Cathie Wood

Current Company

ARK Invest — Founder, CEO & CIO

Disrupting Asset Management

Cathie Wood spent decades in traditional asset management — including 12 years at AllianceBernstein — before founding ARK Investment Management in 2014 at age 58. Her thesis was simple but radical for the industry: most fund managers were too focused on backward-looking financial metrics and were systematically undervaluing the companies driving disruptive innovation in genomics, robotics, AI, energy storage, and fintech.

ARK's flagship Innovation ETF (ARKK) delivered extraordinary returns through 2020, driven by high-conviction positions in companies like Tesla, Square, Roku, and CRISPR therapeutics. Wood became the most-watched fund manager in the world, attracting tens of billions in assets and a massive following of retail investors who treated her public research and market commentary as essential reading.

Conviction Through Volatility

ARK's aggressive strategy brought both spectacular gains and painful drawdowns. After ARKK's 2020 highs, the fund experienced a severe decline in 2022 as rising interest rates punished growth stocks. Wood's response — doubling down on her long-term theses rather than rotating to safety — divided opinion but remained consistent with her founding philosophy.

Regardless of short-term performance, Cathie Wood has permanently changed the conversation in asset management. She demonstrated that actively managed ETFs could compete with index funds, that radical transparency and public research could attract retail capital at scale, and that a woman in her 60s could build one of the most influential investment firms from scratch in an industry dominated by legacy institutions.