[6] She co-founded Giant Spacekat, an independent video game development studio, with Amanda Warner in Boston, Massachusetts.

[12][13] She grew up in an entrepreneurial environment; her father was a retired US Navy doctor who opened his own clinic, and her mother ran a series of small businesses.

[14][15] She enrolled at the University of Mississippi, studying journalism and political science and writing for The Daily Mississippian, but left in 2001 without a degree.

The same hosts, including Wu, started a new podcast called Disruption on Relay FM, covering technology and culture.

[18] The game, created with the Unreal Engine for a total budget of several hundred thousand dollars, was released for iOS devices in July 2014.

[17] Wu decided immediately after the 2016 American presidential election to run for a Congressional seat in the greater Boston area, focusing in part on privacy rights and online harassment, but also on the wider Massachusetts economy.

[24] Wu feels that Massachusetts proportionally contributes more to the federal government than it receives in return and wants to use it as leverage in negotiations.

Meanwhile, David S. Bernstein, a long-time political reporter for Boston Magazine, did not think Wu has a chance of unseating Lynch.

[32][9] Wu began a second campaign for the 2020 election, again with an emphasis on tech issues such as Elizabeth Warren's proposal to break up giant new media companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google.

[33] She endorses the Green New Deal, legislative goals aimed at shifting the United States to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035.

In 2020, she and Cenk Uygur co-founded Rebellion PAC, a political action committee with a focus on running advertisements in opposition to Donald Trump and in support of progressive get-out-the-vote efforts.

She has argued in The Boston Globe that "my fellow leftists are betraying our Jewish allies" and "the casual antisemitism I’d looked past in progressive spaces [are] impossible to ignore.

[50][51][52] By February 2015 she said she was spending a full day a week contacting law enforcement, and was only attending events in the US with a security detail.

[56][57] In August 2021, The Washington Post reported that "despite the attempts to discredit her, wreck her career and destroy her sense of safety, Wu has now become a vocal proponent of forgiveness for those who apologize and show they have grown."