Anne Wojcicki Wins Bidding for 23andMe | Hacker News Reader

Anne Wojcicki Wins Bidding for 23andMe

wsj.com

61 pointsmfiguiere25 comments

So, found company, SPAC it to get some of that sweet sweet public market cash, run it poorly so that it goes bankrupt and you resign, and then buy it at auction for less than it's supposed assets?

Surely that does something bad to economics of investing and running businesses if you can just steal public investment dollars like that, right?

Is there an alternative that doesn't reward a rich CEO for killing their own company, even if it wasn't done on purpose?

She put very little of her own money into it. One of the first investors was Google, ie her husband, then it just kept raising money (how much of that money went directly to Anne), billions of dollars of investment, never made profit, and now she gets it for $300 million or so.

The principle is that employees matter more than shareholders: wiping out shareholders to save jobs is the greater good even if it enriches a nefarious or incompetent executive. Many retail investors are shocked to learn in their first bankruptcy how low they are in the pecking order when a company goes under.

The alternative is just to not make stupid investments in the first place. The shareholders knew (or should have known) the risk. If "dumb money" hasn't purchased the stock then the CEO wouldn't have been able to burn their capital.

aren't scenarios like this ultimately enabled by the application of the Greater Fool theory?

No one is required to be a fool. You can opt out.

Very few companies have CEOs that actually have the voting shares to run their own company to the ground to buy it privately.

Wojcicki was actually able to stand against the rest of the board to bring this company down to bankruptcy level because of her 49% voting shares

She wasn't rewarded, she asked to take it private twice because it was going to go bankrupt, board said no both times, now she has to pay 7.5x her last offer to them.

I think you're misunderstanding it as if the company endogenously failed due to missteps on her end, which sort of trivially can't be the case, there's a very defined product here where you can charge more for the output than the input. Thing is, investors / board didn't wanna run that sort of business, apparently.

If it clearly had more assets than the cost more people would bid for it at auction

The tech behind 23andMe has long been grossly obsolete. AFAIK, they test a small sample of DNA only, whereas serious people do whole genome testing. A newer company in the field with more to offer is Nucleus Genomics, but I advise finding the full genome test provider that's right for you.

And then what? So you find a full genome test provider, and now you have a full array result: What do you then do with it that doesn't violate your privacy?

Isn't the real prize the library of personally-identified samples preserved in their "biobank" and not the methodologies or analysis they've applied to it so far...

The prize to the user is the quality of the data and the analysis, not the prospect of it.

I rarely used the 23andme website for much of anything and always used it to export into Promethease.

The 23andMe scan just doesn't have all the necessary data. It scans just a small sample of the data that's biologically relevant. Think 700K SNPs versus 5 million SNPs with full genome.

They have the freezers filled with biological material that could be resequenced though. Or not?

How is that useful to the user right now? Other companies have the full genome data sequenced, also offering a mature full genome sequencing service. 23andMe has neither.

It is like saying that AMD could train LLMs on its hardware. Maybe it could, but others already have it.

They decided to try to be a pharma company instead of a diagnostics company. The microarray tech was obsolete, but they did have a lot of data. The problem is that being a pharmaceutical company is very difficult. I always question why they wanted to play in early pipeline rather than using their data to have an edge in later stage acquisitions. Perhaps they felt that running later stages of development and commercialization was too difficult, risky, and capital intensive; but if so then they probably had no business trying to sell drugs in the first place.

This is a great outcome no?

Who knows. What we do know is someone intimately familiar with the data and its potential utility is no longer bound by any prior contractual obligations as to its use. I doubt this will end well, but i am a cynic.

This. Nonprofit status is no assurance of governance. Just look at Firefox. The limiting factor is the ethics of the new/returning management/board of directors layer(s).

What makes it a great outcome?

Is there any full genome sequencing company which doesn't keep dna results associated with user name? ie. strong privacy guarantees

I thought they all gave you the option to delete your data? That's effectively the same.

I requested deletion, but I have no faith whatsoever that it was honored.

Big companies that have a legal team and operate in the EU generally do honour deletion requests - I have worked with/for some and a big part of the system architecture usually revolves around being able to be sure that deleted data is erased even from backups within 30/60/90 days.

Smaller companies, all bets are off - good chance your data is sitting on a dusty hard drive/tape backup or in some 'data_extract_test_2023.tgz' file in an S3 bucket.

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