From HRT Internship to Co-Investment by Founders Fund: The 'New Mafia' Network in the AI Industry Takes Shape
Synthesizing reports from the Financial Times, Colossus, and other sources, Zhidongxi argues that four former Hudson River Trading (HRT) interns—Alexandr Wang, Scott Wu, Jeff Yan, and Jesse Zhang—are moving from shared experiences to tangible business connections. Talent has flowed between companies, and Founders Fund appears on the investor lists for both Scale AI and Cognition. However, the article notes that compared to the PayPal Mafia, this network is still in its early stages regarding cross-coverage of entrepreneurship, investment, and management.
In the winter of 2016, ten young people from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) met during a three-week internship program at Hudson River Trading (HRT), a Wall Street quantitative trading firm. Ten years later, at least four of them are leading or managing AI and crypto-finance companies with a combined valuation exceeding $50 billion: Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer at Meta; Scott Wu, co-founder of AI coding company Cognition (valuation $48 billion); Jeff Yan, founder of on-chain derivatives platform Hyperliquid; and Jesse Zhang, co-founder of AI customer service company Decagon (valuation $4.5 billion).
Looking at these numbers alone, it would merely be a coincidence of several smart individuals succeeding independently. What gives the label 'HRT Gang' analytical value is the emergence of specific business connections. The first clue lies in talent mobility: Steven Hao, co-founder of Cognition, appeared on the engineering team list of Scale AI in 2018, introduced in an article written by Alexandr Wang himself; several years later, he co-founded Cognition alongside Scott Wu and Walden Yan. This indicates a traceable channel of personnel between Scale AI and Cognition, rather than just parallel entrepreneurship by the same group of people.
The second clue is at the capital level. Founders Fund, a venture capital firm co-founded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, appears simultaneously in the existing investor lists for Scale AI's $1 billion financing round in May 2024 and Cognition's Series E financing round in September 2026. This is not easily explained away as coincidence: a fund founded by core figures of the previous generation of Silicon Valley power networks happens to bet on two of the most important companies in the 'HRT Gang' simultaneously.