The AI Era’s 'PayPal Mafia' Rises from Internships to Billion-Dollar Valuations

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Yesterday, a feature interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan in Colossos magazine went viral online (see «Jeff Yan’s “The 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 only 10 interns were selected. Among that cohort, several individuals, apart from Jeff Yan who chose the cryptocurrency path, have since 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: The group photo of this year’s interns shared by Jesse Zhang

According to Scott Wu’s additional disclosure, HRT’s internship program was not the starting point of their friendship; many of them had already met in high school through Olympic competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and others had all won gold medals), and that small circle included many 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, Alexander Wang’s former partner at Scale AI…

During the formative years of Jeff Yan and Scott Wu, the “PayPal Mafia,” represented by figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, had already made a major impact in the business world, and people began searching for the next similar network of influential connections. Jeff Yan’s small circle had also discussed this topic, and at age 19, Alexandr Wang once asked his peers: “Why not us?”

Ten years later, Alexandr Wang’s bold claims now seem to be coming true. Empowered by AI, these young people by the Hudson River are shaking up this era in their own way.

Alexandr Wang may be the most well-known figure 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; he qualified for the Mathematical Olympiad Program in 2013, 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 MIT and, a year later, founded Scale AI to annotate 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 by 2021, making Alexandr Wang, who held a 15% stake, a billionaire.

In June 2025, Meta, clearly falling behind in the AI race, spent $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, with Zuckerberg’s condition being that Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s key figure and then only 28 years old, must join Meta. Alexandr Wang subsequently joined Meta and began overseeing Meta’s AI development team, the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

On the night of April 8, Zuckerberg's gamble paid off as MSL officially launched its first proprietary AI model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model supporting tool invocation, visual chain-of-thought, and multi-agent orchestration. It is the most powerful model Meta has ever released; during training, MSL observed predictable scaling improvements across pre-training, reinforcement learning, and inference testing phases.

Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to Chinese immigrant parents. During his upbringing, Scott Wu actively participated in programming and mathematics competitions, earning three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, including first place in 2014.

After graduating from high school, Scott Wu enrolled at Harvard University and dropped out two years later. While an undergraduate at Harvard College, he competed as a team member in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), where the team won a gold medal and ranked third overall.

In 2019, Scott Wu co-founded the social platform Lunchclub as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. In 2023, Scott Wu, along with friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both Olympic gold medalists), co-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 writing, testing, and deploying code, while supporting the decomposition and collaboration on complex tasks, significantly outperforming GPT-4 on the SWE-bench benchmark. In May of the same year, Cognition secured $175 million in funding led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, achieving a post-money valuation of $2 billion; in September 2025, Cognition raised an additional $400 million, pushing its valuation to $10.2 billion.

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

Like Scott Wu, Johnny Ho, a Harvard graduate, won three gold medals at 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 a conversational search experience, displaying cited sources and suggesting related questions.

In 2023, Perplexity reached 10 million monthly visits; by April 2024, its monthly active users had grown to approximately 15 million. In the same year, Perplexity embarked on an aggressive fundraising campaign, raising $500 million in its fourth round by year-end, achieving a $9 billion valuation; in July 2025, Perplexity completed another $100 million funding round, raising its valuation to $18 billion.

Notably, Perplexity has made several bold acquisition proposals of the “giant swallowing the dwarf” variety—with venture capital backing—including an offer in early 2025 to acquire TikTok, aiming to merge Perplexity, TikTok’s U.S. operations, and new capital partners into a single new entity, and a proposal in August 2025 to purchase Google’s core product, the Chrome browser, for $34.5 billion.

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

Jesse Zhang, also born in 1997, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. From high school, Jesse Zhang was a classic "competition enthusiast"—selected twice for the Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP), reaching the finals of the Intel Science Talent Search, and participating in MIT’s RSI research program. After entering Harvard, Jesse Zhang completed four years of undergraduate coursework in just three years.

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

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

In June 2024, the newly established Decagon 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 $65 million in its Series B round; in June 2025, it raised $131 million in its Series C round, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion; in January 2026, it raised $250 million in its Series D round, with its valuation surging to $4.5 billion... Alongside the rising valuation, Decagon’s revenue capabilities also grew significantly; by the end of 2025, the company disclosed annual revenue potential exceeding $30 million.

Demi Guo was born in Hangzhou, China, in 1999 and moved with her family to Silicon Valley, USA, 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, before leaving Stanford’s PhD program to focus on entrepreneurship in generative AI video content creation.

In April 2023, Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng co-founded Pika, with Demi Guo serving as CEO. Pika focuses on developing video generation AI technology, with core products including the Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 models that support the generation of 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and cinematic styles, offering features such as video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.

In terms of funding, Pika secured a $20 million seed round prior to its official launch, followed by a $35 million Series A round in November 2023 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In June 2024, Pika completed an $80 million Series B round at a $470 million valuation, led by Spark Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and actor Jared Leto.

Steven Hao, a graduate of the Mathematics Department at MIT, also won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He was previously a partner of Alexandr Wang at Scale AI and has now joined Scott Wu’s Cognition as CTO. Both companies have been introduced in detail earlier, so further elaboration is not repeated here.

According to Forbes, Steven Hao, only 30 years old, is now estimated to have a personal net worth of $1.3 billion.

I’ve thought of giving this small circle a new name similar to the “PayPal Mafia,” like the “Hudson River Mafia” or something broader like the “Ossian Mafia”… Although the historical context and narrative arc are entirely different, they seem to share the same core spirit as the previous generation’s “PayPal Mafia”—beneath the bonds of intense camaraderie, what truly unites them is a shared pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and system rearchitecting, along with a profound foresight into where the future begins.

The new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped onto the stage. Before them lies a challenge far greater than the Olympiad: “How will AI reshape the world?” This is their battlefield and their stage.