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23andMe's Fall

wsj.com

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Re: 23andMe's Fall

#71

Post by mplscarnut »

brianwawok wrote: post #65
mplscarnut wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Growing at the rate of inflation only matters if your market is capped out. Like, say Soda makers. 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..

Yeah I was trying to convey there are successful businesses that are broadly maintaining and there are rocketships (and everything in between) and we should expect them to be valued differently and have different risk profiles. So the observation (100x! That’s dumb!) is not rational.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#72

Post by someonehere »

I was an early adopter of 23andMe way back when they started. Before the privacy concerns. Before we had to worry about password uniqueness.

I didn’t renew my services with them. 1) I didn’t gain any value out of it, 2) their consistent blame of users that used recycled password for their breach.

I use ancestry.com as I’m working on dual citizenship with my family’s home country and find it worth the value. I was able to trace my family back through the Colonial Revolution all the way to the 1500s in Germany. That’s worth my money. Not 23andMe.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#73

Post by dabber »

nirvael wrote: post #7

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…

> Presumably they are selling their genetic data, but I don't get why it's not giving them a revenue stream. Let GSK manufacture the drugs using your genetic info, with a profit share for any drugs made this way. They mention a collaboration with GSK in the article, but why was this stopped?

In 2018 GSK made a $300M equity investment in 23andMe as part of a 4 year collaboration (with the option to extend for a fifth year) under which GSK had exclusive access to their data for use in drug target discovery programs, but [0]:

> All activities within the collaboration will initially be co-funded (50%/50%), with either company having certain rights to reduce its funding share for any collaboration programme.

So it seems they not only lost out on 5 years of developing their B2B business, but committed to covering a portion of the R&D costs over that period as well. There were terms about profit sharing on new developments, so it was a bet.

It doesn't sound like it worked out quite as well as either sided hoped though because in October 2023 (after the 5 year agreement) they entered into another agreement but this time [1]:

> Under an amendment to their Collaboration Agreement, 23andMe will receive a $20 million upfront payment for a one year, non-exclusive data license. > [...] > for a 12-month period, and [23andMe will] offer its research services for analyses of the data over that same period. Any new drug discovery programs that GSK chooses to initiate during the agreement will be owned and advanced solely by GSK.

[0]: https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/gsk-and-23and...

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

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#74

Post by ackbar03 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #68
ackbar03 wrote: post #31

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…

I would say target discovery is definitely no less important than drug discovery though. Biology is so complex, for a lot of diseases we aren't even sure the targets and pathways are valid. But then again, as per another commenter, I guess it's much harder than it seems, and probably not as easy to monetize as a drug

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#75

Post by dabber »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #26

Apparently $356M is nearly $0 to the WSJ

> Apparently $356M is nearly $0 to the WSJ

That is a pretty awful click-bait title. Presumably the "$0" is in reference to their sub $1 share price?

The fact that they put everything behind a paywall _and_ slap on click-bait titles is confusing to me. I can't imagine paying for access to that type of writing.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#76

Post by shmatt »

Shank wrote: post #33

> 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…

Promethease is why i initially did 23andme, and it was beyond worth it for me personally.

But for the same reason I'm just a one time customer, all I needed was for 23andme to give me a very expensive hospital test at a 95% discount, and I didn't need them anumore

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#77

Post by ilamont »

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, friends, and connections to pony up more cash, the company will likely be sold as the DNA and profile information has real value. I worry that it will go to PE (like Ancestry.com) or a global data broker that will strip-mine the assets in every evil way you can imagine (and maybe even some we can't).

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#78

Post by nso »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #15
tokai wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would russia or aliens ever pay for it, when they can just steal it?

Right. And they have enough of DNA themselves!

The aliens collection method is not as appealing to the end user, tho.

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#79

Post by dr-detroit »

ilamont wrote: 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…

[dead]

Re: 23andMe's Fall

#80

Post by toader »

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?
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