Anne Wojcicki Business Lessons from the Billion Dollar 23andMe Brand

You have a code inside you and you don't understand how you work. And I think that there's a there's a fundamentally really interesting aspect of biology in that like it's incredibly complex. You know it's not um you know you can in some ways there's like laws about the universe but your body is just an incredible complexity and yet you you live in it like you are sustained by this complexity and all these things happen within you and you don't Hi my name is Ann Wojcicki. I'm the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe. 23andMe is a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company that allows people to get access to their genetic information and see all about their ancestry, where they're from, who they're connected to in the in the world, and then also to learn a bunch about their health. So I like to tell origin stories or I like to ask about origin stories. How did you get this job? How did you how do you start this thing? Well it came out of I always had a science background. I was working on Wall Street for about 10 years and it it was you know I happened to I was lucky I was working at a time when there was a lot of interesting innovation and also when the human genome had just been sequenced for the first time and I saw there's this incredible potential for what's going to happen when your human code is accessible and it always seemed fascinating for me like I'd love to see my code. What potential did you see though? I'm just curious what your vision was at that time. I think it's to me it was interesting it's a two aspects of it so one is that you have a code inside you and you don't understand how you work and I think that there's a there's a fundamentally really interesting aspect of biology in that like it's incredibly complex you know it's not you know you can in some ways there's like laws about the universe but your body is just an incredible complexity and yet you you live in it like you are sustained by this complexity and all these things happen within you and you don't understand why and so I was always fascinated like the the fundamentals of it is your is your genetics and I was also interested in in the in diversity in that like we we're similar we're genetically similar but we're different and why is it that my sister can look a certain way and my other sister can have a certain preference but we're all genetically quite similar but yet there's these small differences that like make you you like technically this is the blueprint for you so I was always just like one the most interesting thing for me is like it's your blueprint it's as basic as that and then secondly it also seemed like there's this incredible potential is that if you can understand your blueprint you can understand how to be healthy and so for me being surrounded by you know living on a medical community it was health was always a topic and what are the things that you can do to be healthier and why is it that some people get really sick and why is it like you know I would see some parents are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and some have asthma and other issues like why and that was always an interesting question to me and and again it goes back to the source of the information is you know your source code which is your genome so what are some of the advances that you're making now like what what's so good about like help me understand why someone should send in their dna to 23andme what do I get well 23andme is all about giving you access to your genetic information which again is what I see is your blueprint and what you can learn from there is your ancestral origins meaning sort of what parts of the world does your dna come from and what we have found is that that's actually a really fascinating area for people to dig into and you get people in the last 500 years people's families have been moving around and you might think that you're you know 100 irish irish through and through and then suddenly you find out well like oh I'm a little bit spanish and I have a little bit of french and like oh wow I have like like five percent chinese and so we find that it opens people up to this realization that what you look like is very different than what's actually inside and that what's inside is actually really connected to the planet not just to this one area and we find it really connects a lot of people yeah beyond so beyond the connection and you know we talked a little bit off camera how meaningful your work is to me someone who's adopted someone who did not have access or has not had access to his identity you know original birth certificate personal medical history or records of any kind you know I would go to the doctor and they have six eight pages of questions and it would just all get question marks don't know don't know don't know don't know you know and the doctor would look at me you know hey I need you to fill this out it's like hey I don't have it you know it's it's sealed away in a vault somewhere I feel it's unfair you know so to me the work you're doing is a game changer I mean it's it's huge for those of us who have been denied access yeah talk to me about the impact though beyond connections I mean for me personally I learned that basically I come from two areas of the world I'm about 50 Ashkenazi Jewish and on the other side I'm United Kingdom so like Great Britain Scotland Ireland I'm almost one percent Scandinavian but it's fascinating to me and I never knew that or thought about that before in in this particular way and for me personally I really couldn't fully live in the present until I reconciled my past if that makes sense help me understand how you see the impact that you're making beyond connections you know putting families together and helping other people with medical records well I think what's interesting that's happening right now is that you have sort of this watershed moment where suddenly everyone's seeing like the mirror for the first time and so like you obviously see your visible mirror but it's it's obviously different when you see your genetic information and the thing that I've been surprised at in the company is how everyone has a story that's disconnected from what their original perception was right everyone and and in some ways like it doesn't matter if you're adopted like I found you know my mother's brother you know he never had children but he was very active in the 60s and like turns out he had a child and so like I never you know took me 10 years of running this company before like that story came out but everyone has something that is comes out that's surprising for them and it could be about the ancestral side of you know you have your you thought you were from part of the world and it doesn't match the family stories a lot of times it comes out that there's you know you have a family member that you did not know about or that you're not related to a family member that you thought you were