141–150 of 372 posts
I used to work at 23andMe, AMA
did the employees come out ok equity-wise from the spac merger?
Many people sold during internal private liquidity events, and they did well. If you joined early you did well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My most radical political opinion is that we need a right to privacy enshrined in a constitutional amendment. And it needs to be robust enough to prevent the government from subpoenaing data collected by private companies.
The 4th Amendment should already do that.
For the record, 23andme is one of the few companies where the CEO never once responded to one of my emails (2017, 2019, 2022, 2024). You can make a lot of money just by betting on companies where the CEO (or the CEO's office) takes listening to customers'(who are rooting for them!) emails seriously, and shorting those that do not.
You cold e-mail CEOs and get a >70% hitrate? I gotta try this more often.
My CEO response rate is about 1%. That one time when DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails) responded to my email about my software library 10 years ago. It wasn't even a Ruby library. What a nice guy. A great CEO and engineer as well.
I used to work at 23andMe, AMA
I used to work at 23andMe, AMA
Do you have knowledge of sensitive data being sold to third parties?
However they sold access to the data to a bug pharma company (GSK). This was widely publicized. Not sure if that counts: GSK had some ability to look at the data but didn’t have an on premise copy of it.
Also, I worked on the GDPR deletion project. I can attest that they do best effort to delete your data when your request that. At least when I was there, this was the case. One caveat is for coding errors, oversights and bugs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have knowledge of sensitive data being sold to third parties?
Not directly, afaik they never transferred the data. However they sold access to the data to a bug pharma company (GSK). This was widely publicized. Not sure if that counts: GSK had some ability to look at the data but didn’t have an on premise copy of it. Also, I worked on the GDPR deletion project. I can attest that they do best effort to delete your data when your request that. At least when I was there, this was…
What 23andMe was selling to GSK was the results of GWAS (Genome Wide Association Study) results, which could be used to generate therapeutic candidates.
GWAS is a sort of rudimentary machine learning algorithm that basically maps a phenotype (like propensity for a particular disease) to a region of DNA. From there the drug company can narrow down candidate genes to attempt to develop specific drugs for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused by this; isn't the board of directors who picks the CEO? Or are they locked in for some period of time and don't want to wait around?
I don't know the first thing wrt how 23andMe has its governance and voting setup, but the letter seems to imply the CEO has majority power or, at least, a large enough plurality that it is a one-person-show: > Because of that difference and because of your concentrated voting power, we believe that it is in the best interests of the Company’s shareholders that we resign EDIT: But that brings up a different question:…
1. Less legal oversight and paperwork.
2. I don’t know the terms of the buyout, but if this means the CEO, family, friends, etc (“insiders”) become the new shareholders, then any future upside will be distributed to insiders not the open market.