· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: And that's easy to do. Just go to your 19th birthday party. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I mean, that's unbelievable. [00:00:00] S0: To people listening that don't know what the hell I just referenced, can you talk about real quick who was at your 19th birthday party and why that would have been a good bet if they just invested everybody around the table? [00:00:00] S1: This is a really crazy thing to think about. My 19th birthday party, I was a freshman at MIT. It was in January. I was doing a winternship, a winter internship , a winternship, at a trading firm called HRT. There were 10 of us, 12 of us, something like that. Almost all of whom were students at either Harvard or MIT. Most of us already knew each other from various math and science or computer science competitions. Some of the other people were Jeffrey Yan, who went on to start Hyperliquid. [00:00:00] S0: Yep. [00:00:00] S1: Very successful. Scott Wu went on to start Cognition, very successful. Another person there was Jesse Zhang, went on to start Decagon, also quite successful. Another person was Vicky Yi, who is, I think, a brilliant researcher, works at Anthropic. Everyone was incredibly talented. I actually talked to the founder of HRT recently, and HRT itself, by the way, now is crushing it unbelievably. [00:00:00] S0: What does HRT do?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: What does HRT do? [00:00:00] S1: HRT, it's a proprietary trading firm, so they trade their own money. In Q2 of 2026, had 11 billion of revenue, and I think 8 billion of profit is the record number. I think it's under 1,000 people work at HRT. I mean, it's unbelievable. But I recently met up with the founder of HRT, and they were talking about like, "Oh, yeah, we're starting to do some private investments." I was like, "Just invest into the interns." All the interns get seed checks. [00:00:00] S0: That's great. [00:00:00] S1: I grew up doing math and- ... science and computer science competitions and Olympiads and got to know all sorts of people from all around America doing this kind of stuff. It's quite surreal to see the people that I did competitions with become so successful. [00:00:00] S0: It's going to be fascinating what all of you do the next few decades. Before I interrupted you, did you have more to say about diamond mining and skyscraper stuff?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: It's going to be fascinating what all of you do the next few decades. Before I interrupted you, did you have more to say about diamond mining and skyscraper stuff? [00:00:00] S1: Basically, it's like, does it have a power law payoff where some things just pay for literally a million times the investment? Or is it something more like building skyscrapers? Which I would describe data annotation or data businesses as more like this, which is like Amazon Prime deliveries is another example where the payoff is pretty linear, and you have to just develop a process where you're really, really amazing at doing it. If you're building skyscrapers, then it's a very operational business, and it's all about squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of that process, and you just look at it and you figure out, "I can make it 2% more efficient this way and 1% more efficient that way and half a percent more efficient that way," and you just try to squeeze every ounce of optimization out of it. And then there's diamond mining where you're kind of like, "Hey, everyone, just go forth, try all your crazy ideas," and you're just nurturing the ideas that seem promising. [00:00:00] S0: That's what you feel you're doing at Meta right now? [00:00:00] S1: That's what I feel I'm doing at Meta, and the building skyscraper stuff, generally speaking, is what I felt I was doing at at Scale. And that's this big paradigm difference.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: That's what I feel I'm doing at Meta, and the building skyscraper stuff, generally speaking, is what I felt I was doing at at Scale. And that's this big paradigm difference. [00:00:00] S0: Going back to the coaching and the difference of how you're essentially managing now at Meta compared to what you did at Scale, why do you have so many direct reports? You have what, 100 direct reports? How many direct reports? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I think more than 200, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: How and why?
· Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S1: Going back to it, one of the founding thesis of MSL and what we want to do in rebuilding this lab was, how do you have really, really high talent density? How do you make it the best place for a lot of these brilliant people to do their best work? And how do you build an organization that's technically focused where the technical people are doing their best work and have the opportunity to really do their life's work? And one of the design principles around this was making it very flat. Effectively, all the researchers that we hired into this group called TBD, they report directly to me. And it's more of a statement of the fact that this is anti-bureaucracy. TBD is literally anti-bureaucracy. The point is, we're hiring brilliant people, and you all have demonstrated clearly that you can do brilliant, brilliant work. You have done it before in your careers. So, I don't need to be micromanaging you to do brilliant work. You're going to be able to do that on your own. We need technical leadership, so some of you are going to be responsible for setting clear technical directions for your groups. And we have this kind of pod structure where we have various pods, and there's various technical leads of the pods who tie a break on the technical decisions. So, there's a technical leadership structure in place, but from a quote-unquote "people management" perspective or from a bureaucracy perspective, we're just anti-bureaucracy. And then the other part of this is we do make a lot of group decisions. We want to debate because it is a very talent-dense group of brilliant people. We want to have those conversations where we're all discussing what we think the right path is. Everyone in the lab has done brilliant things. We want to hear all these opinions. We want to arrive at things that we all believe are the best path forward. So, it's certainly an unconventional way to run the team, and I would be lying if I said I was the best manager to more than 200- ... people. But part of the point is that they don't need managers. They need a great environment. They are all brilliant. They're all extremely capable. They just need the room to cook.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, and so maybe not a coach. You're kind of like the steward of a great environment so they can do great work. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, exactly. [00:00:00] S0: Alex, this was awesome, man. Thanks for taking the time. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, thank you. [00:00:00] S0: It's awesome talking. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through "Founders."