How 23andMe Went From $6B Valuation to Penny Stock | WSJ What Went Wrong

DNA-testing company 23AndMe and its founder, Anne Wojcicki, aimed to revolutionize healthcare, bringing genetic tests to homes with just a tube of spit. But challenges with its business model and continued data privacy concerns for consumers have brought the company once valued at $6 billion to a valuation of nearly $0, with Nasdaq threatening to delist it.

WSJ explains what went wrong with Wojcicki’s biotech business.

Chapters:
0:00 Home DNA testing
0:49 The rise of 23andMe
2:18 The turning point
4:03 23andMe’s fall
5:23 What’s next?

What Went Wrong explores the challenging conditions and decisions that led to a company's downturn.

#23andMe #DNA #WSJ

[rickybobby]

Dear WSJ, please stop calling every ivy leaguer with ivy leaguer parents, who gets a bunch of start up money from rich friends, "sell made."

[JoshinDallas]

I love how they say she would have been a self-made billionaire, but then they note oh hey, she had wealthy parents and was dating one of the richest guys in the planet who helped her fund the company. Do you guys know what self-made means?

[theuser]

The life of a corporation:
1. Start a small project
2. Notice success and continue innovating
3. Go corporate and public
4. Start introducing unecessary beaurocracy
5. Sales start to decline
6. Make the product noticeably worse to cut costs (subscription models, AI 'support', etc)
7. Sales decline even further
8. Layoff everyone but the aristocrats
9. Even more money is burned
10. The founder sells all remaining shares and investors are left holding the bag

[withoutpassid]

23&me sold its customers’ genetic profile to pharmaceutical companies without their consent. I’m not surprised that it got caught up and is paying the price now.

[surelywoo]

". . . making Anne Wojcicki a self-made millionaire . . ."

Well, if you ignore the fact that she was married to Sergey Brin and Google kicked in 2.6 million to get it going, but okay.

[nickolas]

"self made" + dated Google founder and hosted parties with celebrities

[stevensmith]

Too many businesses are centred around raising money rather than making money these days.

[vivienne]

My parents are self made. They’re from an impoverished country and immigrated twice to be able to live in America. My paternal grandparents abandoned my father and his brother in elementary school and worked in labor and farm jobs since the age of 4. My maternal grandfather attempted to murder my mother and beat my grandmother. They used to share just one egg between a family of 6 during birthdays. My father used to walk instead of paying 10 cents to take the bus to his construction job. They worked for 60 years of their lives. They’re retired now and are multimillionaires, but they had worked so hard without doing regular checkups that when my dad did retire he was diagnosed with cancer twice and a heart disease. My mom became half blind because or cornea was dying and had never gone to get it checked. This is the definition of self made, not super rich people creating a company with other super rich people.

[ropro]

Sick and tired of the subscription model. As consumers, we need to show companies the 🖕 to make them stop.

[aspecialvisit]

God I hate subscription platforms so much. the moment a company starts relying on subscriptions is the moment I'm out.

[AnthonyWilliams-ewwp]

The key here is that essentially it is a buy once product. It’s unbelievable that investors didn’t identify this as a fatal flaw in the business. There’s a reason Buffet invested in Coca Cola.

[Gotcho]

Will this stop me from seeing that dumb article where a mother she raised two CEOs and a doctor? The article also leaves out that she was married to the co-founder of Google.

[HostileTakeover]

There was a show that used identical triplets to test out this one, an Ancestry, and another one. The 23 and me gave each one of them different results…

[combatepistemologist]

"We're not making enough progress on the research side." I.e., you promised more than you could deliver. Oh, that's never happened before.

[dontbanmebrodontbanme]

My wife bought me one of these when it first came out. I thought it was so cool!!!! But I let it sit under my desk. I just couldn’t bring myself to use it. Why? Once I give my DNA to this company, they have it forever and can do whatever they want with it. I’m a healthy dude, but what happens when insurance companies (life and health, for example) decide to raise rates just for me (or not insure me at all) because I have a family history of some disease? Or cancer? Or some other thing? And considering I’m black, does this thing really know my history? Since I know nothing of my history, they could tell me anything. So then I thought about doing this with multiple companies to at least see if they’re consistent. In the end, the idea of a company having my DNA was unacceptable to me and for that a reason, I was out!!! 😂

[MrGigaHurtz]

All these companies talk about protecting your personal data but then when there's a breach they just say "Oops we tried". When there is a leak the board should be required to provide their personal data to the victims

[dclamp]

Right from the beginning it was easy to see that your genetic information might be valuable to you, but is VERY valuable in the marketplace, i.e., insurance companies, health care providers, etc. Once that information leaves your actual body, it is on the free market and can never be retracted. That data is simply too valuable NOT to sell; there is no way privacy can be reasonably assured.

[nickmitchko]

0:32 How can you be a self-made billionaire when you're married to sergey brin (founder of google)

[seashackf]

Their business model was always to build up a database and then make money selling the data either piecemeal or the whole thing. The dna service is only a way to get the data, it was never meant to be the main business. Once they sell the company the buyer can do whatever they want with the data.

[stefziggy]

Super informative in under six minutes. Great video.