Investing at the Frontier of Technological Disruption

When Simon Brewer sat down with Cathie Wood for a broad conversation on technological disruption, the moment felt emblematic of the era she so vividly describes, one in which the pace of change is accelerating beyond anything seen since the breakthroughs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wood argues that “we have never seen this amount of technologically enabled disruption in history,” drawing parallels with the invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine and the telephone. It is a view that captures both the scale of the transformation underway and the conviction that has defined her career as one of the most distinctive voices in global asset management.

It is a bold proposition, but Wood has long been comfortable at the frontier. Throughout her career, she has shown a willingness to embrace emerging technologies early, withstand periods of intense market scepticism, and construct an investment philosophy untethered from traditional benchmarks.

Her world view was shaped early. The daughter of an Irish immigrant and Air Force-trained radar systems engineer, she grew up moving between England, Ireland and the United States, experiences that demanded adaptability and cultivated curiosity. At the University of Southern California, she studied under the economist Arthur Laffer, whose intellectual breadth awakened her passion for economics and introduced her to Capital Group, where she began her career. Years later, when she founded ARK, she gave Laffer 1% of the company in gratitude.

Across roles at Capital, Jennison Associates and later AllianceBernstein, Wood developed an approach that combined bottom-up innovation research with top-down macro reasoning. During the tech bubble’s final years, she warned that too much capital was chasing immature technologies and dramatically cut her tech exposure, a fact often overlooked by those who later cast her as a permanent technology evangelist. By 2014, she sensed an inflection point. Innovations seeded during the internet era had matured, and she believed a benchmark-driven industry was structurally incapable of recognising it. ARK was created to operate outside those constraints.

At the centre of ARK’s philosophy sits the idea of exponential, and increasingly “super-exponential,” growth. Traditional valuation frameworks assume that high-growth companies inevitably slow toward GDP-like rates. Wood instead draws on Wright’s Law, which holds that for every cumulative doubling in units produced, costs fall predictably. This dynamic has taken genome sequencing from a multi-billion-dollar, decade-long scientific undertaking to a process costing a few hundred dollars and a few hours. Industrial robots, once locked behind cages, have become far more intelligent and affordable through similar compounding.

Reflecting this thinking, ARK’s research team is structured not by sector but by technology. Tesla, for example, was never analysed as an automaker but as a convergence point for robotics, energy storage and artificial intelligence. That interdisciplinary lens helped ARK recognise early the strategic significance of Nvidia’s GPUs and Tesla’s autonomous ambitions; long before the wider market appreciated their centrality to the AI wave.

From this approach emerged ARK’s five innovation platforms: AI, robotics, energy storage, public blockchains and multi-omics sequencing. Each contains technologies with independent learning curves and together they reinforce one another. Wood believes that this convergence will drive "real GDP growth globally... from 3% where it's been for the last 125 years to 7% to 8%, powered by productivity," a shift comparable to the transition from pre-industrial stagnation to the explosive economic expansion of the 20th century.

Healthcare, in her view, represents the most profound transformation. Multi-omics sequencing, spanning DNA, RNA, protein and metabolomics, combined with AI and CRISPR gene editing, could reduce single drug development costs "from $2.4 billion to $600 million" and cut timelines "from 13 years to 5 to 8 years." Liquid biopsies are already diagnosing cancers far earlier, and gene-editing therapies have delivered functional cures for diseases once deemed lifelong.

Energy is next in line. Echoing Elon Musk, Wood envisions a world ultimately powered by the sun, with battery storage acting as the backbone of global electricity systems. Today, the world is only partially efficient in its use of electric power; with storage technology scaling, much of the wasted energy can be captured, shifting grids from fossil-dependent to truly renewable.

Yet Wood does not dismiss risk. ARK evaluates each company across six dimensions: people, moat, execution, product leadership, valuation and thesis risk, with unit growth dynamics the decisive variable. Covid exposed structural vulnerabilities worldwide as supply chains proved far more fragile than expected, and ARK concentrated too early, amplifying the subsequent drawdown. If confronted with a similar setup again, Wood says ARK would tilt temporarily toward cash-rich innovators without abandoning its thematic convictions.

Pressed her on whether AI might make much of the investment industry redundant, Wood’s response was direct: benchmark-driven, rules-based strategies are inherently automatable. But innovation investing, projecting technologies five, ten or twenty years into the future, still requires human judgment, imagination and synthesis. AI accelerates ARK’s research, she says, "we're using it, cutting our research times in half."

Her stance on China has also evolved. After withdrawing following a series of regulatory changes, Wood now sees signs of a policy pivot. Beijing's shift toward New Productive Forces and rapid progress of Chinese open-source AI models, and how creative [they are] with their algorithms," suggest an increased commitment to technological leadership. Companies are being encouraged to move up the value chain into robotics, AI and autonomous vehicles; developments that have drawn ARK back into selective Chinese exposure.

For young people navigating this technological disruption, Wood’s advice is consistent: move to the right side of change. Learn AI, which is in its "first innings," experiment with emerging tools, pursue entrepreneurship and engage directly with the technologies reshaping the economy. The opportunities, she believes, will multiply across every dimension of global growth.

About ARK Invest

ARK’s thematic investment strategies span market capitalizations, sectors, and geographies to focus on companies that we expect to be the leaders, enablers, and beneficiaries of disruptive innovation. ARK’s strategies aim to deliver long-term growth with low correlation to traditional investment strategies and are offered in a variety of vehicles.

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