Before moving into venture capital in 2014, Steve Lau worked as a market maker at Spear Leeds & Kellogg and later ran proprietary trading desks at major banks, and he has since become an early investor in quantum computing companies like IonQ, Rigetti, and SeeQC while personally backing more than 150 startups. He now serves as CEO of WorldQuant Foundry, a venture studio that builds deep-tech companies from the ground up, and sits on Zapata Quantum's Growth Advisory Board, reflecting a career path that moved from trading markets to building and funding frontier-tech startups.