Hi coders,
I have always felt curious about how the IMO/IOI/Nutellas and all academic-successful people are doing in their life. What awesome things they have been contributing to the world? Or about the seemingly-impossible things they have overcome. Such as the story about someone who won the IOI in 2020 with a perfect score despite his own country effort to stop him. Or a certain IOI medalist ended up creating the world's best QA platform called Quora.
I am sure those stories will be very inspiring for the next generations of coders.
Do you happen to know any online tracker for that?
Update 1: I put the raw data here first. If there are many, I'll create a Wiki article for it.
Update 2: Wow, the Vietnamese CPers are great. Come on, everyone. Where are you? Is there no story from your country?
Some Companies created by successful CPers:
VK (RU) — worth billions $.
Telegram (RU) — worth billions $.
Ethereum (CH) — worth billions $.
Quora — worth billions $.
Pony.ai — worth billions $.
Near Protocol — worth billions $.
Sogou (CN) — worth billion $.
Axie Infinity (VN) — worth billion $.
Kyber Network (VN) — worth hundreds of millions $.
Lunchclub — worth hundreds of millions $.
Emerald Innovations — worth hundreds of millions $.
Forethought — worth hundreds of millions $.
Yugabyte — worth tens of millions $.
Abivin (VN).
SubWiz (DK).
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I think there were some threads on CF or Quora about successful competitive programmers.
Anw, I'll add a few:
Bonus: not world level CPer, but Vietnamese level CPers:
Thanks. That's incredible. As a Vietnamese, I find it very inspiring.
You could also add Abivin whose founder is Pham Nam Long (IOI 2007 bronze medalist).
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In September 2015, Looksery was acquired by Snap Inc. for $150 million, marking the biggest startup acquisition in Ukraine’s history (source). Main technical breakthrough was made by the ICPC 2014/2015 finalists from Odessa, Ukraine. For Codeforces 5th anniversary they hosted a round here to thank for the platform and possibilities which it gives to young people. Currently that's the biggest success of Ukrainian CPers from what I know.
Since you are talking about companies created by CPers, I'd also like to mention the founder of Sogou, Xiaochuan Wang. He participated in CP almost 30 years ago and won a gold medal at the IOI 1996.
A couple of other examples, in no particular order.
Yugabyte. One of the founder is Mikhail Bautin (whom got perfect score in IOI 2000).
Bayesian Capital Management, whom CEO is Velin Tzanov. He got two gold medals in IOI 2001 and 2002, and he was the author of some of the best problems in IOI (e.g. Fish in IOI 2008 and Archery in IOI 2009).
Lunchclub, with the founders are scott_wu and Vladimir Novakovski (IOI 2001 silver medalist).
Emerald Innovations. One of the founder is exod40.
Forethought: the founder is Deon Nicholas, whom participated in ICPC World Final 2013 and 2015. Another CP member of the company is Lewin
VK and Telegram. The founders are Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov, the later won one gold (1996) and three silver medal in IOI (1995, 1997, 1998).
On the crypto side, Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, a 2012 IOI Bronze Medalist.
didn't knew this, nice
Alice Ryhl maintains Tokio, a widely used async I/O library for Rust. I prefer async-std though, which is created by Stjepan Glavina (stjepan).
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SupWiz was co-founded by Mathias Tejs Knudsen (IOI silver, IMO gold, NWERC winner and ICPC world finals, Google Distributed Code Jam finalist) and Søren Dahlgaard (IOI participant and ICPC world finalist (same team)).
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It's great that these people have gone on to build these great companies. The question is did competitive programming help them in building an entrepreneurial mindset ? In FAANG companies the data suggests A software enginner without competitive programming background performs as good as a software engineer with competitive programming background . Wonder if anyone has done similar analysis for entrepreneurs as well.
Why should it?
This is likely a classical case of "correlation != causation": there are many successful entrepreneurs with a strong CP background not because CP necessarily made them better at business, but rather because strong CP-ers are generally very intelligent, and this intelligence, combined with some entrepreneurial spirit, leads to successful tech companies. In other words, it's probably not because of CP making you better at business, but rather intelligence and passion making you successful in both CP and business. Also, we only really know of the stories of the businesses that thrive, there may be a lot of CP-ers who founded startups that later failed.
shouldn't CH be CA, since CH is swiss?