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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

In a letter to customers, CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki said, "We're about to cash out of this bitch, and go kick it on a South Pacific island. Just fair warning that the database is going to have new owners soon, who will be keen to sell access to your most-intimate biological details to anyone with an idea on how to make money on it, and a checkbook."

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Funny, I have her 2006 letter and there seems to be some inconsistencies:

"As you all know, I'm rich enough from Google that I could just go kick it on a South Pacific Island. Instead though, I'm going to spend the next 15 years of my life grinding, taking flak of the press and internet trolls, so that I can set the record for helping the most people in the world learn there ancestry and pioneer mass genetic testing via the mail, mass SNPs genotyping at a level never seen before by orders of magnitude, and pave the way for a future where everyone on the planet has access to their genetic information for better health"

Fair enough, but however altruistically you might hold her motives, it doesn't change the fact that the new owners will surely be looking to maximize their returns through new and creative ways of using pre-existing assets. I've watched this movie many, many times over the past couple of decades.

I get that, and yeah have seen some of the same movies.

I do see a lot of potential in 23andMe (though I loathe the name—never put a number in your name! numbers are incredibly overloaded—millions of times less combinatorics; and they become outdated almost immediately—23 is a largely meaningless number).

But 23AndMe at least has built a large number of paying users. If they look at where medicine could be in 10-20 years, and have the courage, they've got a better shot than nearly anyone of leading the way. Someone could be a $1T universal health care company.

The health privacy issues I think are a red herring. Proper medical research entails generating strongly typed data that you can synthesize infinite records with one click. An individual's personal health data should be of little value, and if it's not, then we've got deeper fundamental problems with our system (which we do, but has nothing to do with 23andme)

It's not meaningless. Humans have 23 chromosomes (except for those with Down syndrome). That's never going to become outdated.

Click "go to definition" enough and you will figure out what I'm talking about.

Godmode troll activated.

If 23andme had that many paying customers, they would not have needed to go the SPAC route to avoid financial disclosure. That they have chosen to go public as a SPAC after more than a decade of existence does not speak highly of their financial situation or their prospects for future earnings (and this is generally something that nearly all recent SPACs share).

It could be.

It could also be that they just saw no reason to enrich a set of insiders and saw a SPAC as a way to stick it to the man.

I have zero clue. My DD is basically on this page, and though I've been a customer since the beginning and have referred a bazillion people, a lot of that has just been due to lack of competition and not necessarily because I've been thrilled by 23andMe's stuff.

It could also be that they just saw no reason to enrich a set of insiders and saw a SPAC as a way to stick it to the man.

A SPAC is the ultimate way to enrich a set of insiders...The SPAC initiators get to buy additional shares of the SPAC at discount prices that other SPAC investors don't have access to. And unlike with a traditional IPO, the targets don't have to disclose those arrangements or other sweetheart details that the target executives receive as part of the acquisition. Another big consideration for a SPAC is that executives get to sell their post-acq stock immediately, while normal employees are still subject to a lock-up period to "protect" the stock price from downward pressure.

Ugh yeah I had a feeling this may be the case. I was hoping SPACs might be better, but haven't researched it.

It's almost like we should have a thing called "public markets" where the public can invest directly in new ventures. /s

(Gotta say I'm with Cuban and Mr Wonderful and Elon with the idea that regulators are pretty awful in their blindness to 2nd order effects)

Maybe the blockchain is the way to go after all.

Regulators are aware of these effects. They have limited ability under the law to pursue things that only have 2nd order effects.

Blockchain won't help; you would have the same problems but with even fewer ways to address them.

There's a weird push and pull on Hacker News where if a company does something unethical it's: "Well what did you expect, they have an obligation to maximize shareholder value", but at the same time founder and CEOs are often venerated as hard-working, almost selfless individuals who dedicated their lives to make the world a better place in spite of their own self-interest. It's pretty jarring.

That’s because we all see ourselves as the good guys in the story. It’s remarkable though how often decisions in tough situations always somehow end up benefiting yourself within whatever constraints are placed on your actions when there’s any kind of real conflict.

So if you’re the outsider, you see the harm. If you’re the insider you made the best decision possible with the information you had and the resources available to you. I think both viewpoints are correct in many ways (ignoring those that are blatantly dishonest).

The line runs through about the 7th zero in the founder's net worth, I think.

There are 100 kinds of people in the world.

1) People who want to get rich first but also would be happy to make the world better

10) People who care about making the world better first but also would be happy to be rich

11) People who are enlightened and don't care about such things

100) People who just love to troll the other 11 groups

This is the best answer

Try not thinking of Hackernews, or any forum on the internet, as a single entity, but as many individuals. Some of them have conflicting views with the others.

Averaging the thoughts of a diverse group will just end up as white noise.

> many individuals. Some of them have conflicting views

This goes double for major political parties, and a key reason why all them end up known by their enemies as hypocrites.

Every successful founder or CEO sees themselves and their vision as fundamentally good for society, and at worst they may see some evil around their company which they'll chalk up to "price or progress". As the money starts rolling in and the price never ends up being paid by themselves (or the company) it's hard to see it as anything but a fruitful vision. One that's "good for all intents and purposes". The more money, the more of the bad intents and purposes they hand waive or brush aside.

It's indicative of the tradeoffs in any human endeavor and the shades of gray that come into play when evaluating those endeavors in moral terms. It can be both. Also, it's way easier to retire young if you have made a good amount of money and to live with a higher quality of life than a lot of CEOs who just have more property than they can do anything with. Being a quiet multimillionaire is great. Being a hardworking American Stakhanovite-CEO is, indeed, a lot of sacrifice for not a whole lot of real individual or familial gain. 23andme has done a lot of good and has accomplished a laudable mission, but there are also concerns that many people share about its activities or the potentially abusive things that could be done with the customer data.

What unethical thing has 23andme done?

Pretty sure there was some personal interest at play. She was married to Sergey Brin. His mother has/had Parkinson’s and I believe I read that based on genetics he almost certainly will also. 23andMe is a data play original conceived, in part, to gather genetic data to further research to extend the life of a billionaire.

Here’s hoping we all benefit from this work. It’s easy to spin things as sinister if that’s what you want to do.

Did she honestly say this? Do you have a link?

If this is true then, wow... just wow!

Edit: given that Zuck took the piss out of his customers many years ago [0] as a teenager and is now a billionaire then I guess anything's possible.

[0] - https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...

She did not say that

I'm... how you say?... paraphrasing.

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