Henry Li

Two minutes left in the science bowl, down twenty points.

Ten seconds left in your last byoyomi period.

Realizing you won’t make the next ICM payout, and needing to find the right spot to get it in.

Five seconds before the open, the morning after tariffs were announced.

One week out from launching a multi-asset class UMA platform for an enterprise client.

Math and science competitions, Go, poker, trading, and now Moment. For Henry Li, they all come down to the same thing: rational thinking and sound judgment in high-stakes environments, and the focus to sustain it over long stretches.

“There are only so many categories of problems,” he says. “If you learn how to solve them, you’ll be good everywhere.”

In Go, the strategy board game, he represented Chicago and Boston in city league tournaments. In poker, he finished 236th out of 10,000 at the World Series of Poker.

It’s what made him a trader, too. After the University of Chicago, where he studied Computational Applied Math and Economics, Henry joined DRW’s Chicago headquarters on the equity and index options desk. Two years in, he found himself drawn to what sat 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 it. His team grew from roughly 10 to 100 over his tenure, and building infrastructure that holds up through that kind of growth, without breaking what already works, is a hard and exciting engineering problem.

He wasn’t looking to leave. Moment’s first two cold emails went unread. The third named the people he’d be working with, including Chief Markets Officer Anish Karyat, who spent 20 years at Jane Street and Citadel. That got Henry on a call.

Still, he didn’t rush. He ran it like a research project: more than 20 hours talking to people inside Moment, and more than 30 with people outside, friends, friends of friends, former colleagues, 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 and 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.

“It was incredibly important to me that the founders were all-in,” he says. “By the end, I had full conviction that they were.”

What clinched it was the caliber of the team. “A lot of companies have smart people,” Henry says, “but not a lot have exceptional people.”

The work itself was the other half of the pull. 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 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 foundations are already there. “We have backing, we have a great reputation, we have the right team, and the right vision. What’s left is to continue executing.” He describes the 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.”

And there was a familiar face. 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 New England). “Roshan and I had fun doing nerdy things in high school. Now we have fun doing nerdy things at work. I thrive with that kind of person, and not a lot of startups can say that.”