Anne Wojcicki

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The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

Rabin, “In Israel, a Push to Screen for Cancer Gene Leaves Many Conflicted,” New York Times, November 27, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/health/in-israel-a-push-to-screen-for-cancer-gene-leaves-many-conflicted.html. 33. E. Murphy, “Inside 23andMe Founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA Revolution,” Fast Company, October 14, 2013: http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. 34. FDA, “Inspections, Compliance, Enforcement, and Criminal Investigations: Warning Letter to Ann Wojcicki,” November 22, 2013, http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/2013/ucm376296.htm. 35. A. Pollack, “FDA Orders Genetic Testing Firm to Stop Selling DNA Analysis Service,” New York Times, November 26, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/business/fda-demands-a-halt-to-a-dna-test-kits-marketing.html. 36.

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., “Dealing with the Unexpected: Consumer Responses to Direct-Access BRCA Mutation Testing,” PeerJ, February 12, 2013, https://peerj.com/articles/8/. 81. R. Epstein, “The FDA Strikes Again: Its Ban on Home Testing Kits Is, as Usual, Likely to Do More Harm Than Good,” Point of Law, November 27, 2013: http://www.pointoflaw.com/archives/2013/11/t.php. 82. A. Wolfe, “Anne Wojcicki’s Quest for Better Health Care,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/anne-wojcickis-quest-for-better-health-care-1403892088. 83. C. Bloss, N. Schork, and E. Topol, “Effect of Direct-to-Consumer Genomewide Profiling to Assess Disease Risk,” New England Journal of Medicine 364, no. 6 (2011): 524–534. 84. R. C. Green and N.

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There are other complementary forces that are, in parallel, pushing DNA democratization forward—consumer genomics and a landmark decision at the United States Supreme Court. We’ll now zoom in on each of these. The Angelina Effect and Consumer Genomics On the same morning as Jolie’s op-ed, the CEO and cofounder of the consumer genomics company, Anne Wojcicki, had e-mails, texts, and calls pouring into her office. She said, “Angelina Jolie talking about a technical subject and saying, ‘I did this, you can do this’ is a great thing for us. She did something to prevent disease, and that’s exactly what we want people thinking about.”33 We’re going to drill down on 23andMe, whose mission is to democratize genetic information.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT went public with their split: Liz Gannes, “Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe Co-Founder Anne Wojcicki Have Split,” All Things D, August 28, 2013, https://allthingsd.com/20130828/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-and-23andme-co-founder-anne-wojcicki-have-split/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Brin went to Burning Man: Vanessa Grigoriadis, “O.K., Glass: Make Google Eyes,” Vanity Fair, March 12, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-rosenberg-affair. After separating in 2013, Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki divorced in 2015. A YouTube representative said the company could not confirm Brin’s attendance at Burning Man.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT her book on parenting: Wojcicki, How to Raise Successful People, 138. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT another magazine named her: Elizabeth Murphy, “Inside 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA Revolution,” Fast Company, October 14, 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a San Jose newspaper: Mike Swift, “Susan Wojcicki: The Most Important Googler You’ve Never Heard Of,” The Mercury News, February 3, 2011, https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/susan-wojcicki-the-most-important-googler-youve-never-heard-of/.

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Meanwhile, Wojcicki’s sister Anne and Sergey Brin were going through a tabloid-style divorce. Brin, Google’s whimsical co-founder, had fallen for a twentysomething marketing staffer for Google Glass who modeled the dorky headgear Google pitched as the future of computing. The staffer also happened to be dating an executive at Google’s Android division. Brin and Anne Wojcicki went public with their split in August 2013, noting, through a publicist, that they “remain good friends and partners.” Anne absconded to Fiji with girlfriends to unwind with yoga. Brin went to Burning Man. But the breakup and awkward love rectangle were a recurring topic in Google’s gossip mill, adding even more tension.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

But even though he was raised as a Jew and attended Hebrew school for a few years, he was nonpracticing, did not have a bar mitzvah, and was put off by traditional Jewish celebrations, which he once told an Israeli reporter he “associated with getting lots of gifts and money, and I was never comfortable with that.” When he was married on an island in the Bahamas in May of 2007 to Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of 23andMe, a genetics research company, the couple stood in bathing suits under a chuppah, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy, but no rabbi officiated. Then, as now, he was uncomfortable with introspection. Asked by the same Israeli reporter if it was a coincidence that his wife was Jewish, he said, “I believe there are lots of nice non-Jewish girls out there.

