Bankrupt Barbie
23andMe's CEO Anne Wojcicki resigns as DNA testing company files Chapter 11
“The real world isn’t what I thought it was.” – Barbie
You are Barbie. You can be anything.
Mattel cloned 23andMe co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki as a Barbie doll as part of its “Celebrate Role Models” series in 2023.
Wojcicki, 51, was running one of the hottest start-ups in the world, which was valued at $6 billion after it’s initial public stock offering in 2021. On Sunday, 23andMe filed bankruptcy, its shares are all but worthless, and Wojcicki resigned.
All the genetic data 23andMe has collected since its founding in 2006 is up for grabs in bankruptcy court. Who knows where it will end up or how it may be used? If you’re among the 15 million people who’ve ordered a 23andMe test, you should go online and delete your data – and even then, it may never be erased.
Now what do we tell the girls?
Like Barbie, Wojcicki was a victim of way too much adulation. She was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who seeded the company and vetted its first hires.
In 2008, the couple organized “spit parties” at the World Economic Forum in Davos and New York Fashion Week, collecting saliva from global business luminaries and celebrities. Also that year, Time magazine named 23andMe’s genetic test its “Invention of the Year.”
In 2013, Fast Company named Wojcicki “The Most Daring CEO”. In 2020, Forbes put her on its list of the “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.”
What could go wrong?
Patrick Chung, who served on 23andMe’s board, offered a key insight into Wojcicki’s character in a January 2024 Wall Street Journal article
“Anne has a willful ignorance of constraints,” he said.
He likely meant it as a compliment for her ability to overcome obstacles, but we live in a universe full of constraints that can’t be ignored any more than gravity.
23andMe imploded because it couldn’t develop a revenue stream beyond its one-time charge for a spit test. It never turned a profit, burned through most of its investor’s cash, and sent hundreds of employees to the unemployment lines.
Somewhere, someone is probably using a Wojcicki Barbie as a voodoo doll.
Wojcicki kept saying she wanted to grow the company from an ancestry and health data provider into revolutionary healthcare giant that used genetic testing data to develop pharmaceuticals. But these efforts face serious constraints, taking more time and money than Wojcicki had.
This is a woman who played hockey at Yale, toiled as an analyst for hedge funds, married a Google founder, and rubbed elbows with some of the most revolutionary technologists of our time. But sometimes success is a pathway to massive failure.
Just after the company’s first round of layoffs, Wojcicki was reportedly spending her time with Mattel on her Barbie doll. At an employee meeting, her chief of staff said it was good for the “Anne brand.”
She was clearly living in Barbie World.
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