Zhidx (WeChat public account: zhidxcom)
Author | Jiang Yu
Editor | Yun Peng
A “new Silicon Valley Mafia” made up of Wall Street quant interns has returned to the spotlight.
Zhidx reported on November 4 that the UK’s Financial Times had recently published a profile of Meta’s Chief AI Officer, 29-year-old Chinese-American entrepreneur Alexander Wang (Alexandr Wang),discussing his influence inside Meta and the possibility of one day succeeding Zuckerberg as the head of the tech giant.
Two days after the succession rumors emerged, Alexandr Wang made his presence felt once again, showing the outside world another side of himself.
On October 19, he shared a group photo on X with Cognition co-founder Scott Wu and Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan,captioning it, “Got the HRT gang back together!” (got the HRT gang back together!)
▲The group photo shared by Alexandr Wang, from left to right: Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and Alexandr Wang
The three people in the photo had all participated in the winter internship program at Wall Street quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading (HRT for short).
Today, Alexandr Wang leads Meta’s Superintelligence Labs; Cognition, the AI coding company founded by Scott Wu,is valued at $48 billion(approximately RMB 320.79 billion); and Hyperliquid, founded by Jeff Yan, has become a major platform for on-chain derivatives trading.
Another intern from their cohort back then, Jesse Zhang, has also founded anAI customer service company, Decagon, valued at $4.5 billion(approximately RMB 30.07 billion).
These young people, who met through math competitions, programming olympiads, and quantitative trading firms early in their careers, are gaining increasing influence in the AI and crypto finance industries.
In Silicon Valley, such a network of connections readily brings to mindthe PayPal Mafia, which emerged more than two decades ago.
Back then, a group of PayPal founders and early employees left the company and went on to help found companies such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, and SpaceX. Among them was Musk, who led and propelled Tesla into becoming a global electric-vehicle giant.
These entrepreneurs, who had come out of a payments company, later used venture capital to influence the rise of a generation of Silicon Valley tech companies.
I. The interns he met on his 19th birthday: one is now worth $48 billion
To understand how this “new Silicon Valley Mafia” took shape, one has to start with the shared experiences of these young people. The relationships among Alexandr Wang, Scott Wu, and Jeff Yan can be traced back a decade..
On October 11 this year, Alexandr Wang recalled an experience from his 19th birthday on David Senra’s podcast.In January 2016, he was still a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taking part in a winter internship at quantitative trading firm HRT.
He recalled that there were around 10 to 12 young people around him, mainly from Harvard University and MIT, including Jeff Yan, who later founded Hyperliquid; Scott Wu, who co-founded Cognition; and Jesse Zhang, who co-founded Decagon.
In April this year, a profile of Jeff Yan published by business media outlet Colossus shed light on the details of the internship.
According to the report, HRT’s inaugural winter internship program had 10 participants and lasted three weeks, with tasks organized in the form of a competition. Across several rounds of internal competition, Scott Wu and Jeff Yan consistently took the top two spots.
However, these individuals’ paths had crossed before the HRT internship.
In an interview with Colossus in May this year, Scott Wu revealed that he had competed in math and programming competitions in the United States since middle school, where he met Alexander Wang, Jesse Zhang, Johnny Ho—the co-founder and CSO of Perplexity—and others through national competitions and training camps.
He and Alexander Wang had been friends since middle school, and the two had even brainstormed startup ideas together back then.In Scott Wu’s recollection, Alexander Wang was the first among this group of friends to truly commit to starting a company.In 2016, Alexander Wang left MIT and co-founded Scale AI.
A few years later, the others also began pursuing entrepreneurship, but in different markets.
Scott Wu co-founded Cognition with Steven Hao and Walden Yan.In 2024, Cognition released the AI coding tool Devin, which can write and debug code based on tasks submitted by users and submit the changes for review.
From left to right: Steven Hao, Scott Wu, Walden Yan.
On September 8 this year, Cognition announced a new funding round of more than $2 billion (approximately RMB 13.36 billion), led by a16z and Accel, bringing its valuation to $48 billion (approximately RMB 320.79 billion). According to figures disclosed by the company at the time, Cognition’s annualized revenue run rate had grown from $492 million (approximately RMB 3.28 billion) in May this year to nearly $900 million (approximately RMB 6.01 billion).