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A longtime Google employee describes Page this way: “Larry is like a wall. He analyzes everything. He asks, ‘Is this the most efficient way to do this?’ You’re always on trial with Larry. He always pushes you.” While Brin is more approachable than Page, he, too, can be awkward around strangers. His wife Anne Wojcicki’s company, 23andMe, was feted at a fashionable cocktail party in September 2008 that was cohosted by Diane von Furstenberg and her husband, Barry Diller, Wendi and Rupert Murdoch, and Georgina Chapman and her husband, Harvey Weinstein. The event was held at Diller’s Frank Gehry-designed IAC headquarters in Manhattan.

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Google ended the year with 16,805 full-time employees, offices in twenty countries, and the search engine available in 117 languages. And the year had been a personally happy one for Page and Brin. Page married Lucy Southworth, a former model who earned her Ph.D. in bioinformatics in January 2009 from Stanford; they married seven months after Brin wed Anne Wojcicki. But Sheryl Sandberg was worried. She had held a ranking job in the Clinton administration before, joining Google in 2001, where she supervised all online sales for AdWords and AdSense, and was regularly hailed by Fortune magazine as one of the fifty most powerful female executives in America.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Founded by Anne Wojcicki: Katie Hafner, “Silicon Valley Wide-Eyed over a Bride,” New York Times, May 29, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/technology/29google.html. the company provides ancestry-related: “How It Works,” 23andMe, https://www.23andme.com/howitworks/. It’s not a full sequencing: “About the 23andMe Personal Genome Service,” 23andMe, https://customercare.23andme.com/entries/22591668. Since then, he drinks green tea: Elizabeth Murphy, “Do You Want to Know What Will Kill You?” Salon, October 25, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/10/25/inside_23andme_founder_anne_wojcickis_99_dna_revolution_newscred/.

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As these tests become more common, one of the most crucial issues for us to grapple with, he says, “will be to educate people as well as physicians about the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of particular challenges they might find, and to do it in a fashion that doesn’t cause great anxiety or anxiety out of proportion to the risk.” Vogelstein and Diaz’s concerns were brought to the surface recently by the genomic testing company 23andMe. Founded by Anne Wojcicki at age 32 in 2006, the company provides ancestry-related genetic reports and uninterpreted raw genetic data for its clients. You spit in a tube, send it to 23andMe’s lab, and for $99 they send you back your genetic information. It’s not a full sequencing of your genome, but a snapshot of the areas of your DNA that researchers know the most about, like genes that indicate a risk for Parkinson’s or how a person might react to certain blood thinners.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

He loved that Google afforded him proximity to power. Like Zeus, he was weird and mysterious in a way that the others weren’t. He was always there but you never knew what he was really like. And let’s not get into his complicated romantic life, the servicing of which required a fuckpad on Manhattan island. Susan Wojcicki was the sister of Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin, and she was the Senior Vice President of Advertising. She was like Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and the growing earth. It was Susan Wojcicki who let Sergey Brin and Larry Page start Google in her garage, and it was Susan Wojcicki who really ran the show, overseeing the advertising which was the source of all the money.

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There was nothing ironic in the wrongness of a bunch of dumb assholes who offer bogus opinions for money. Dumb assholes who offer bogus opinions for money don’t need to be right. They only need to be loud. “I was very much captivated,” said Adeline, “by news of Sergey Brin’s affair.” Sergey Brin was one of the co-founders of Google. He was married to Anne Wojcicki. Over the summer, news had broken that Sergey Brin was having an affair with an underling at Google X. Google X was an experimental lab that developed products like driverless cars, dogs that don’t need to lick their own genitals, and Google Glass. Google Glass was a wearable computer built into a pair of ugly eyeglasses.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

