Cognition Founder: Top AI entrepreneurs mostly come from competitive programming circles, and entrepreneurship is becoming like "mathematical poker"

According to Beating Monitoring, Colossus magazine published a three-hour exclusive interview with Scott Wu, the founder of Cognition. During the interview, the reporter asked Scott Wu a very interesting question: Why are almost all the leading figures in the AI industry from the competitive programming community?

The reporter compared this to the “Budapest Martians” of the early 20th century: von Neumann, Szirád, Tél, the Hungarian Jewish geniuses who later revolutionized physics, born around the same era, attended similar schools, participated in comparable math competitions, and finally met at Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb.

In today’s AI scene, this analogy is not at all exaggerated. Among Wu’s IOI teammates, Alexandr Wang founded Scale AI, Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity, Jesse Zhang founded Decagon, Jeffrey Yan founded Hyperliquid. Looking further out: OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman was in the top 24 of the U.S. math competitions and won a silver medal at the chemistry Olympiad; OpenAI research head Mark Chen was part of Wu’s U.S. IOI national team; OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki is a frequent opponent Wu faced in international competitions; Anthropic founder Dario Amodei was on the U.S. physics Olympiad national team.

Wu’s explanation is simple: competitions test two things—intelligence and resilience. He used the word salty, saying he has wanted to win against everyone since he was young, even if the opponent is a few years older. Those with enough brains and a fighting spirit, after a few years of tinkering, will eventually catch up in product sense, leadership ability, and business judgment.

As for why almost everyone entered the industry at the same time, Wu said the biggest contributor was Alexandr Wang. The two became best friends on Google Hangouts in middle school and even co-wrote a startup idea document. Wang was the first in the scene to truly start a company; seeing him take action, others followed suit. Wu said, “Many people simply didn’t realize that entrepreneurship was an option. We were lucky to go through these experiences together and watch each other grow.”

He also made an analogy: entrepreneurship is becoming like poker. Early poker experts relied on intuition and street smarts, but now the table is full of math whizzes. AI startups have also reached this stage; founders with a strong technical foundation perform better than those who are just good storytellers because the core challenge is tackling hard technical problems.