Tampa Bay: Special Edition - Power Breakfast Podcast with Cathie Wood, Ark Invest

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
Florida Business Minds, presented by The Business Journals of Florida. Brought to you by TECO Peoples Gas, at the heart of Florida's energy.
In this special edition, recorded live at the Tampa Bay Business Journal Power Breakfast, market president and publisher Ian Anderson, and editor Alexis Muellner, welcome Cathie Wood, founder, CEO, and chief investment officer of ARK Invest.

**Ian Anderson** (0:41)
She made a bet on Tampa Bay before many others did, relocating ARK Invest headquarters from New York to St. Petersburg in late 2021
At a time when most of Wall Street's migration was heading to Miami, she chose a smaller market, one she believed could become a hub for innovation. The decision reflects the same conviction that defines her investing. She'd seen opportunity earlier than most and acting on it with clarity. Cathie founded ARK Invest in 2014 to focus exclusively on disruptive innovation, organizing her work around five converging technology platforms, AI, robotics, energy storage, blockchain, and multinomics. The firm shares its research openly. It uses a five-year outlook to spot technologies that will scale and reshape industries. The result is a globally followed investment strategy centered on how innovation transforms not just markets, but jobs, businesses, and everyday life. ARK reports roughly 13 billion to 16 billion in publicly visible holdings, and manages closer to 30 billion including private funds, cash, and nondisclosed assets. And at a moment when rapid technological change is creating both fear and opportunity, Cathie has emerged as one of the most influential and optimistic voices helping leaders understand what comes next.
Alexis Muellner is an undergraduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He later earned a master's degree in print journalism from University of Miami. He spent 14 years in South Florida before moving back to Tampa Bay in 2004 Now in his 23rd year as editor-in-chief of The Business Journal, he continues to lead a team of tenured and award-winning journalists. Take it away.

**Alexis Muellner** (2:17)
Thank you so much, Ian. Can we have one more welcome for Cathie Wood, everybody?

**Ian Anderson** (2:27)
Thank you.

**Cathie Wood** (2:29)
Thank you so much.

**Alexis Muellner** (2:31)
Cathie, you know, in preparing for our time together today, it was wonderful to take a deep dive into the trajectory and the remarkable success of creating the global brand at Ark and Vest that you have, and so it's an honor and a privilege to have you with us this morning and in our community, and you're a big deal. And this was born out last night for me when I went to have my haircut at Bob's Barber Shop in Weston Chapel, and my barber said to me, you're a finance writer. I said, yeah, I'm a business journalist. I'm the editor of the Tampa Bay Business Journal, and I'm interviewing a very important person tomorrow for breakfast in front of a couple hundred people, and I need you to clean me up. And he said, well, who are you interviewing? And I said, her name is Cathie Wood. Cathie Woods?
Cathie Woods? The emphasis on the plural is part of it. And she said, I love Ark and Vest. I follow them all the time. You wondered about whether or not your departure from Robin Hood, some of the South of Robin Hood was early, and that is not my first question for you this morning. But where I want to start, Cathie, is what's something that you believe about the future right now, that if you're correct, will make most people in this room rethink their business in the next five years?

**Cathie Wood** (3:37)
Oh, gosh, that's a good question. These, as you can tell, very spontaneous and I like that. So the five major innovation platforms that we've centered our research around, if they touch any of you, I think the word we would want you to use and think about is convergence. So the five platforms are robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, which is the biggest catalyst of all time. We are in a technology revolution, blockchain technology and multi-omics technology in the life science space. And life science and health care are very important to this community, much more important than I understood before we arrived. Now, those are the five platforms. They involve 15 different technologies.
And we're seeing a convergence among technologies, with AI again being the biggest catalyst.
So I wouldn't ignore these technologies. Of course, everyone after the Chat GPT moment, and even more so after Anthropic. It's Anthropic. I don't know if you've heard this stat. But in December, Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate, so multiplied by 12, what happened in December, was 9 billion.
In April, it appears it could be 44 billion. That's how quickly, that's how quickly AI is sweeping through the global economy. So ignoring it will be at your peril. At ARC, for example, we have show and tell in the morning. There are so many people at ARC who are now able to do things in an hour or half an hour that might have taken them three days or one day before. And so we're encouraging sort of a bubbling up, a bottom up kind of approach to AI, get everybody excited. There is also the top down. For us, that means Palantir. Palantir is helping us organize our data so that we can harness AI as effectively as possible. We're only 70 people, so most companies with 70 people would probably not do Palantir, but OpenAI and Anthropic themselves are coming up with competitors.