Live data from Hacker News

23andMe's Fall

wsj.com

91–100 of 282 posts

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#91
Wikipedia entry has:

“In 2007, Cusenza left to join Nodal Exchange as CEO the following year. Avey left in 2009 and co-founded Curious, Inc. in 2011.”

Cusenza is not mentioned in the article (he was president, too) and evidently Avey didn’t just “leave”.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#92
> As an added security measure, we have temporarily disabled the ability to download your raw genetic data. We hope to re-enable this ability soon, and we appreciate your patience.

After reading this article I decided to download my data in case they go under. Was greeted with this message on the relevant page. Does anybody have some insight if this is related to the data breach or something else?

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#93

Now we get to see the compromises they choose when desperation sinks in. I think getting the results of one of these tests would be interested, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, due to trust issues related to handing over something like that to a company with an unproven track record when it comes to privacy and integrity. I figured it was only a matter of time before they were hacked or they decided…

> I wish I could get a test done by a lab, be given the results, and have that be the end of it. No accounts, no forever records kept by the lab/company. Just a simple testing service that isn’t trying to be a tech company.

EMR has put paid to this pretty handily. Every positive STD test anyone ever gets from now on is yours for the taking if you can crack LabCorp's database.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#94

Now we get to see the compromises they choose when desperation sinks in. I think getting the results of one of these tests would be interested, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, due to trust issues related to handing over something like that to a company with an unproven track record when it comes to privacy and integrity. I figured it was only a matter of time before they were hacked or they decided…

Repeating a comment from 2021[0]:

“Entrepreneurs are not at all like ordinary businessmen. An entrepreneur who is not in trouble closes no avenues, keeps a lot of balls in the air, and will never tell you the whole truth when a half-truth will do. An entrepreneur who is in trouble will lie, cheat, and steal. He will smuggle cocaine or ship bricks. We should never measure an entrepreneur by the standards of a rock-solid businessman.” — attributed to Kenneth Rind[1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28060166

[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#95
post #77

This is a damning indictment of Wojcicki's management of the company. Failed execution on the drug development strategy over 10+ years, lying about growth, pushing out the cofounder, never making a profit, hack that went undiscovered for months ... about the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite. If she can't convince her family, fri…

If they go bankrupt they should destroy all the data but of course they will rather sell it to recover at least a bit of money.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#96
Please ELI5: I understand that one of the key features of 23andMe is their health report because the genealogy and the DNA dump are included in other companies.

For a developer plus a scientist it is teally difficult to get the health data from the raw ADN and using current (Python?) modules?

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#97
post #62

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…

Unless dollar looses it's reserved currency status Silicon valley is going to be fine

Silicon valley's tokenomics are going bust because of the Fed's tightening. Loosing the reserve currency status is another matter altogether which should scare the future of the American economy.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#98

Their kit is 99 dollars, but how expensive is the actual DNA testing nowadays ? It's my understanding from this [0] video that it is approximately 1000 dollars for the whole genome, but 23&Me sequence only a tiny portion of the genome (above video mentions 500 000 bases out of 6 billion total bases of human genome), and that sequencer processes thousands of samples in parallel, so there is some economy of scale facto…

Their financial reports consistently paint approximately 50% gross profit (revenue - cost of revenue). However, their R&D burn is enormous. Sales, marketing, general and admin costs are approximately equal to their gross profits.

In an alternate reality, you probably could have structured 23andme into a company making modest net profit. But that would not have matched the 6 billion price valuation either. And it's quite likely that a substantial part of the R&D burn was because they recognized the limitations of their core product.

https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#99
post #77

This is a damning indictment of Wojcicki's management of the company. Failed execution on the drug development strategy over 10+ years, lying about growth, pushing out the cofounder, never making a profit, hack that went undiscovered for months ... about the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite. If she can't convince her family, fri…

My suspicion has always been that this sort of data–common SNPs from all comers and no specific phenotype collection–is not very useful for any sort of drug design. And if it is, publicly available data will be just as good as 23andMe's larger amount.

It was a bet worth trying, IMHO, but always a risky bet. And with bio, you don't find out if your bets work for a decade or more, because the iteration cycle is 10x slower than software for businesses/consumers.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#100

Now we get to see the compromises they choose when desperation sinks in. I think getting the results of one of these tests would be interested, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, due to trust issues related to handing over something like that to a company with an unproven track record when it comes to privacy and integrity. I figured it was only a matter of time before they were hacked or they decided…

> I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, due to trust issues related to handing over something like that

Same here. Imagine the value of this data in the hands of insurance companies that are willing to misuse it. Will we, as a society, be able to prevent that "value" from being realized?

Post reply on HN