He quit a lucrative Wall Street job the month oil went negative to bet on AI

Eric Landau, a former Wall Street quant who went on to co-found the AI data company Encord, was sitting on his couch fighting Python dependencies, the small pieces of helper software that have to line up before a machine learning program will run. He had just left his job to start a company, and he thought, "What have I done?"

He had spent 10 years as a quant, a trader who uses math and computers to bet on markets. He quit that very well-paying job during COVID to become a founder. He said he did not do it for the money.

The timing made the doubt sharper. That month, the market went wild, with oil trading negative and very high volatility, and people earning large sums from risky bets. His old desk, he thinks, made more money that month than it made in the previous three years combined.

He made the trade anyway because he and his co-founder believed AI was the technological shift of their generation. To them, it felt like what Landau called "the early days of the internet," like the early days of computing, a change large enough to start over for.

They went on to build Encord. The company helps AI teams manage, label, and evaluate large volumes of data used to train systems.

For Landau, the difference showed up at night. For the last several years as a quant, he said, he would hit the pillow and think, "What am I doing with my life?" After he started the company, even when markets were chaotic, he went to sleep thinking about the concrete problems of the company. He no longer felt that existential fear.

At first, he said, the new work did not clearly provide value to anyone. But he believed he was part of something bigger than himself, and he said that felt very rewarding.