Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

I agree with you completely. I was merely pointing out that it was a great sci-fi movie worth watching. Not as some sort of foreshadowing of future societal outcome. Plus, what's portrayed in the movie (i.e. discrimination based on genetics) is disallowed by law, at least in California.

Those formula's assume the creator knows all the variables. I have data on things like Probablity a First name is of which race. When names started to appear for determining maximum Age. Search data for identifying people who were worried they had a disease.

Often a single piece of data will cause the intersection of two traits to be 80% accurate. You can't mathmatically predict these things because you don't know how many factors I have.

There are zip codes where only 1 in 100 people are of a given race. There are diseases that only 1 in 100k people have done a search for and only 1 in 500k people have. These kinds of things you can't formulaize.

Far be it for me to rain on this parade, as the founders seem great (and probably somehow related to me given their last name), but if I were to bet on a startup capitalizing on the moore's law change in genomics, it would not be this one (or any other existing company).

Why? From what I can tell, Counsyl is doing genotyping as opposed to sequencing. The latter is what is undergoing "moore's law" price declines.

Second, from the comments by employees on this thread, and the CEO's statement from the article, they are spreading themselves too thin by aiming to be the so-called "Apple" of genomics. Apple didn't start by trying to control the "full-stack", and it wouldn't be Apple if it did.

Third, any company that has Steven Pinker and Henry Louis Gates as advisors, at this stage, seems to be aiming at the wrong things: media exposure and political/legal maneuvering (Our test requires a doctor's prescription) as opposed to making something people want.

> Second, from the comments by employees on this thread, and the CEO's statement from the article, they are spreading themselves too thin by aiming to be the so-called "Apple" of genomics. Apple didn't start by trying to control the "full-stack", and it wouldn't be Apple if it did.

Counsyl started out using a third party lab to process the samples. The founders had a vision of being a pure software company. It turned out that the outside labs they tried all had terrible quality control and we had to re-test samples more often than not. That's totally unacceptable for the stakes of a pre-pregnancy genetic test. So they decided to run a lab in-house and it has been one of the best decisions made in the history of Counsyl. We have an amazing statistical process control team making sure that everything performs as expected. Control plates are constantly moving through our pipeline to catch any mishaps, and we are automating as much as we can in the lab, both to scale and to eliminate human error. We have no known false positives or false negatives, and we've found errors in the 1000 genome project's data (expect a publication about that sometime in the future).

> Third, any company that has Steven Pinker and Henry Louis Gates as advisors, at this stage, seems to be aiming at the wrong things: media exposure and political/legal maneuvering (Our test requires a doctor's prescription) as opposed to making something people want.

Pinker has been an advisor for many years, long before we left stealth mode. (I believe this to be the case with most of our advisors, but I only know for sure about Pinker because I'm a fan.) We have been operating silently since 2010 and have only just now lifted the veil. The test requires a prescription because of the state of health regulation in the US. We give medically actionable information so we're required to get a prescription.

> The points about Pinker etc are not that these aren't impressive people, but rather what do they have to do with the technology or business of Counsyl other than snob appeal?

Ah, I see your concern. That's an understandable critique coming from outside of this industry. I had similar thoughts before I got more familiar with why we have the advisors that we do. Our industry (that is, genetic testing) is a minefield. Lots of people have strong opinions about it and there are many unanswered ethical questions. We need ethicists as advisors to help us make the right decisions. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard the question "So you're like GATTACA?" (For the record: No!) When your customer base is primed for strong negative reactions you need great minds to help inform both the public and your own decisions.

> What disturbs me is the seemingly coordinated release of the article, with the overwhelmingly positive comments by employees here, and rapid defense of any criticism.

Heh, I promise nothing suspicious is afoot here. TechCrunch came by a few weeks ago in preparation of writing a story. We've all been eagerly awaiting its release and as soon as it was up it got announced on our internal "chatter" email list. As you can imagine, when your startup gets profiled on TC it causes a bunch of excitement and we all immediately went to HN to upvote and comment (incidentally, I think we set off the voting ring detector on one of the submissions since we were all voting from the same IP). We love this place and all believe in what we're doing. Nobody was instructed to say nice things or defend the company.

disclosure: I'm a software developer at Counsyl. The above are just my opinions, I am not speaking on behalf of Counsyl, &c. &c.