For the billion-dollar companies launched between 2014 and 2018, a more recent cohort, Google, was still the largest previous employer, followed by Square (a relative newcomer, founded in 2009), Facebook, McKinsey, Amazon, Genentech, Cisco, and Oracle. It’s also worth pointing out that while some may see a contrast between the roles of investors and founders and may believe that investors are not good operators, a sizable number of billion-dollar startup founders worked in venture capital rather than in corporations. Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the consumer genetics-testing company 23andMe, worked as an analyst for Passport Capital. Katrina Lake was an associate at Leader Ventures before starting Stitch Fix, a clothing retailer. David Vélez was a partner at Sequoia Capital looking into Latin American investment opportunities before venturing out to start Nubank, the Brazilian online bank unicorn, and Andy Rachleff co-founded Benchmark Capital before starting Wealthfront, a consumer financial advisory company.

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Before the consumer genetic-testing company was launched, most people would raise their eyebrows at the invitation to mail a tube of their saliva to a startup in Silicon Valley. Genetics testing was, at the time, mostly medical. Few people had used it to calculate their genetic predisposition to certain ailments. In other words, there was no market for consumer genetic testing. The founders of 23andMe—Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey, and Paul Cusenza—had to create one. The company 23andMe was one of the first to offer autosomal genetics testing for ancestry applications using saliva, and it took years for sales to ramp up beyond the early adopters. Initially, the tests were expensive—23andMe charged $999 for each test back in 2008.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Given the money at stake, “it seems only a matter of time before humans were added to the growing list of creatures whose genomes” were up for grabs.25 I’d hazard a guess that “Christina” will not be the last entrepreneur down this road. In fact, there are already players milling around the starting gate, many of them true heavy hitters from Silicon Valley. The best-known “consumer-facing” genetics company is probably 23andMe, founded by Anne Wojcicki. Anne’s father, Stanley, was the chair of Stanford’s physics department in the late 1990s; he had a couple of students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who would go on to start a thing called Google. In fact, they started it in Anne’s sister Susan’s garage. (Anne would later marry and divorce Brin; Susan is now the CEO of YouTube, owned of course by Google.)

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Supreme Court Unity Biotechnology Urban, Tim USA Today Utah utilities Vanity Fair vapor pressure deficit Vassar, Michael Venezuela Venice Verity, William Vermont Vietnam Vinci, Leonardo da Virgin Galactic Virtue of Selfishness, The (Rand) Vodafone volcanoes voting rights Walker, Scott Wall Street Journal Walton family Washington Post water Watson, James Wealth of Nations (Smith) welfare West, Michael wet-bulb temperature wheat Whippman, Ruth White, Curtis Whitehead, Emily white supremacy wilderness, protected wildlife Wilkinson, Richard Williams, Jerry Williams, Ted wind power Wired Wisconsin Wohlforth, Charles Wojcicki, Anne Wojcicki, Stanley Wojcicki, Susan women’s rights Woods, Darren World Bank World Happiness Report World Meteorological Organization World Petroleum Congress (Beijing, 1997) World War II Worster, Donald Wozniak, Steve Y Combinator Yellowstone Yosemite Valley Youtube Yudkowsky, Eliezer Zhang, Feng Zinke, Ryan Zuckerberg, Mark ALSO BY BILL McKIBBEN Radio Free Vermont Oil and Honey The Global Warming Reader Eaarth American Earth The Bill McKibben Reader Fight Global Warming Now Deep Economy The Comforting Whirlwind Wandering Home Enough Long Distance Hundred Dollar Holiday Maybe One Hope, Human and Wild The Age of Missing Information The End of Nature ABOUT THE AUTHOR BILL MCKIBBEN is a founder of the environmental organization 350.org and was among the early advocates for action on global warming.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

But they built the critical early relationships, established the trust, and created a competitive advantage that made it possible to scale later—something Spotify certainly did, to the tune of 345 million active users and more than $2.5 billion in venture funding. * * * — While Daniel Ek needed to establish trust with an old-school industry that viewed him as a threat, Anne Wojcicki, founder of the DNA testing and analysis company 23andMe, faced even more formidable hurdles as she launched her business. She had to take on both the entrenched healthcare establishment and the U.S. government agencies that regulated it. Anne’s big idea was born out of a passionate belief that people have a right to know more about their genetic history—so they can use that information to make more informed and empowered decisions about their own health.