On a different track, Jeff Yan chose crypto finance.
After graduating from Harvard, he officially joined HRT in the second half of 2017, working on algorithms for U.S. stock trading, but left after about eight months. He then ventured into crypto trading and launched the Hyperliquid project in 2022, building infrastructure that supports on-chain perpetual contracts and spot trading.
According to research published by digital asset manager Grayscale on October 30, Hyperliquid generated approximately $105 million (approximately RMB 700 million) in revenue in September this year.
Jesse Zhang, another member of the HRT internship cohort, set his sights on the enterprise customer service market.
In 2023, he co-founded Decagon, which primarily uses AI agents to handle inquiries and service requests from enterprise customers. On January 27 this year, Decagon announced $250 million (approximately RMB 1.67 billion) in funding led by Coatue and Index Ventures, reaching a valuation of $4.5 billion (approximately RMB 30.07 billion).
▲Decagon co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang (left) and co-founder and chairman Ashwin Sreenivas
Decagon disclosed that in the prior fiscal year it added more than 100 global enterprise customers, including car rental company Avis Budget Group, fintech Block, and Deutsche Telekom.
The young people in that same cohort of the quantitative internship program ultimately entered three different businesses: large model development, AI software services, and on-chain financial trading.
II. The man Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion to hire is already being talked about as a successor
Among this group of old classmates, Alexandr Wang has already moved from being an entrepreneur into the core management of a tech giant. Why did the rumors of succeeding Zuckerberg fall on him? It all goes back to Meta's ten-billion-dollar investment last year.
In June 2025, when Meta announced its investment in Scale AI,Alexandr Wang was only 28 years old.
The deal valued Scale AI at more than $29 billion (about RMB 193.81 billion). After the transaction closed, Alexandr Wang stepped down as CEO and joined Meta to lead its AI business, while retaining a seat on Scale AI's board.
Scale AI was founded in 2016, initiallyproviding training data annotation services for AI applications such as autonomous driving, and later expanding into large model training and evaluation.
When Alexandr Wang took over Meta's AI business, the company was facing the test of model development falling short of expectations.
On October 17, Forbes revealed the process by which Zuckerberg recruited him. According to Zuckerberg's recollection on Stripe co-founder John Collison's podcast,the two first had a call lasting about 44 minutes.
▲Alexandr Wang and Zuckerberg together at the podcast recording
Two days later, Alexandr Wang sent Zuckerberg a long memo setting out how he would restructure the team if he were put in charge of Meta's AI business. His suggestions included raising the talent density of the core team and rebuilding the R&D system.
Zuckerberg then personally took part in large-scale talent recruitment. In an interview, Alexandr Wang revealed thatthe core research team of Meta's Superintelligence Labs numbered fewer than 200 people, closer to 100, with larger infrastructure and product teams on the periphery.
In September this year, Meta launched the personal AI agent app Muse; on October 12, its Superintelligence Labs released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full.After more than a year of restructuring, Meta is now able to bring out frontier models that can be directly compared with those of its main competitors.
The authority Alexandr Wang gained at Meta has also prompted outside discussion of his long-term management prospects.
But overseeing Meta's AI development and becoming Meta's CEO are perhaps still two different things. Just four days after the Financial Times reported his potential succession, Meta disclosed a new equity structure plan.
SEC filings showthat although Zuckerberg holds only about 13.4% of the company's economic interest, he has about 60.6% of the voting power.According to the negotiations disclosed in the filing, Zuckerberg made clear that he would not support financing or other arrangements that would cost him control of the company's voting rights.
III. From old classmates to investors, two generations of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial circles have begun to intersect
Having only shared internship experience is not enough to form a “new Silicon Valley mafia.” Whether these young people have established actual business ties is another important indicator.
Beyond their HRT reunion, talent has already begun flowing among these young people. One clear thread connects Scale AI and Cognition.
On June 9, 2018, Alexandr Wang published an article on Scale AI’s official website introducing the company’s engineering team at the time. The list included Steven Hao, who would later become a co-founder of Cognition.
The article noted that Steven Hao graduated from MIT, had worked at Jane Street, D. E. Shaw, and Quora, and had won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics. Several years later, he co-founded a startup with Scott Wu and Walden Yan, becoming a core founding member of Cognition.