related to it's definitely transformative for adoptees and sperm donor children and egg donor children because like suddenly exactly what you said they have this ability to fill in a lot of gaps where they had holes in their existence and and now they can get it and it's interesting it's been interesting for me because it's it's a level of truth you know we always hear about like you don't want to racially profile people but we do that all day long and the reality is like without genetic information I'm always looking at you and making assumptions right and so until I actually get your genetic information until you actually see it you don't know what's real and and the reality is like because this information hasn't been accessible to people before it's not just like there's some people who have greater impact in their stories but it's everyone like every everyone out there and that's why I was actually like it's so for me it's like so interesting to document this time period because it is the first time like imagine if you introduced mirrors today and before that you never saw yourself oh I was thinking the same thing I mean you this thing that you're doing is literally just an infant just barely born yeah and as I look personally into the next decade or beyond I'm thinking probably you guys are going to use what you're doing to customize medication for example like you know we hear those ridiculous commercials on tv with all those side effects yeah I'll bet in a decade you'll be part of the revolution that says can you believe that we actually took that right the risk of what it could have done right versus something being specific yeah to our genetics well that's I mean that's specifically I think there's a whole world that's coming and part of again the reason that we started the company was that I didn't see the government or industry seizing on this opportunity of pulling together lots of genetic information and individuals and trying to really solve the problem well yeah I mean in my experience the government is pulling back it's still holding on to antiquated laws as far as I'm concerned as an adoptee this was a law that was started back I think probably to protect they say protect children but I think it's probably more to protect the reputation of the family or perhaps the sure the you know whatever the reasoning was but here we are now in the 21st century had to be on things have changed a little bit we can still we can talk about right you know complex even painful conversations in a very adult way right every and that's the thing is everything has changed like there's no such thing really now as you know you share your genetic information with lots of people one of the things I like about 23andMe system or process or way of doing things is I have the power I have the control and for me again you know my POV I have never had the control right it's always been controlled for me so if I want to opt in or if I want to opt out or if I want to share this or not share that it's up to me yeah and that whole kind of personal you know owning your personal medical history is so empowering yeah totally you know well that's I mean you should be a spokesperson for us I mean that's that's kind of our whole message is that to me I find so many aspects of health care just insulting what have you learned like what's gone wrong and maybe help calm some of the fears that maybe my parents have so my dad was very receptive to finding me well he was found he he didn't choose to hide or deny it my mother did choose to deny it and still doesn't want to be found to this day so what do you say to both sets of parents who maybe have different opinions about you know coming out and being public about something that happened I think that you know it's kind of what I said is that it's sort of this watershed moment where a lot of people are learning information and the reality is like it's not easy and we see that for a lot of people you know it's interesting because we're regulated on the health side and people always worry like oh you have an Alzheimer's risk or you have this risk and causes issue but it's far it's far greater on the ancestral side that people have a sense of identity or in your case a lack of identity and relationships and they want to find them and in that that like in some ways like that's like people people can understand and say like oh I know that there's risk in the family and like you get sick at different times and yeah like everyone's comfortable with that but suddenly waking up one day and saying like everything you thought about yourself is different really rocks people so the main thing that I see for people that's helpful is two aspects so one is patience like it's one thing I said in those early days like people would come like people used to come up to me and they'd be like I will never do your test I was like okay don't like that's fine with me so these are the same people by the way that said they'd never put a credit card into the internet yeah for sure buy something right yeah I think it's one of those things no one likes to be forced to do things and you know advances like I totally get it like you have to wait till you're comfortable yeah and people should wait till they're comfortable I think that the second thing that we've we've done is you know we have over seven million people who who are customers today and the reality is like there's comfort in numbers and let me ask you a little bit more about the number so is the quantity important to the body of work in other words do you need a big enough sample to make it you know this effective or more effective like do more people need to submit their DNA in order to get to the next phase I think it's you know we at every stage it's kind of like growth you know in childhood at every stage it's exciting because it's it's new and so like there's never been data of this size before I guess I'm asking do you have enough right now like if no one else submitted their DNA you have a big enough gene pool to work with to to advance always want more oh sure we have we have tons of potential like we have tons of potential on drug discovery and making discoveries and connecting people and all of this but the reality is you like understanding the three billion base pairs and why you are you and you're not a slug like that's a really complicated problem and and so you need a massive data set to understand that so I think that's where you know it's to to really hit that end goal you need a lot more information but like I said at every step of the way like we're kind of the company and the people here like it's overwhelming how many things that we can do with the information we have so that's why I said it's similar to childhood like at every stage it's exciting but there's always more you can do and so I think that's where there's a push here you know science in general is beautiful because you never stop learning and there's always more you can learn we're just scratching the surface