[HN Gopher] Anne Wojcicki Wins Bidding for 23andMe
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Anne Wojcicki Wins Bidding for 23andMe
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 44 points
Date : 2025-06-13 20:31 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| The28thDuck wrote:
| This is a great outcome no?
| woleium wrote:
| 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.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| abxyz wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| aren't scenarios like this ultimately enabled by the
| application of the Greater Fool theory?
| nradov wrote:
| No one is required to be a fool. You can opt out.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| 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
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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.
|
| Now it has.
|
| 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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?
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| 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...
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Huh. The prize to the user is the quality of the data and the
| analysis, not the prospect of it.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I rarely used the 23andme website for much of anything and
| always used it to export into Promethease.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| yread wrote:
| They have the freezers filled with biological material that
| could be resequenced though. Or not?
| tintor wrote:
| Is there any full genome sequencing company which doesn't keep
| dna results associated with user name? ie. strong privacy
| guarantees
| londons_explore wrote:
| I thought they all gave you the option to delete your data?
| That's effectively the same.
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