Anne Wojcicki

From Grokipedia

Anne Wojcicki (born 1973) is an American entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer of 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing and biotechnology company headquartered in South San Francisco, California.

Born in Palo Alto, California, Wojcicki is the youngest of three daughters of Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish-born physicist and former chairman of Stanford University's physics department, and Esther Wojcicki (née Hochman), an American educator of Russian-Jewish descent renowned for her innovative journalism teaching at Palo Alto High School. Her older sisters include Janet Wojcicki, a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Susan Wojcicki, who served as CEO of YouTube from 2014 until 2023 and died in 2024 after a battle with lung cancer.

Wojcicki graduated from Yale University in 1996 with a Bachelor of Science in biology. After college, she spent nearly a decade on Wall Street as a healthcare analyst and investor, focusing on biotechnology firms at Passport Capital and other investment groups, where she grew disillusioned with the inefficiencies in the healthcare industry. In 2006, motivated by her interest in preventive medicine and family health history—including her father's Parkinson's disease—she co-founded 23andMe with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza to democratize access to genetic information through affordable at-home DNA testing kits.

Under Wojcicki's leadership as CEO from 2007 to 2025, 23andMe expanded rapidly, amassing over 14 million customers by 2023 and going public in 2021 via a SPAC merger that valued the company at $3.5 billion. The firm pioneered consumer genomics, offering insights into ancestry, health risks, and traits, while partnering with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2018 for a $300 million deal to develop new therapies based on its genetic database. Wojcicki, who was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 2007 to 2015 and shares two children with him, has long advocated for using genetics to empower personal health decisions.

In March 2025, amid declining demand for DNA kits and regulatory challenges, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, prompting Wojcicki to resign as CEO while remaining on the board. Later that year, in June, she reclaimed control of the company through her newly formed nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, acquiring substantially all of 23andMe's assets—including its vast genetic dataset and telehealth subsidiary Lemonaid Health—for $305 million in a court-approved auction, outbidding pharmaceutical firm Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. This move positions 23andMe to operate as a nonprofit focused on research, privacy safeguards, and advancing genomic science for public benefit.

In brief

Anne Wojcicki bet that ordinary people would want a letter from their own genome. 23andMe made that letter a product — ancestry, health hints, and a database science still argues over.

The company has had regulatory winters and public dramas. The idea remains simple and Jewish in the best laboratory sense: look at the data, then let a person own a copy.