The strongest intern team in history – A photo worth 80 billion USD

This is the first batch of interns at HRT, organized in the winter of 2015.
Among those 10 interns are faces now dominating the AI and fintech worlds:
- Jeffrey Yan ( founder/CEO of Hyperliquid )
- Alexandr Wang ( co-founder/CEO of Scale AI, currently leading AI at Meta )
- Scott Wu ( co-founder/CEO of Cognition )
- Jesse Zhang ( later founder/CEO of Decagon )
Based on the current value of the companies they built:
Hyperliquid ~ $40 billion USD
Scale AI ~ $29 billion USD
Cognition ~ $10.2 billion USD
Decagon ~ $4.5 billion USD
HRT (Hudson River Trading ) is a legendary quantitative trading company (HFT/quant fund ) headquartered in New York, famous for high-speed trading across all asset types and stocks.
The working environment at HRT is not your typical "internship." It’s a place where brilliant minds gather to code, debate ideas into the late hours, and build extremely strong relationships.
The network here is not the kind of "add friends on LinkedIn and forget." It’s formed through high-pressure situations, living, eating, and solving real problems together — relationships that later help them collaborate, introduce deals, recruit top talent, and even support each other in funding rounds.
Sometimes, teams that shake the world start from a small, tightly-knit group. Ten young people created a "network" that reshaped the landscape of artificial intelligence and global financial technology.