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* * * — Generosity can be found in the DNA of companies featured in every chapter of this book. Sallie Krawcheck’s startup Ellevest is focused on closing the “gender investment gap” by helping women to become more active and smarter investors. Payal Kadakia of ClassPass built her business around the vision of helping people become more active and find their fitness passion. Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe started her genetic testing business with the goal of empowering people to gain more control of their healthcare information. And Charles Best launched DonorsChoose with the express purpose of helping to fund worthwhile school projects by matching them up with donors. As these organizations that are “born good” gradually begin to scale, the acts of goodness often start to expand and multiply.

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The idea is for Google Fit products to collect the never-ending stream of biometrical data to feed the Baseline Study. Yet companies such as Google want to go much deeper than wearables. The market for DNA testing is currently growing in leaps and bounds. One of its leaders is 23andMe, a private company founded by Anne Wojcicki, former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The name ‘23andMe’ refers to the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that encode the human genome, the message being that my chromosomes have a very special relationship with me. Whoever can understand what the chromosomes are saying can tell you things about yourself that you never even suspected.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In 2008 Google gave the organization $1.5 million. (Lessig, who no longer works with Creative Commons, says this amount exaggerates the group’s dependence on Google, since the gift is a pledge to be fulfilled over the course of several years.) In 2009 the company’s cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, donated $500,000—more than a fifth of the money contributed that year. It was something of a family gift, since Wojcicki’s mother, Esther Wojcicki, then served as chair of the organization’s board of directors. All of these organizations do legitimate work, and some present compelling ideas for copyright reform alongside ideas that would amount to handouts to Google.

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(Goldsmith and Wu) “Why Your Cell Phone Is So Terrible” panel, 3.1, 10.1 Wiggin LLP WikiLeaks, 4.1, 7.1 Wikipedia, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 10.1, 10.2 Williams, Robbie, 2.1, 9.1 Wilson, Stephen “windowing”, 6.1, 7.1 Windows operating system, 2.1, 7.1, 7.2, 10.1 WIPO Copyright Treaty (1996), 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 Wired, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 Wojcicki, Anne Wojcicki, Esther, 3.1, 3.2 Wolff, Michael World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1 World of Warcraft World’s Fair Use Day Wu, Tim, 1.1, 3.1, 8.1, 10.1 Wyden, Ron Xbox Live, 7.1, 7.2, 10.1, 10.2 X-Men Origins: Wolverine Yahoo!, 2.1, 3.1, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2 Yang, Jerry You Are Not a Gadget (Lanier) YouTube, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 Zelnick, Strauss, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 Zittrain, Jonathan ZML.com Zucker, Jeff, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Levine was the executive editor of Billboard magazine and has written for Vanity Fair, Fortune, Rolling Stone, and the arts and business sections of the New York Times.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

By participating, everyone feels more in control of their destiny. Especially when failures or major setbacks occur, you need to carry your team through it. For example, imagine working years to launch your product to much fanfare and then suddenly having your product shut down by the government for a couple of years. That’s exactly what happened to Anne Wojcicki, CEO and cofounder of genetic testing company 23andMe. Founded in 2006, 23andMe allowed customers to spit in a small tube and, within a few weeks, get access to a wealth of genetic information about their ancestors, predisposition to health issues, and other insights based on their genes. The company thrived in its early years, attracting excited customers and some of Silicon Valley’s greatest investors.

…

But after the initial shock of someone leaving us rather than being dismissed, I realized that our team’s immune system was working as it should. As you lose people who aren’t a good match your team becomes stronger. Be great at retaining your A players, and less so with your B players. “You have to constantly be reevaluating the people you have,” says Anne Wojcicki from 23andMe. “Figuring out talent is hard. You never want to set someone up to fail. Doing so only hurts them and the company. One of the hardest parts of leadership is not getting attached to people. Even the people you enjoy the most may face a point where they become too specialized for their role or not specialized enough.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Companies like 23andMe: Thomas Goetz (17 Nov 2007), “23AndMe will decode your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the age of genomics,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/15-12/ff_genomics. Elizabeth Murphy (14 Oct 2013), “Inside 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA revolution,” Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. personalized marketing: Charles Seife (27 Nov 2013), “23andMe is terrifying, but not for the reasons the FDA thinks,” Scientific American, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/23andme-is-terrifying-but-not-for-reasons-fda.

