Henry Li

After graduating from the University of Chicago with a double major in Computational Applied Math and Economics in the summer of 2019, Henry joined DRW’s Chicago Headquarters as a trader on the equity and index options desk.

After two years on the desk, Henry found himself drawn more to what was underneath the trading: the infrastructure, the tooling, the systems that made the edge possible. He moved into quant development in 2021 and spent the next five years building exactly that.

What made those years formative wasn’t just the work, it was the top-tier caliber of people and the scale of that work. Henry’s team grew from roughly 10 to 100 people during Henry’s tenure to support the growth of the business. Building reliable, scaled infrastructure and tooling to support that kind of growth, without breaking what was already working, is a different problem than most engineers ever encounter.

Moment’s first two cold emails to Henry went unread. The third named Moment’s leadership team, including Chief Markets Officer Anish Karyat, who spent 15 years at Jane Street before becoming Head of Fixed Income ETF Trading and Systematic Credit at Citadel Securities. Upon reading this email, Henry decided to take a call.

Henry agreed to come into the office. What struck him most wasn’t the product pitch, it was the people. “What I liked most about quant trading was that the caliber was high. I like working with skilled people, and I wanted that in my next job. A lot of companies have smart people, but not a lot have exceptional people. That was something I felt even in the early stages of talking to people at Moment, and my expectations have been exceeded.”

Still, he didn’t rush. He spent over 20 hours talking to Moment employees and over 30 hours talking to people outside the company: friends, friends of friends, and anyone who could give him an honest and additive read.

Henry’s final decision to join Moment was solidified after spending time with our co-founder & COO, Ammer. They met on a Friday afternoon; the scheduled hour became two; so Ammer offered to meet again the next day.

Ahead of their Saturday morning coffee, Henry sent 10 questions ahead of time, and then dove deep with Ammer on both the company and Ammer’s own philosophy and journey. They went for another three hours.

As Henry was heading out of the office, he noticed a stack of Mamba Mentality books by Kobe Bryant in the lobby; Ammer shared that all hires receive a copy upon joining. Henry asked to take one home and finished it in a coffee shop that afternoon.

“If I were to take a bet on joining a new company, it was incredibly important to me that the founders were all-in. By the end of my time with them, I had full conviction that Moment’s founders were truly all-in on building something generational.”

Henry works on the multi-asset class UMA Platform. “I would enjoy working on anything at Moment as there are incredibly interesting problems to solve across the business, but what I love about UMA specifically is how broad of a surface area it covers across asset classes and workflows. We are building the centralized investment management platform that scaled enterprises run their business on. It’s incredibly cool to be working on something so foundational to our clients and the industry at large.”

The problems are real, but the context is what makes them exciting. Wealth management infrastructure isn’t a new concept, but building a modern platform for it that can move as fast as Moment does, creates genuinely novel challenges every day. “We’re not solving brand new problems,” Henry says. “We’re solving problems that have existed for a long time, but we’re solving them at lightning speed and with genuinely innovative approaches.”

In his words, the hardest part is also the best part: the business foundation is already there. “We have backing, we have a reputation, we have the hardest problem in the business solved. What’s left is to execute.” He describes his team as world-class athletes training for the Olympics: highly motivated, well-structured, with expectations that are reasonable enough to consistently exceed. “That gets me excited. I feel the impact of my work even more.”

One moment that crystallized everything for Henry was personally being a part of his first enterprise-scale customer deployment; things Henry built, being used by real customers, much faster than he’d expected. “It was a great source of positive feedback. We are just getting started, but that first step showed me how fast Moment moves even while delivering reliable and scalable enterprise-grade infrastructure.”

Outside of work

Henry is the kind of person who gets obsessed. In the past, it’s been poker and the strategy board game Go; of which he competed in city league tournaments representing both Chicago and Boston.

But the thread that runs through all of it is competition - specifically, the kind that sharpens your thinking under pressure. Growing up, Henry competed in math and science competitions. “There are only so many categories of problems. If you learn how to solve those problems, you’ll be good everywhere. The competitions test how well you’ve prepared, and they train the speed of your thinking.” That background, he says, is what made him a good trader. And it’s what makes Moment feel familiar in the best way.

In fact, Roshan, one of Moment’s founding engineers, went to high school with Henry where they competed in the Ocean Science Bowl (Roshan was the top-ranked competitor in all of New England). Henry reflects on how they connected about this on his first day: “Roshan and I had fun doing nerdy things in high school, now we have fun doing nerdy things at work. I thrive with this type of person on a professional level. Not a lot of startups can say that.”