23andme testing is one and done. Once you've had it you will never spend a dime with them. It's a red flag for any investor.
their data could be very valuable depending on the evolution of personal medicine.
23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
121–130 of 458 posts
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#122Did anyone learn anything meaningful from these tests?
I saw some results, for example, "I'm 3% Syrian, 10% Portugal, 8% Korean ...." etc., but do they provide more important results like "Sorry, you will have cancer in 2 years"?
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#123[deleted]
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#12423andme testing is one and done. Once you've had it you will never spend a dime with them. It's a red flag for any investor.
their data could be very valuable depending on the evolution of personal medicine.
That was probably the justification for a high valuation. Also explains the recent pharma pivot.
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#125This is a functionality that no one asked for. Why does one need them? Let me ask an extreme question, how different is this from me naming a star after someone for their birthday? I go to some site and print out a certificate that that particular star in a given galaxy is now named Michael. Point is its a novelty thing. If a doctor asks me to get it done for a medical reason, sure. Other wise this is just a curiosit…
> this is just a curiosity with no use Small sample size, but I was adopted and didn't know my genetic background or have any family medical history. When I've been ill I hadn't been able to provide that medical information when the doctors requested it. Thanks to 23andMe I not only know a lot more about myself, but I also found my biological parents who are married to each other and wonderful, and who have two twin…
Sure. Like I said the argument I put forth was an extreme one, intentionally.
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#126I didn’t buy a test, because my brother did. Why pay $100 to get the same story twice?
I didn't buy the test because all it would say would be "Congrats! You are 100% asian." I feel like 23&me is literally only useful/interesting to white people because they can see which one of the 50 European countries they have ties to. It's not that useful for me. I've had friends do it and get 99.97% Chinese or Indian. Amazing, I could have told you that for free.
As a 3rd generation white person in the US, what specific European ancestry I have is meaningless to me.
I find the health tests to be more interesting than the ancestry, though it was a bit scary though having to click through all the warnings to get to the results.
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#127Everyone paying attention the pattern of layoffs? Ebay, Mozilla, DigitalOcean, 23andMe, Intel... Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.
Papyrus is closing 200+ retail stores, Express is closing retail stores...the retail apocalypse growing every day too.
Nothing new there. The retail apocalypse has been going on for years.
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#128They sold 10M kits, and they primarily market in the US. DNA never changes, so you have a lifetime max of 1 purchase of 23andMe per lifetime. Their competitors have likely sold 15-30M as well, so maybe 30-40M of these kits have been sold. That's 10% of US market. What's the max conceivable penetration here? 20%?
Your germ line genome rarely changes. Your exome changes all the time. Your gut biome changes all the time. There's massive market opportunity but a ton of regulations around how to tap into that market opportunity. On a separate note, Ancestry is going through a similar issue. They've had double digit revenue declines in their DNA testing suite. The truth around 23andMe and Ancestry is that they're really doing a su…
Your exome is a subset of your genome. It does not change. That said, the cheap DNA kits do not test your entire exome, so there will be a market for these once they are able to do so.
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#129> Wojcicki has theories Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn't initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for. Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in…
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) specifically prohibits health insurance companies from denying coverage or setting rates based on such tests.
You are correct but a major challenge of our time today and the near future is to see whether the rule of law still works against political or financial power. From the 2008 financial crisis onward, there is a growing public sense that the powerful cannot be held subject to justice any more.
I have to say that I personally would never purchase a DNA testing kit for this reason. On the social and political trajectory that I perceive, it might not matter what federal law says, if insurance companies can build a strong enough web of mutual favors with politicians or law enforcement.
Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I would also say that a partial reason why these would've dropped is that everyone who can do it has done it. You only need these kinds of results once because your DNA doesn't change. I knew people who were giving or had gotten these as gifts, but those are one-off purchases. And if you've heard of people doing it then you'll do it too but that's also a one-off. I don't think I'd personally benefit because…
I did it 6/7 years ago because the novelty, and enthusiastically recommended it to family and friends. Now I regret doing it considering how Google and Facebook has abused consumer data. I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.
>I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.
You already have since your DNA is out there in a database.