101–110 of 282 posts
Not encrypting user data and then being hacked resulting in compromised user DNA details certainly isn't a positive for PR. Can someone tell me why more companies don't encrypt data at rest and if that would have prevented the leak?
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…
It is not like they are doing real genomics. It’s devilishly hard to find genes responsible for conditions like schizophrenia, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, etc. The last thing you need is mountains of low quality data. Attempting to discover drugs is a proven way to make a small fortune by starting with a large fortune. Everything north of the Charles River in Boston would vanish if people stopped believing thoug…
Last time I researched it the estimate was 5-6 digits, but I'm sure technology advancements have made it cheaper. What happened to that $1000 nanopore?
I have some acquaintances with lab experience who could run this, and could split the costs between friends and family. Everyone gets their own data, no copies are made, all samples are destroyed. We can resell the equipment after to recover some of the costs.
This is the best way to be sure about the data not leaking or getting sold to boost CEO bonus.
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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?
What use is that growth in terms of valuation if the company never manages to break even?
> Roelof Botha, a 23andMe board member and partner at Sequoia Capital, said the company’s big-spending strategy made sense when money was cheap. Now that it isn’t, “we’ve had to trim and focus on a smaller number of projects.” > Sequoia, which invested $145 million in 23andMe, still holds all its shares, he said. Today they are worth $18 million. Interesting that they weren't forced to liquidate/distribute the shares…
"Sequoia is abandoning the 10-year venture fund, in which limited partners, the outside investors that contribute to the fund, expect to get paid back over a decade. The firm said it’s establishing a single fund, the Sequoia Fund, that will raise money from LPs and then funnel that capital down to a series of smaller funds that invest by stage.
Proceeds from those funds will feed back into the Sequoia Fund. With no time horizon, Sequoia can hold public stock for longer stretches, rather than distributing those shares to LPs. Investors who want liquidity can pull money out instead of waiting for distributions."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/26/sequoia-changes-fund-structu...
What would be the rough cost of equipment and consumables required to do DNA sequencing for say 10 people? Assuming similar genome coverage as 23andme gets. Last time I researched it the estimate was 5-6 digits, but I'm sure technology advancements have made it cheaper. What happened to that $1000 nanopore? I have some acquaintances with lab experience who could run this, and could split the costs between friends and…
> To create a recurring revenue stream from the tests, Wojcicki has pivoted to subscriptions. As media companies launched streaming “+” channels, Wojcicki rolled out 23andMe+, offering personalized health reports, lifestyle advice and unspecified “new reports and features as discoveries are made” for an initial $229, with annual renewals of $69. I was a heavy believer of 23andMe until this point. I answered all of th…
Now we get to see the compromises they choose when desperation sinks in. I think getting the results of one of these tests would be interested, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, due to trust issues related to handing over something like that to a company with an unproven track record when it comes to privacy and integrity. I figured it was only a matter of time before they were hacked or they decided…
> I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, due to trust issues related to handing over something like that Same here. Imagine the value of this data in the hands of insurance companies that are willing to misuse it. Will we, as a society, be able to prevent that "value" from being realized?
Look, I give her great credit for the women in STEM thing, her perseverance in the light of obstacles, and making a 10$ lab kit worth $399 to buyers. But to not understand how far actors would go to get hold of that data, to not understand that the drug industry is brutal because humans are poorly-understood meatsacks (see: anything by Derek Lowe), well, seems like that Yale education didnt impart a whole heap of reflective thinking skills.