people in the group photo belonged to Meta, Hyperliquid, and Cognition respectively, and the question "Why can't it be us?" from when they were 19 years old already had an answer.

Source:Global Cybersecurity Alliance (GCSA)
Website:www.gcsa.org