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vinniepukh | 2 years ago

Why did the CEO extract money from specifically Google and why did Google continue funding them despite all the shortcomings?

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dekhn|2 years ago

The CEO, Anne Wojcicki, was married to Sergey Brin (founder of google): https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/technology/23google.html Her sister Susan was also an exec at Google and provided space for the company when it first got started. Sergey loaned a bunch of money to 23&me before that, and his loan was repaid when google invested (which sounds like a conflict of interest to me, but then again, Sergey is a bunch of conflict of interests). Later, GV (Google Ventures) invested more in 23&Me. At the time, the head of GV was Bill Maris, who had worked with Anne before she founded her company (and I was an advisor for GV around that time; if they'd asked me, I would have said "don't put more money in this turkey").

So basically a little family of people who wanted to see the company succeed. I think they've been given their time to succeed and at best, have reached a sort of steady state where they are not going out of business, but also aren't achieving the interesting mission they were based on.