▲Steven Hao, co-founder of Cognition
Cognition still uses a recruiting approach highly focused on technical founders. According to its official website,the founding team has won a total of 10 gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics; of the first 35 team members, 21 had previously founded companies.
In an interview with Colossus, Scott Wu also mentioned that many of the math and programming competition contestants he had known since middle school later joined Cognition.
At the capital level, there is likewise a thread connecting two generations of entrepreneurs.
In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion (about RMB 10.02 billion). Afterward, a group of early founders and employees left PayPal and went on to found companies such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Palantir.
Among them,PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (Peter Thiel)later helped found the venture capital firm Founders Fund.
▲PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (Peter Thiel)
Today, this investment firm, founded by core members of the PayPal Mafia, appears on the investor lists of both Scale AI and Cognition.
In May 2024, Scale AI announced the completion of a $1 billion (about RMB 6.68 billion) funding round, with existing investors including Founders Fund. In September, Founders Fund also participated as an existing investor in the list of investors in Cognition’s Series E financing, disclosed by Cognition.
Clearly, the rise of the HRT circle was not entirely independent of the capital network of the previous generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. At least in the cases of Scale AI and Cognition, the two sides have already formed clear ties through investment.
As for HRT, the organization that brought these young people together has also begun making moves in venture capital.
HRT’s official website shows that its HRT Ventures has invested in companies across crypto trading infrastructure, fintech, and AI networks, including projects such as Sei Network and Eridu.
In an October podcast, Alexandr Wang also mentioned that, after recently meeting with HRT’s founder and learning that the company was conducting private investment business,he jokingly suggested that the founder directly invest in the interns from back then.
On October 19, after Alexander Wang posted a photo with his old friends, HRT’s official account also responded publicly, inviting HRT alumni with entrepreneurial projects to contact its affiliated investment team.
▲HRT’s official account responds
IV. Silicon Valley’s New Mafia: How Far Are They from the Old Guard??
So, can the HRT circle, which has already produced several tech stars and begun to forge business connections, be called Silicon Valley’s new mafia? Let’s look at the PayPal Mafia of yore.
In November 2007, Fortune published a feature titled “The PayPal Mafia,” using a group photo shot in mafia-style attire to chronicle the influence of former PayPal employees in Silicon Valley’s startup and investment spheres.
▲Cover of Fortune’s “The PayPal Mafia” feature
The people pictured include Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and others. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, these former colleagues continued to maintain business ties within the tech industry.
For example, Peter Thiel helped found Founders Fund and became Facebook’s first outside investor; Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn; and David Sacks later founded the enterprise software company Yammer.
The PayPal Mafia’s influence also continued to expand through venture capital.Founders Fund invested in companies such as SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe, and Palantir, while some former PayPal employees went on to other venture capital firms.
The HRT circle formed in a different way.
They first met through math, physics, and programming competitions, then reunited in HRT’s internship program. Compared with their shared entrepreneurial experience at PayPal, these young people mostly built their connections before formally starting their own companies.
However, their current business ties still center on their early shared experiences, some movement of talent between them, and common investors. By contrast, PayPal Mafia members not only founded multiple tech companies one after another, but also continued to participate in financing the next generation of tech companies through investment firms such as Founders Fund.
In this respect, the HRT circle has already produced several successful entrepreneurs, but still has some distance to go before forming a lasting commercial network spanning entrepreneurship, investment, and corporate management like the PayPal Mafia.
Conclusion: Silicon Valley’s New Mafia—Their Story Is Just Beginning
Twenty years ago, members of the PayPal Mafia left the company to start their own businesses, then returned as investors to participate in the growth of a number of Silicon Valley tech companies.
Today, Alexander Wang and his old classmates are experiencing an entrepreneurial era of their own. Compared with the previous generation of entrepreneurs, they have caught the rise of large AI models and crypto finance. Some of them have even controlled business assets worth billions of dollars or joined the core management teams of tech giants before turning 30.
Of course, these young entrepreneurs still need to prove that they can continue to develop and thrive amid technological iteration and market competition.
Ten years ago, they met through HRT’s internship program; ten years later, a reunion photo made this group of old classmates the talk of the town again. The next-generation PayPal Mafia is one to watch.
Sources: Financial Times (UK), Fortune, HRT, Decagon, Colossus, Grayscale, Scale AI
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