This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore. Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how century-old markets work. Its founder, Jeffrey Yan (@chameleon_jeff), had never taken a physics class when he picked up a textbook at 16. Two years later, he won gold at the International Physics Olympiad. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico—working off a television because he didn't own a monitor. Within 3 years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms. Then he shut it down. Yan was rich and free, but he had spent years inside crypto, watching it betray itself. Bitcoin's central premise was decentralization. Yet the biggest exchanges were centralized. Crypto kept reintroducing the dependence on trust it was built to eliminate. He set out to create what should have existed. Hyperliquid is a blockchain with a trading exchange on top, and anyone can build on it. Yan's vision is to house all of finance. In 3 years, it has done over $4 trillion in volume. And in the past few months, it has begun to outgrow crypto. Markets for oil, silver, and the S&P 500 now trade on Hyperliquid around the clock, weekends included, and are growing roughly 40% week on week. When the US and Israel bombed Iran on a Saturday in February, Hyperliquid was the venue traders turned to. Hyperliquid's success has cost Yan his freedom. He works out of a secret office in Singapore and cannot travel without two bodyguards. Even the team's housekeeper doesn't know what they do. In January, @domcooke spent a week at their office. Read his profile on Yan and @HyperliquidX below.

Dan Loeb on the opportunities created by quants, CTAs, and pod shops: "The advantage of a fundamental investor, who doesn't make trading decisions based on computers, is that there are still a lot of market irregularities caused by some very good strategies, but collectively they create anomalies. You have quants, CTAs, pods. They have a great strategy for them and their investors, but it causes some unusual behaviors. Fundamental investors believe that, as Warren Buffett would say, if a stock goes down, you celebrate it because it's a chance to buy more at a better price. They have risk metrics which have forced selling on the way down, so they do the opposite. It might be rational for their business model, but it's not rational for long-term investors. That's where the human element comes in. To make those tough trading decisions when fundamentals are going one way and stock prices are going the other way, and to take the pain of losses in the short run."

In a previous life, @colossusjeremy was a bomb squad technician in the U.S. Army. From 2014 to 2019, he deployed to five countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. For Memorial Day, he wrote about a soldier who killed himself shortly after their deployment, and a memorial service that became less about the man who died than the people left in the room. There is little that’s redemptive or feel-good in the story, and it has nothing to do with business, investing, or technology. But it will leave you thinking about how often we fail to see a person clearly until it’s too late, and sometimes not even then.

I’ve been making podcasts about Rick Rubin for 4 years. Tomorrow on @davidsenra my conversation with Rick comes out.

favorite part of worklife: learning from incredible people favorite part of writing early days: showing them off in today's edition, love for @DevinLewtan and @thesephist & a cameo from @TerranMott

This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore. Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how century-old markets work. Its founder, Jeffrey Yan (@chameleon_jeff), had never taken a physics class when he picked up a textbook at 16. Two years later, he won gold at the International Physics Olympiad. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico—working off a television because he didn't own a monitor. Within 3 years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms. Then he shut it down. Yan was rich and free, but he had spent years inside crypto, watching it betray itself. Bitcoin's central premise was decentralization. Yet the biggest exchanges were centralized. Crypto kept reintroducing the dependence on trust it was built to eliminate. He set out to create what should have existed. Hyperliquid is a blockchain with a trading exchange on top, and anyone can build on it. Yan's vision is to house all of finance. In 3 years, it has done over $4 trillion in volume. And in the past few months, it has begun to outgrow crypto. Markets for oil, silver, and the S&P 500 now trade on Hyperliquid around the clock, weekends included, and are growing roughly 40% week on week. When the US and Israel bombed Iran on a Saturday in February, Hyperliquid was the venue traders turned to. Hyperliquid's success has cost Yan his freedom. He works out of a secret office in Singapore and cannot travel without two bodyguards. Even the team's housekeeper doesn't know what they do. In January, @domcooke spent a week at their office. Read his profile on Yan and @HyperliquidX below.

If you don't know Jeremy Stern, you probably know his work He's the man behind the profiles of Palmer Luckey, Neil Mehta, Shyam Sankar, Josh Kushner, and Scott Wu We talked about : - what makes someone worth writing about - how founders can give better interviews - what to expect if you get profiled - how to become a better writer Thank you @colossusjeremy and @colossusmag for what you do!

If you don't know Jeremy Stern, you probably know his work He's the man behind the profiles of Palmer Luckey, Neil Mehta, Shyam Sankar, Josh Kushner, and Scott Wu We talked about : - what makes someone worth writing about - how founders can give better interviews - what to expect if you get profiled - how to become a better writer Thank you @colossusjeremy and @colossusmag for what you do!

Maybe the most fun (and certainly the biggest) month in ILtB history - @alex_karnal on the future of bio - @dylan522p on compute - @ptj_official on … everything - @bchesky on ai founder mode - Krishna on what’s happening inside Anthropic Thank you to the millions tuning in.

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.