I think he's saying that a quant can work for a few years and retire unreasonably rich, or keep working at a place where they are well rewarded and everything works.

Or they can take a strategy built on advantageous relationships with banks providing credit for leverage, an accurate and clean history of the markets and prior data to feed models, all run by teams who know what they're doing and who are constantly working to improve the edge the entire firm has, and try to do it all themselves after only really working in one small area.