Roughly a dozen years ago, Cathie Wood started looking to the future and didn’t see herself there. She didn’t see oblivion either. Far from it. What she could not envision was a future at her current place of employment, the Wall Street asset management house of AllianceBernstein, where she had logged a dozen years serving as CIO of global thematic strategies, managing more than $5 billion in investor capital.

It had nothing to do with job performance or any acts of malfeasance. Rather, she had an epiphany that she was looking to act on. Perhaps epiphany is an overstatement. Let’s just say she had hatched a brazen, new concept and had advanced it to the firm’s leadership. The idea was to create ETFs populated by companies working on disruptive innovations — a high-risk, high-volatility model also capable of generating outsized rewards.

The problem was that AllianceBernstein did not even trade in ETFs at the time, which was the case with most investment houses