A few months ago, our Hudson River Trading intern class went viral because the group included Jeff Yan (founder of Hyperliquid), Scott Wu (cofounder of Cognition), Alexandr Wang (founder of Scale), and me with @DecagonAI. It sparked a broader conversation about how my generation, who did math, coding, and science olympiads growing up, represents a disproportionate amount of today’s founders.
There’s more of us: Johnny Ho (cofounder of Perplexity), Steven Hao and Walden Yan (other cofounders of Cognition), Demi Guo (cofounder of Pika), Albert Gu (cofounder of Cartesia), the list goes on.
This post is my reflection on why this is and how it has affected our hiring at Decagon (and my plans for any future kids :)).
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What is an olympiad? If you’re not super familiar, they’re basically academic competitions that are difficult and timed. For example, for math, it’s typically 6 hard problems over two days, 4.5 hours per day. Here are examples of simple (but not easy) questions:
“Determine all triples of positive integers (a, b, c) such that each of the numbers ab − c, bc − a, ca − b is a power of 2.”
“Suppose a, b, c are the side lengths of a triangle. Prove that a²b(a−b) + b²c(b−c) + c²a(c−a) ≥ 0, and determine when equality occurs.“
Everyone is ranked nationally and then eventually internationally. The top students get brought to a summer camp, which is where you first get to know each other.
Besides the obvious fact that math and coding talent translates well to tech, the problem-solving traits that olympiads help develop carry over to building a company. Many challenges founders face are difficult and ambiguous. This isn’t limited to technical challenges – how to build an org, how to design a GTM strategy …it’s all applicable. Being able to slowly chew through them systematically and rationally is a big advantage.
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The bigger factor actually is that the competitions develop kids in very high-pressure, competitive environments. Regardless of how talented you are, doing well requires extreme grinding and sacrifice over many years. Doing well really makes you believe you can do hard things. This breeds people who normalize hard work and don’t shy away from intense competition.
A lot of my work ethic can be credited to people in this community who I watched develop their craft relentlessly day after day without any breaks. Some of them knew every olympiad problem by heart from the last 30 years. It’s hard not to be inspired by that.
This is also why we’ve made it a point to hire many folks with contest backgrounds at Decagon. They don’t embrace hard work because they have to… it’s just a waste of their talent and potential otherwise 🙂.
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The final piece is that having a community of friends doing the same thing is very powerful. Historically, many of the earlier generations would build careers in academia or quant finance. When I was in high school, I saw the first couple of folks start companies. Many of them did not end up working out, but it was very cool to see them building something from scratch. Being able to learn from peers doing the same thing as you lets you draw inspiration from successes and avoid mistakes.
As everyone got older and went to college, quant finance firms were popular internships (Hudson River Trading, Citadel, Jane Street, D.E. Shaw). They’re basically a real-world form of math contests where work ethic and problem-solving are directly rewarded. Citadel kicked off their internship with a literal live math contest for all the interns.
The group in the photo was the first-ever HRT intern class, during my freshman year. Shortly after that, Alexandr dropped out to start Scale, which of course was an inspiring journey, and even more so to see up close.
Like how the “Paypal Mafia” produced such a dense group of people starting companies, investment firms, and funds, I suspect we’ll see more and more people from the Olympiad community in the coming years. I’m very excited to see what everyone does as we get older.
I’d extend this to the science research contests too. Research Science Institute (a high school research camp and one of my favorite summers growing up) has an alumni group that includes Michael Truell (Cursor) and Karim Atiyeh (Ramp). We have four other alumni at Decagon.
For this reason alone, I’d heavily encourage olympiads or academic contests for all kids, depending on what you’re interested in. The community will live with you for your whole life.
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Of course, I should say that founding a company requires many more skills than what you learn in olympiads. For example, olympiads are generally individual contests, while startups are very much a team sport. I’m constantly humbled by the endless sea of skills to learn. Contests are great for solving problems you receive but often in life, you need to come up with your own problems.
