On a separate note, Ancestry is going through a similar issue. They've had double digit revenue declines in their DNA testing suite. The truth around 23andMe and Ancestry is that they're really doing a super shallow sequencing and, I believe, are doing only genotyping. It's not super interesting in the long run because it's such a static dataset. Getting to exomic or metabolic/gut biome sequencing provides much more interesting insights into the human body.
2) An outside can't sabotage your own idea. Only you can sabotage it. Sure, it doesn't make it any easier, but if someone can change your mind on your definition of "success" then you will never achieve it.
3) Yes, people spend money on dumb shit. I was in the same environment. Keeping up with the "jones" was a thing. Succeeding was also looked down upon. You know what is consistent with folks who came into success from those areas? They said f-that, I'm going to make my own path, regardless of what others say. They had mental fortitude.
4) My first car cost $2,000. My second car cost $1,000. Both I saved up and purchased. If police are harrassing you about being homeless in a car, then leave that location. That sounds like a police state (Cali anyone?). And before you say "It's not that simple to just leave!" Yes, yes it is. In order to change my situation, I literally "YOLO'ed" across the country (no job, nothing) in order to get out. Much like many in this investment group, in order to get out of hell, you have to make huge bets.
I live in the USA in 2019. I lived in the USA when I was homeless during the height of the recession. It is easier now than it was then.
I wasn't wealthy when I started investing. Hell, the first dollar I put into my long term portfolio was when I was living in my car! I started with ~$200 that I made from doing a collection of odd jobs (mowing lawns, computer repair, moving dirt, etc.). Every extra penny I made went into investing into a moderate portfolio focusing on high yield dividends (4-6%).
As I've grown in my career, got married, etc., I've kept effectively the same principles. I now get great passive income after 10 years of doing this and it's only getting better with each dollar we put in.
It is possible with the right mindset. In an investing group that I'm part of, my story is the norm - not the exception.
Affordable container ship that is electric.
A personal finance software that solves upper-middle class issues (eg. primary income, side business, rentals, etc.).
A product/service that makes CROs obsolete in drug development (CROs = 25% of cost of drugs; admin overhead)
Idk, those are some that immediately come to my mind.
Most of these are pay to play. IIRC, when Facebook was creating their ads platform in like 06' or 07', they did a deep partnership with DataLogix where DL was effectively powering their targeting/user classification. That's largely why you still see dumb ad classifications (eg. Farmers vs. Non-Farmers) in the FB ads platform. DataLogix started out as a CPG play since they powered the "put your phone number in for groceries" platform that everyone used in the mid 2000's. They then started doing tons of data aggregations and purchased a whole bunch. DL become way more powerful when they were bought by Oracle in 14' since they could do identity resolution across their cloud. Eg. when you go buy a car, you are likely using the Oracle Auto suite which includes credit checks.
I worked on the largest social data set available from the major providers (~20PB or so) and it was super cool (from a PM perspective) to unlock the possibilities around analyzing the data set.
The idea that I can unlock insights and change behaviors is an alluring concept until it is used improperly or inappropriately. That was ultimately why I left the data/marketing world.
Some other notes about the data: you can get additional hydrations 2-4x/yr @ $50k per pull. The data can be passed via API but they expressed to me that MOST data is doing via SFTP in Excel spreadsheets. They purchase data from any and all vendors possible.
Another insane data provide is Datalogix by Oracle. They were some of the first to have a deep relationship with Facebook. They do identity merges across all the Oracle touch points. This includes POS data, auto data (including sensitive data), and their overall marketing cloud.
It's insane to me that these other guys are not front and center in this debate.
What was funny to me in the whole process was that CA was the LEAST of what worried me. We were talking to Acxiom as well in which I could buy 500-1500 data points on 300M Americans for $250k-$500k. This included info like types of bank accounts, types of CC rewards, mortgages left, restaurant chain preferences, etc. They also had their own methods for creating data (the ML sauce) which created psychographic profiles.
The other thing the general public doesn't realize about profile data is that it suffers from sporadic and episodic contributions, making accurate high-resolution profiles difficult to obtain. There's lots of deduplication, profile merging, etc. that needs to be there.
Sure, CA had some shady shit going on. But from my perspective, they were tame relative to some of the other big players.
My day job is working for a company that competes with Jira. There is a huge trend in the enterprise space to replace their PPM tools with something that is "more agile but still has accountability".
What has happened is enterprises realize they need to change how they do business in order to compete. So, they implement agile, slap a new "trendy" software on top of it that isn't Planview and BAM! We're in digital transformation mode - right?