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Blue Bottle Coffee, cognitive load, fake news, Gene Kranz, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Wall-E

Time and time again, the process brings teams together and brings ideas to life. Over the past few years, our team has had an unparalleled opportunity to experiment and validate our ideas about work process. We’ve run more than one hundred sprints with the startups in the GV portfolio. We’ve worked alongside, and learned from, brilliant entrepreneurs like Anne Wojcicki (founder of 23andMe), Ev Williams (founder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium), and Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (founders of YouTube). In the beginning, I wanted to make my workdays efficient and meaningful. I wanted to focus on what was truly important and make my time count—for me, for my team, and for our customers.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Her husband traveled a lot, and when she got lonely, she would go to the other side of the house and talk to the Googlers. After a number of late-night sessions when she’d heard Larry and Sergey’s dreams time and again, she quit Intel to join Google herself. Eventually Sergey began dating her sister. (Anne Wojcicki and Sergey would marry in 2007.) In early 1999, Google moved to its new office space on University Place in Palo Alto, over the bicycle shop. The conference room had a Ping-Pong table, and, maintaining the tradition, the desks were doors on sawhorses. The kitchen was tiny, and food was yet to be catered.

…

Many cheeky activities that had once seemed so refreshing began to assume an aura of calculation when they became routine. How many scavenger hunts can you attend before it becomes a chore? Page and Brin themselves had grown in the decade since they founded Google. Both were now married and within a year of each other fathered sons. Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, was a cofounder of 23andMe, a company involved in personal DNA analysis. Brin defied corporate propriety when he shifted his personal investment in the firm to a company one. Google’s lawyers made sure the transaction passed formal muster. The normally gregarious Brin could turn icy when an unfamiliar person referred to his private life—for example, when a reporter offered congratulations at a Q and A at the Googleplex soon after his wedding, he changed the subject without acknowledging the remark.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Through Google, Larry Page has given over $250,000 to Singularity University and has said that if he were a student, SU is where he’d want to be.67 Interestingly, his wife, Lucy Southworth, is a biologist who has written papers on aging issues, including one titled “Effects of Aging on Mouse Transcriptional Networks,” coauthored with Stanford’s Dr. Stuart K. Kim, who is a well-known aging expert and one of Larry Ellison’s award recipients.68 Sergey Brin is spreading the meme in a more personal way. 23andMe is a genomics company that was cofounded by Brin’s biologist wife, Anne Wojcicki, and has gone a long way toward popularizing the idea of personalized medicine. “Spit parties” are one of the cute marketing techniques the company uses to get the public interested in thinking about their DNA and how it might be fixed to cure disease. One high-profile party took place during New York City’s Fashion Week.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Sjöblad’s cyborg evangelism Bryan Menegus, “Company Offers Free, Totally Not Creepy Microchip Implants to Employees,” July 24, 2017, gizmodo.com; James Brooks, “Cyborgs at Work: Employees Getting Implanted with Microchips,” April 23, 2017, apnews.com. “gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations” Anne Wojcicki et al., U.S. Patent 8543339 B2, December 5, 2008; Karen Kaplan, “23andMe’s Designer Baby Patent Is ‘a Serious Mistake,’ Critics Charge,” October 3, 2013, latimes.com. endorsed the Singularity sect Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” February 10, 2011, time.com. an online forum of futurists who called themselves extropians.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

