FORBES.COM JUNE 30, 20 1990
ANNEWOJCICKI^—PRESCRIPTIONFORINNOVATIONfailed 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 hu-
bris, 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 moth-
er, 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 (andmuch 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 Bellev-
ue 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 anti-
allergy baby-food company Wojcicki backed. “She is unde-
terred 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 bi-
ology as an undergraduate and was creating research pro-
grams at Affymetrix, a gene-testing company in Santa Clara,
California. The two began brainstorming over dinner in De-
cember 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 Enter-
prise Associates and Genentech, 23andMe launched its first
product in November 2007. The spit test cost $999. Custom-
ers 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 ad-
vertising 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 en-
tire human genome, down from a whopping $50 million
in 2003. (It now costs less than $1,000.) But 23andMe gen-
erated 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 blinkat the $999 price tag, 23andMe held spit-test parties at
events from Davos to New York Fashion Week, where ce-
lebrities 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.’”ut 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 defin-
ing 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 so-
called 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?”
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