Nature And Nurture
Anne Wojcicki raised her genetic-testing company, 23andMe, from a wonky wunderkind through a troubled adolescence. Now her $2.5 billion biotech machine is ready to take the next step, combining big data and big pharma. Decoding the DNA of Silicon Valley’s most personal creation.
ArAised her genetic testing compAny, 23Andme, from A Wonky Wunderkind through A troubled Adolescence. noW her $ 2.5 billion biotech mAchine is reAdy to tAke the next step, combining big dAtA And big phArmA. decoding the dnA of silicon VAlley’s most personAl creAtion.
Anne Wojcicki is 45 minutes late, something so encoded in her habits as 23andMe’s CEO that employees have stopped complaining about it. They know it’s hardwired. On a Thursday morning in April, her team is waiting patiently as she swirls into the company’s headquarters wearing running shorts, a T-shirt that says “Yay DNA” and worn tennis shoes, having just pedaled the 5 miles to work while eight months pregnant.
Reflecting Wojcicki’s passions, 23andMe’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California, looks like a cross between a Silicon Valley startup and a fitness club. There are treadmill desks throughout the open-plan office, elliptical machines in conference rooms and Peloton bikes in the cafeteria, which connects directly to a gym. Wojcicki is still practically bouncing after climbing the four flights to her small glass-walled office, pausing only to fill up her metal water bottle. She makes sure her employees know that their well-being is their own daily choice. “I’m like, ‘I take the stairs and I’m pregnant! You can take the stairs!’ ” Wojcicki says.
Such a workout would be a lot for most expecting moms, but Wojcicki, who’s 45 and has two children with her ex-husband, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, isn’t even breathing hard. And she is still energized about what she refers to as her “first child”: her 13-year-old business, 23andMe. Since its launch, around 10 million people have spit a half-teaspoon of saliva into a 23andMe plastic tube and mailed it in to get their ancestry or health-risk results. Nearly 5 million customers did so last year alone, generating an estimated $475 million in revenue for the company, which has yet to turn a profit. It’s also made Wojcicki (No. 33 on this year’s list of Richest Self-Made Women) worth an estimated $690 million, almost entirely from her roughly 30% stake in 23andMe, which is valued at $2.5 billion by investors.
To get this far, Wojcicki weathered an annus horribilis that threatened to end it all—her separation from Brin in 2013 came at the same time the Food & Drug Administration forced 23andMe to immediately cease health-test sales—and has
faced skeptics who viewed her company as little more than a parlor trick.
Now that she has moved on from her marriage and proved beyond all doubt that 23andMe is a serious company, Wojcicki finds herself at a turning point once again, both personally and in her business. She’s been quietly preparing to welcome her third child—this time as a single parent. “Whether you’re in a relationship or not should not dictate whether or not you have the ability to have children,” Wojcicki says. “I’m very stubborn. When there’s something I want to do, I get it done. I really wanted a third child. So like, guess what? I executed,” she adds with a laugh.
And while it might make interesting cocktail conversation to reveal that you are 5% Scandinavian and have a genetic disposition to sneeze in the sun, 23andMe’s ambitions are much grander. Wojcicki wants to leverage the exponentially plunging costs of genetic sequencing (down 99% in a decade) and 23andMe’s massive DNA library (the world’s largest genetic research database) to fuel a “biotech machine” that will not just indicate genetic predispositions to certain diseases but also help create the drugs that will treat those diseases. The brilliance is that, if all goes as planned, 23andMe gets paid on both ends. Customers pay to find out about their heritage and then the company uses that genetic data to one day profit from potential new medicines. Eighty percent of 23andMe’s customers consent to allow their DNA to be used for biomedical research.
“I thought it was genius actually, that people were paying us to build the database,” says Richard Scheller, 23andMe’s chief scientist. “People want their data to be used and to help scientific discoveries.”
23andMe’s latest chapter started with an in-house drug discovery group in 2015. But pharma development is notoriously hard—86% of new drugs fail in clinical trials—and expensive. The average cost of developing a medicine in the U.S. is about $2.6 billion. So, in July of last year, Wojcicki inked a deal with U.K.-based giant GSK (formerly called Glaxo-SmithKline; 2018 sales: $31 billion), which invested $300 million in 23andMe and signed a four-year exclusive partnership to identify new drug targets. 23andMe will have to share drug-development costs, but it will also share in any profits.
Another potential growth area for 23andMe is a deeper and more personalized approach to health. Wojcicki wants to coach consumers based on their genes, giving them greater control over their health. That could mean more partnerships like the one it has with fellow Mountain View startup Lark Health, which lets 23andMe customers sign up for diabetes counseling. Or it could mean that 23andMe’s own AI-powered app will remind you to drink more water or to choose a lunch entrée with tomatoes, which some research touts as helping to deter the onset of Parkinson’s. Wojcicki isn’t sharing details just yet about the coaching.
It won’t be an easy task. There’s no clinical evidence that people who’ve learned through genetic testing that they have a high genetic risk for a specific disease dramatically change their lifestyle to lower that risk. Or change their lifestyle at all. In fact, there is plenty of evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, to the contrary. Humans find habits hard to break. Wojcicki’s own staff take the elevator when she’s out of sight.