Here's a super dirty secret that will come as no surprise to folks in this forum: organizations that do this see, quantifiably, very low change in velocity. They see higher levels of accountabilty which, a nasty byproduct of this, is siloed teams and company politics (ever heard "that's not my job"?). In fact, people who institute software like this experience an increase in overhead for creating decks, dashboards, and the like to report out on how "accurate" their timelines are. Guess what? The project timeline rebase rate for MOST enterprises is still the same or higher.
What I do find fascinating is that there is a small subculture of companies who are getting that it's not the software that makes them better - its the culture. And the culture starts with their managers. To further this, the ones that we see become most effective that that BS term "digital transformation" and ultimately more competitive/innovative, are the ones who get rid of their managers and hire leaders who can lead a culture, lead teams, inspire them, push them, and GTFO out of their way. In our research, teams and organizations that focus on outcomes instead of deadlines produce faster, higher quality, and measurably larger ROI than ones that don't.
Anyway... sorry for the rant. This is a sore topic in our company right now because we tout that we're helping shape the new world of work yet internally we do the same stuff we've always done.
Part of us believes that there are enough people who just want the data with some suggestions on tools to explore the data for their own curiosity. Almost like a hobby (similar to what genealogy use to be). Perhaps this is false but need more proof points.
There is the option of a sort of marketplace/forum/app place that we explored. Effectively, you'd get your data and then have a handful of options that we'd offer up as next steps. Instead of keeping that all in house, we'd act more as a platform to bring together the right services and software so that people can explore at their own will.
We'd likely offer 3 kits out of the gate that are specific to certain areas of interest (cancer, inherited disease, etc.). Over time, we could expand this but I'd do this as just sort of a proof point.
In theory, we could create a custom targeted kit for any gene(s) but it's usually cost prohibitive since you generally order in batches of 24 samples.
The hardest part would be getting enough samples from different consumers to make the runs cost effective. We'd likely need at least 20-30 samples before we could run, so need to think through the logistics there.
Hi HN,There was a thread yesterday[0] around the inaccuracy of DNA tests from likes Ancestry & 23andMe that was intriguing and I'm hoping to get opinions on the subject.I'm a co-founder in a genome sequencing lab where we work only on research projects for clinicians, pharmas, etc. We currently don't do direct-to-consumer. However, we're big believers in having access to service and data...
May be worth your time in reaching out.
Sign a couple of departments that we do a lot of business with onto a sequencing subscription service (recurring rev).
Launch our new bacterial identification pipeline & product for Ear/Nose/Throat doctors.
Expand organic marketing content while scaling paid marketing.
Go as far into automation in our lab as we can.
Start dabbling in RNA sequencing and further our offerings in B/T cell immunology.
1) We're services/project oriented. So for each $1 we spend, we receive ~$20 back on revenue. That unfortunately doesn't compound and isn't recurring in the normal SaaS sense.
2) That's $20:$1 on revenue but not profit. We average between 15-25% net profit. Not great and we're trying to focus heavily on increasing this but it's quite tricky. Incrasing this usually means very expensive equipment purchases for automation.
3) I wish we could pour more money into advertising but we have to save up for additional equipment to purchase to expand services or pay for future software projects that could help us generate recurring revenue. We don't have deep pockets to leverage since it's bootstrapped. Otherwise, we'd have gone in guns blazing on advertising!
Also, I wouldn't value my time at $60/hr right now. When you're barely paying yourself in order to grow, hard to think of it that way ;)
Why sacrifice that when there are alternative options for cheaper, especially when we're only sending out a handful of emails/mo?
We go up against universities all the time in our competitive deals. They're generally always cheaper since everything is subsidized however the turnaround times are usually significant and the quality is not entirely repeatable. The cost here looks heavily subsidized just as a way to spark interest.
Also, in their About Us section they have every technology listed under the sun (Illumina, PacBio, Thermo, BGI) so I think it's just whatever they can get their hands on based on which labs have open runs. Seems quite questionable from a data integrity perspective if you're trying to do population based genetics. The quality between sequencers varies dramatically.
The only way this company stays alive without significant venture funding (which it appears they don't have) is through partnering with pharmas. From reading their privacy policy, it looks like they are de-identifying genotypic and phenotypic data from users. This, at scale, creates a nice population based genetics study so that if I'm a pharma, I can look at a specific biomarker and all data associated with it. That helps me build drugs against certain genes, diseases, etc.
So yes, you are the still the product and yes, your data is being resold.
So for now we're sticking with bacterial and targeted human as our primary market.