61–70 of 282 posts
This story makes 23andme sound like a non-fraud version of Theranos, with some of the same issues around business viability, dodging the FDA, relentless PR and funding from rich friends. If a healthcare startup get shout-outs from Oprah, SNL and branded Barbie dolls, is that a bad sign?
Silicon Valley's time is coming soon, it is going to go the same way as Hard Rock/Heavy Metal music scene on the Sunset Strip, LA in the 90s. I give it 10 years time before it turns into a town just living on its old glory, with tourist attractions like: - "This used to be a bar where Google's exec team drank" or - "This was the hotel Mark Zuckerberg threw an Oculus Rift into the pool" or - "Oracle datacentre re-enac…
A company that has never made any money is now worth nothing. Maybe the world is starting to make sense again?
Trust me, it's not. I've seen start-ups worth 100x than a smaller successful business due to speculation, despite the smaller business employing more people and actually turning profit for many years.
Why would it be surprising to value the latter kind of business higher than the former?
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Trust me, it's not. I've seen start-ups worth 100x than a smaller successful business due to speculation, despite the smaller business employing more people and actually turning profit for many years.
There’s plenty of successful businesses chugging along growing at about the rate of inflation. It’s really hard to grow a business at 10 or 500 times that rate. Why would it be surprising to value the latter kind of business higher than the former?
If you either create a brand new market, or are taking on a drastically undeserved market... you absolutely need to be growing faster than inflation. Or your brand new company would be worth $1 the first year, $1.03 the second year..
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That's the conflict at the heart of the business. But do the public care enough about that? Obviously a HN audience does, but people use Google and Facebook products every day with the awareness that all that data is sold directly to advertisers. With the right messaging ("yes, we sell your data, but it's to drug companies to help make drugs that can cure your illnesses") it's possible that the conflict isnt too much…
Drug companies pay pretty well for clinical trials, so why would anyone pay 23andme for their own data, so that 23andme can turn around and sell it to drug companies?
Seems like 23andMe is two businesses: consumer and a B2B data business. The consumer side is clearly struggling because of the problems mentioned in the article (they only need one test in their life, public perception is bad because their security has had breaches). So this needs a pivot where you can change the public's perception from a one-time test to continuous health monitoring through blood markers or somethi…
> But why not focus on the B2B side? Sell access to their databases. I'm sure computational biology and/or pharma companies need this information. Are you sure? I mean, presumably there are different types of DNA testing. Doesn't 23andme run basically the cheapest test they can get away with? A user can't tell if the test measured 16 bytes or 1.6 gigabytes of genetic information, and if I was trying to launch a consu…
> She’s sticking to her goal to transform 23andMe from a supplier of basic ancestry and health data into a comprehensive healthcare company that develops drugs, offers medical care and sells subscription health reports. The company hasn't the funds (or time) to develop drugs and I'm not sure why any investors would invest in them rather than a company with a track record of doing so or a potential drug. Selling their…
I would have thought they were pretty well positioned to find new targets for currently untreatable diseases. But maybe they don't quite have the capacity needed to target specific diseases and/or data not granular and clean enough, or not enough capital/runway suitable for that kind of stuff. If they had the sequences for people with diseases such as alzeimers/Parkinson, they could just look for common mutations and…
To find new targets yes but to develop a drug to market (and revenue/profit) takes 10-15 years. Even a drug to a state that gets approved for human testing seems beyond what they could do themselves without so much funding it would wipe out the existing shareholders. Selling to/Partnering with other drug companies with targets they've discovered/IP from DNA etc would seem more realistic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have thought they were pretty well positioned to find new targets for currently untreatable diseases. But maybe they don't quite have the capacity needed to target specific diseases and/or data not granular and clean enough, or not enough capital/runway suitable for that kind of stuff. If they had the sequences for people with diseases such as alzeimers/Parkinson, they could just look for common mutations and…
> I would have thought they were pretty well positioned to find new targets for currently untreatable diseases To find new targets yes but to develop a drug to market (and revenue/profit) takes 10-15 years. Even a drug to a state that gets approved for human testing seems beyond what they could do themselves without so much funding it would wipe out the existing shareholders. Selling to/Partnering with other drug com…
Oddly, 23andme adopted an extremely cautious, risk-averse strategy with respect to providing "health information". The result of this is that many other services became a more interesting/entertaining source of personalized health information based on genetic data (often 23andme raw data extracted and fed into the other system). I get new updated health information from 23andme perhaps 2 times per year. It's mind bog…