But it’s a gamble she’s willing to take. “The medical world has kind of given up on your potential to ever be healthier,” she says. “I think that’s really sad.”
Wojcicki herself was almost forced to give up six years ago. In November of 2013, she was busy adapting to a rapidly evolving life. Her husband had reportedly moved out. She was mother to two young children and still the CEO of a startup. Then, days before Thanksgiving, her phone buzzed with a text: A courier from the FDA had a package for her. “Don’t sign for it!” Wojcicki fired back to her assistant.
It was too late. The FDA notice ordered her company to immediately stop marketing its health tests because it had
failed to provide enough evidence that they were accurate. Wojcicki thought she could brush it off. Three days later, the FDA made its warning letter public, and 23andMe had to take its health tests off the shelf.
It was an abrupt crash after a high-flying start, and many were quick to identify it as another tale of Silicon Valley hubris, not surprising given Wojcicki’s deep roots in the area. She had grown up on the Stanford University campus, where her father, Stanley, was a physics professor. Wojcicki’s mother, Esther, taught journalism at a high school in Palo Alto and obsessed over how early she could teach her three daughters everything, from the Latin names of flowers to swimming as toddlers. “I used them as an educational experiment,” Esther told Forbes in 2018. While her sisters gravitated toward art and math, Wojcicki was nerdy but social. “She could charm the pants off of anybody,” her mother recalled.
Among those to fall for her charms was Sergey Brin (and much later, baseball player Alex Rodriguez), whom she met after her oldest sister, Susan, rented out the garage of her Menlo Park home in 1998 to two ambitious Ph.D.s trying to index the world’s information: Google cofounders Larry Page and Brin. Susan became Google’s 16th employee and eventually the CEO of YouTube. The middle Wojcicki sister, Janet, is now a globe-trotting epidemiologist who teaches at the University of California, San Francisco.
Wojcicki first got fired up to battle the healthcare system as a young Yale University graduate working as an analyst at a small firm on Wall Street. Days spent at medical-billing conferences and nights volunteering at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital drove home how focused the medical industry was on maximizing profits—and not on preventive care.
“It was so unacceptable to her as a compassionate human,” says Ashley Dombkowski, who served as 23andMe’s chief business officer before cofounding Before Brands, an antiallergy baby-food company Wojcicki backed. “She is undeterred by massive, worthwhile problems.”
The human genome was first sequenced in 2003, and scientists were entranced with what the code could unlock. Wojcicki got introduced to Linda Avey, who had studied biology as an undergraduate and was creating research programs at Affymetrix, a gene-testing company in Santa Clara, California. The two began brainstorming over dinner in December 2005. Soon after, Wojcicki and Avey decided to start a company together, and Avey recruited her former boss Paul Cusenza to be 23andMe’s third founder and its operations lead. “I was blown away, because I saw what immediately the implications of that were,” Avey says. The Brin connection didn’t hurt. “Google support would be pretty much clinched.” (Avey left 23andMe in 2009 to work on Alzheimer’s.)
Google did come through. After raising $9 million from Google, Brin and a few outside investors like New Enterprise Associates and Genentech, 23andMe launched its first product in November 2007. The spit test cost $999. Customers learned about their ancestry, their likelihood of going bald and their risk for some common health conditions like heart disease. The company skirted FDA regulations by advertising itself as a fun way for people to get insight into their DNA, rather than as a medical tool.
At the time, it cost about $300,000 to sequence an entire human genome, down from a whopping $50 million in 2003. (It now costs less than $1,000.) But 23andMe generated reports for much less by using a technology called genotyping, which spot-checks specific parts of a gene for mutations known to be linked to certain diseases, instead of sequencing, which entails reading the entire gene.
To drum up publicity among a crowd who wouldn’t blink at the $999 price tag, 23andMe held spit-test parties at events from Davos to New York Fashion Week, where celebrities like Naomi Campbell, Diane von Furstenberg and Rupert Murdoch spit into little tubes. Wojcicki loved being the party planner, but adoption was slow. Competitors like Navigenics died out. By 2011, four years after its launch, 23andMe had amassed only 100,000 customers. It seemed to be nothing more than the hobby of a billionaire’s wife.
In 2012, exponentially declining costs allowed 23andMe to drop its price to $99, sparking an uptick in sales. Wojcicki was ready to go bigger. “We wanted to get the technology quickly into the hands of individuals,” she says. By October 2013, 23andMe was in talks with Target and Wojcicki was pushing hard to enter stores before the holidays, a move that would have put the testing kit in the aisles alongside vitamins and thermometers. 23andMe’s head of business development, Emily Drabant Conley, recalls Wojcicki’s certainty when an exec thought it was impossible to meet the time line: “Anne was like, ‘ This is a company that was founded on impossible.’”
But in the end, impossible won. It would take three more years for 23andMe to get onto Target’s shelves. First she had to overcome the public censure of the 2013 FDA order and rebuild. As she eats pizza and listens to customers talk at the company’s annual DNA Day, those days seem long off. Genetic tests have emerged as one of the defining social trends of the decade, revealing unexpected family members ( Wojcicki found a previously unknown cousin) and even helping to solve cold-case murders like those of the socalled Golden State Killer, who was arrested after a relative
“Should we be encouraging people to spend $200 on a DNA test, or $200 on a gym membership?”