About Me
Hello, I’m Charlie Wood. Welcome to The Interesting Times.
I wrote my first line of code in sixth grade and never really stopped. I earned a computer science degree from the University of Texas and started my first company while still in college. Over the years, I’ve founded seven startups and contributed to others, including a formative stint at Vignette during its high-growth phase.
My most notable success came with Spanning Cloud Apps, which I founded and led through its acquisition by EMC in 2014. After that, I returned to school and earned a degree in economics in 2019, driven by a growing interest in how technology—especially AI—is reshaping the labor economy.
Today, I focus on exploring the intersection of AI, economics, and entrepreneurship.
About This Blog
AI will transform the world profoundly—at least as much as did industrialization in the 19th century. But this time the change will happen much more quickly. It’s already happening, and it’s accelerating.
In the short term, the competition isn’t between people and AI, it’s between people using AI and people who aren’t. And the latter are hosed. In the long term, the battle is between capital and labor—or more specifically between people who make money from their capital and those who make money from their labor. And again, the latter will be hosed.
I’ll be writing much more about all of this here. A play on the (probably apocryphal) Chinese curse and a classic newspaper name, The Interesting Times is about navigating a world in flux.