> Our founding group is a set of high school friends, currently all juniors at Caltech, CMU, and MIT. In our first batch, we have numerous groups with high Putnam scores, high ranking competitive programmers, and 2+ FAANG internships. There will likely be a sense of FOMO for companies in order to recruit these groups, as they'd be losing out on multiple highly regarded talents.
Don't take this the wrong way, I don't want to subtract anything from your accomplishments. What you are describing as "highly regarded" is primarily different forms of artificial tests that provide a leading indicator of talent or quality, but are not the same thing as having a proven track record of success shipping high quality software.
Most companies, especially larger companies, even tech companies, are more conservative than they let on. What you are essentially doing is showing "benchmarks" for a team the way one would for hardware, but the thing that really matters isn't how well something scores on benchmarks, it's how well it runs the actual application that your business cares about. Conservative companies don't buy hardware on the basis of benchmarks, they wait for reviews using their applications or get a proof of concept built. So it goes with hiring as well.
As someone who's hired many engineers, when I think "highly regarded", I think someone that people I know and respect in the workplace speak about with positive reviews and references, not someone who has a high rank on LC, a high GPA, and won a math contest. Of course, this is unfair for new grads because they cannot have met anyone who would refer them yet, except perhaps through internships. That's the reality of things though, and it's part of why who you know is often as important or more important than what you know in life.
I would find this program more compelling as a hiring manager if it was a team of people who had previously worked together (even if that was in college) but had individual separate work experiences showing success outside the team, e.g. 2-3 years after you have all bagged your first full-time job. At that point, you would have each individually demonstrated success, and have described a preference for working together with strong camaraderie. That's worth hiring as a group at a premium, since team morale and camaraderie is often one of the most crucial pieces of performance.