Recently, an interview was published where Jeff Yan, the founder of Hyperliquid, revealed something fascinating: during his internship at Hudson River Trading years ago, he was surrounded by people who later became the most prominent names in AI today. And it’s no coincidence.

What’s interesting is that most of these guys had known each other since high school programming Olympiads. We’re talking about a fairly small but incredibly talented circle: Alexandr Wang ( now leading AI at Meta after they acquired Scale AI for $14.3 billion), Scott Wu ( CEO of Cognition, which just reached a valuation of $10.2 billion), Jesse Zhang ( founder of Decagon, already valued at $4.5 billion), Demi Guo ( co-founder of Pika, the AI video generation platform), and Steven Hao ( now CTO of Cognition with an estimated fortune of $1.3 billion).

But there’s another name that stands out in this group: Johnny Ho. This guy won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, including a perfect score in 2012. Later, he co-founded Perplexity, the conversational AI search engine. The crazy part is that Johnny Ho, along with his partners, has been making bold moves that seem straight out of a movie: an offer to buy TikTok in early 2025, a proposal to acquire Google Chrome for $34.5 billion in August of the same year. According to Forbes, Perplexity is now valued at $20 billion, and Johnny Ho’s personal fortune has already surpassed $2.1 billion.

What strikes me most is how this group shares something deeper than just childhood friendships. A decade ago, when Alexandr Wang was 19, he told his peers: why couldn’t it be us? Referring to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s famous PayPal Mafia. Ten years later, it seems that prediction is coming true.

We are witnessing how a generation of entrepreneurs who grew up together, forged in math and programming competitions, are now transforming AI on a global scale. Each in their own field: Wang at Meta, Wu developing autonomous software engineers at Cognition, Johnny Ho expanding conversational search, Zhang automating customer service with AI agents, Guo revolutionizing video generation.

It’s as if we are witnessing the birth of a new business legend, but this time the battlefield is artificial intelligence. And the question everyone is asking is: how much bigger can this grow?