Many friends have heard me drone on about this subject for years—encouraging me all the while. (And also arguing—which I tend to see as the same thing.) For their support and good cheer I would like to thank Gary Kalkut, Esther Fein, Gerry Krovatin, Sarah Lyall, Robert McCrum, Anne McNally, Richard Cohen, John Kalish, Jacob Weisberg, Deborah Needleman, Jacob Lewis, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki and Alessandra Stanley. When I was a child it often annoyed me that my parents, Howard and Eileen Specter, acted as if I could do anything. As I age, however, I have come to realize there is a role for blind devotion in this world—and I thank them for it profusely. My brother, Jeffrey, and his wife Yaelle, shouldered much family responsibility while I hid behind my laptop, and without that help there would have been no book.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Education and information become insurance against insurance. Godin took this line of thinking to its extreme when he speculated about opportunities not just for smarter people but—genetically speaking—healthier people as determined by 23andMe, a service that analyzes users’ DNA. (Founded by Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe discovered his Parkinson’s gene. Google invested in the company.) Godin said: And while some may not like it, what happens when 23andMe gets a lot smarter and the healthiest gene pool starts their own life insurance coop? U.K. business journalist James Ball agreed with me that insurance is “a glorified betting market” where insurance providers “offer odds against certain outcomes—adverse outcomes—and we pay up the stake.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

Mark McCarthy, a geneticist at Oxford University, worries that ‘there aren’t enough genetic counsellors on the planet’ to manage the subtle interpretations of polygenic scores. But, as always in the world of forecasting, there’s money to be made from commercialising prophecy and imbuing it with moral urgency. Both Plomin and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe believe it is a parent’s duty to ‘arm themselves with their child’s blueprint’.32 Duty to whom? Plomin’s big idea and Wojcicki’s big business trivialise the danger of emphasising what’s certain – the score – over and above what’s uncertain – the other half that represents life. Stereotyping, rationing, discrimination, passivity, surrender: these are the very real risks produced when overstating the foresight afforded by DNA.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It would make them rich beyond belief and transform Google from a mere search engine into a sprawling global platform designed to capture as much information as possible about the people who came into contact with it. The Brain Tap In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved into the garage of a house owned by Susan Wojcicki, the sister of Brin’s future wife, Anne Wojcicki. They had an initial $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, a powerful computer company that itself had come out of an ARPA-funded 1970s computer research program at Stanford University.36 The initial small investment was followed by a $25 million tranche from two powerful venture capital outfits, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.37 Brin and Page couldn’t be happier.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

These products will be incorporated into wearables such as clothes, bracelets, shoes and glasses, and will collect a never-ending stream of biometrical data. The idea is for Google Fit to feed the Baseline Study with the data it needs.30 Yet companies such as Google want to go much deeper than wearables. The market for DNA testing is currently growing in leaps and bounds. One of its leaders is 23andMe, a private company founded by Anne Wojcicki, former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The name ‘23andMe’ refers to the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that contain our genome, the message being that my chromosomes have a very special relationship with me. Anyone who can understand what the chromosomes are saying can tell you things about yourself that you never even suspected.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

MAY On May 1, Steve and Allison Spinner hosted a small fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, who weeks earlier had announced that she would be running for president in the 2016 election. In advance of this event, campaign chair John Podesta, who would be speaking there that day, was advised that “There will be four important individuals within tech in the room: Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), Padma Warrior (CTO of Cisco), Anne Wojcicki (CEO of 23 and Me and married to Sergei Brinn, co-founder [of] Google), and Palmer Luckey (founder [of] Oculus VR).” Luckey had concerns about Clinton (based on her platform in the 2008 presidential race), but figured this would be a good opportunity to find out if any of her positions had changed.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

The citation heralded them “for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes.” The prize, which carries a $3 million award for each recipient, had been established a year earlier by the Russian billionaire and early Facebook funder Yuri Milner, along with Sergey Brin of Google, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Milner, an ebullient fanboy of scientists, staged a glittering televised award ceremony that infused the glory of science with some of the glamor of Hollywood. The 2014 black-tie event, cohosted by Vanity Fair, was held in a spacecraft hangar at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

The two women have shared the “Nobel Prizes” of Japan, Spain, Israel, and Canada (with Zhang), to name a few. The most lucrative award was the Breakthrough Prize, created by Silicon Valley billionaires including Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin (Google) and his ex-wife Anne Wojcicki (23andMe), and Dick Costolo (Twitter). At a black-tie awards ceremony in November 2014, Doudna and Charpentier received their awards from Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz. Charpentier flashed her Gallic humor on stage. “It’s kind of surreal to receive the prize from Cameron,” she said, then turned to Costolo: “Three powerful women… I was just wondering if you’re Charlie?”