ARK Venture Fund | Cathie Wood on disruptive innovation | Webinar, 30 July 2026

Thank you, Marty. Thank you very much. I'm excited to be talking to Australia.

Well, yes, I founded the firm in 2014 for two reasons. The first was to focus exclusively on technologically enabled disruptive innovation. And then the second was to focus on an open source research ecosystem where we share our research, give it away on social media, not only because we want to educate people, which is one of our missions and values, but also because we wanted to reach innovators who are out there building companies so that we could get direct to the source of where all of this innovation was coming from. The reason for exclusively disruptive innovation is we felt that after the tech and telecom bubble and bust, and even more so after 08-09, investors had become extremely conservative and were moving towards passive portfolios or very benchmark-sensitive portfolios and, uh, even investment bankers were giving up on the new new, and we believed that we were entering a period where we would see a technology revolution, and, uh, I can tell you now, we were more right than we knew we would be or that we believed we would be.

Yes, today feels very much like the early days in my career. So in the 80s and 90s, when I was fresh out of school and very impressionable. I was looking at the stock market, the equity market, and we were climbing a wall of worry, especially after, well, really starting in 1982. When I say a wall of worry, we investors were worried about inflation, they worried about interest rates, they were worried about quotas, so trade quotas. Now, today that would be tariffs. They were worried about wars, the Iraq war, and so forth. They were worried about financial crises. In 1987, we had Black Monday, where in one day the stock market dropped almost 25%, which is a little bit like the private credit drama today, but the market went on to new highs. So I think we're in the same kind of environment. And in the US specifically, we think that we're moving into what I believe in hindsight will be considered a boom and it is being driven, we think importantly by some of the new technologies evolving. So, five major platforms: robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, importantly, blockchain technology, and multi-omic sequencing in the life science space. And this revolution, we think, is going to accelerate real GDP growth beyond levels that we're used to. And this is really important, especially given the worries in the market. We think that it is going to lead to much lower than expected inflation, maybe even deflation from time to time. Not bad deflation in the sense that technology is inherently deflationary. So we think that these technologies are big enough now to start moving the needle and impacting real growth and inflation.

Sure. So I just mentioned the five major innovation platforms. They involve 15 different technologies, but the platforms themselves, the three characteristics they have, is they follow a learning curve. Technologies are all about productivity and gaining efficiency and scaling unit growth and falling costs. So that's the first. So lower costs that in the second characteristic, those lower costs enable access, more industries to access these new technologies. The lower costs go, the more industries can access them, and even consumers. And then the third characteristic is these platforms serve as launching pads for more innovation. So, just to give you an example: if in the multiomics world, DNA sequencing has the costs have dropped from $2.7 billion to sequence one person's genome 23 years ago to less than $100 today. So now that all of us are going to have our genome sequenced with time and probably every year, we're going to be able to identify mutations with the help of AI. And now that we can identify mutations, which are the earliest manifestations of disease, we'll be able to use a new technology. So, sequencing was the launching pad for CRISPR gene editing, which can edit out those mutations or those programming errors and cure disease.

Yes, so those platforms involve 15 different technologies. And just to give you a sense of what we mean by this, so robotics is a very broad space and reusable rockets are a part of the robotics theme. And of course, that's creating a whole new world for investing.

Sure. Yes. I think the reason we're calling this period a technology revolution is not necessarily because of the technology, each technologies, each one of them alone, but because of their convergence. And, you know, it's been very interesting to watch Elon Musk over the years. I mean, we've been following, I've been following him for, you know, 20 years now, but he never used the word convergence until last year. And he said, and we're pretty proud of this, and he may even be reading our research because he does read our research. But he said, you know, I think my companies are converging more than I ever thought. And so, wouldn't you know it, soon after that, SpaceX bought xAI, and now there are rumors of SpaceX buying Tesla? So, what is that? So, one big convergence here is autonomous mobility. Now, Elon today is working on robo-taxis, autonomous vehicles, passenger vehicles. And that's the convergence of robots. Autonomous vehicles are robots. Energy storage, they will be electric. Electric vehicles are going to become much cheaper than gas-powered vehicles. And AI, they'll be powered by AI. So that's three of the five major innovation platforms. We believe that this space, all in, globally, including China, is going to scale from billions of dollars today in revenues generated to more than $10 trillion within the next five to ten years. Think about that. That's about a third of the U.S. economy today, right there. So that is going to move the needle. And when we say real GDP is going to accelerate, we think that's going to be as transportation transforms not just autos, but trucks, drones, air taxis. We think that that's going to be one of the most powerful accelerators of economic activity in the next five to ten years.

He is the most productive human being in the world. I'm convinced of that. And so, what he has done, we get the question all the time: how can he run all of these companies? Well, he does not run all of those companies. He has surrounded himself by some of the most brilliant people in the world, both engineers and business people who want to work on the hardest, most challenging, most exciting projects in the world. And but what he does is he sets the milestones, the goals for the companies. And when one of his companies is missing a milestone, he becomes obsessed with it. And he then starts working aggressively with the teams involved in order to break through any obstacles. I think what makes him unique is he bases everything on first principles. He's an engineer, he breaks a problem down, and he does not let the way convince what conventional wisdom suggests is the right way to do things, he likes to rethink how to do things, especially because we have new technologies now. Why would, as automakers did early on, they were trying to construct a battery, especially for the auto, for the auto industry, when we had consumer electronics, laptops, and cell phones, we have that whole battery supply chain, which now lines the bottom of a Tesla car. So he was way ahead of the other auto manufacturers because he thought about a technology that was already in existence, whose cost curve, or the cost curve of which he could ride down while other auto manufacturers were creating an entirely new battery which actually doesn't work. They're all moving towards this way of thinking about the world. So, SpaceX has been or is a top holding and has been a very successful investment in the ARK venture fund.

Yes, well, especially in the United States, we were watching companies stay private for longer. And that's because regulations in the United States after the various crises we were through, whether it was tech and telecom or 08, 09, just one set of regulations after another, after another. And so companies felt that it was becoming too costly to go public and too distracting to go public. And so they're staying private longer. And so this is why we have trillion-dollar companies like SpaceX going public finally. Why are they going public now? It is because, you know, the idea of global i mean orbital data centers, so data centers in space that is going to take so much capital that they're going to need to tap into the public equity markets, but it went public at 1.75 trillion. The problem we were trying to solve was to give all investors, whether accredited investors or non-accredited investors, everyone, an opportunity to participate in the private world. And of course, because of what we do, we were very well set up to do it. All we focus on is technologically enabled disruptive innovation. And we've always followed the private markets because it informed our public market investments as well. As we saw the competition brewing or new ideas brewing in the private markets. So it was very natural. And I'll say the other thing: bringing investors access in a vehicle that is direct to CapTable. So we are direct to CapTable. We do not expose our clients to SPVs and especially the layered SPVs, where there's one fee paid upon another, upon another. And at the end of the day, investors don't even know if they own a piece of the underlying stock. They may just own a promise of an income stream from another investor. So we are direct to CapTable. We know the founders. The founders know our research. And so we have been able to provide access and to gain access to information rights, which many investors and private companies do not have information rights. Those are most appropriate to us. And because of the research we do, we have found founders are very friendly to us in terms of information rights.