The interns at one trading firm went on to found billion-dollar companies.
You can't choose your intern class.
You can choose who you sit next to on your next project, and whose work you study closely
You would have made billions if you gave seed checks to everyone who was at @alexandr_wang’s 19th birthday party:
- Jeff Yan (@chameleon_jeff) went on to start Hyperliquid (~$20B)
- @ScottWu46 went on to start Cognition ($48B)
- @thejessezhang went on to start Decagon ($4.5B)
And Wang himself who started Scale AI, and got $14.3B from Meta for 49% of it.
Wang explains:
“I was doing a winternship at a trading firm called HRT.
There were 12 of us, almost all of whom were students at either Harvard or MIT.
I recently met up with the founder of HRT and they were talking about, ‘We're starting to do some private investments.’
I was like, ‘Just invest into the interns! All the interns get seed checks!’”
How @alexandr_wang's team decided Meta's Muse was ready to ship:
- List 100+ things it must do
- Set a "blocks launch" bar and a "good" bar for each
- Ship only when every row is green
Green on 80 rows, red on 20? They didn't ship. https://t.co/6S9zuPB8pp
Meta's Muse had 100+ rows on its launch sheet.
Versions green on 80 and red on 20 didn't ship.
"We knew that wasn't good enough." @alexandr_wang
Tomorrow in Top 1% Operator: how to build a launch-blocking list for your own work