Wu: One 20-person USACO camp produced Wang, Guo, Ziegler, and Ho
Scott Wu · How AI Agents Are Creating 12X Productivity Gains · Joe Lonsdale · Mar 27, 2026 · at 3:44
Scott Wu, CEO and co-founder of Cognition, describes how an elite high school competitive programming camp produced the founders of Scale, Pika, Perplexity, and key AI researchers.
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“In my year, actually there were a ton of others who all kind of went into AI. And so obviously Steven and Andrew, who started the company you know, who started Cognition with us but also a ton of others. And so Alexander Wang, who started Scale. Demi Guo, who started Pika. The let's see who else. Daniel Ziegler, who is one of the co-inventors of RLHF. Alex Wei, who is like now running a lot of the reasoning efforts at OpenAI. Johnny Ho, who started Perplexity. So we were all the same year, actually, out of that like group of 20 people.”
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