Create Value Piece by Piece

It really started actually on the roof deck at Twitter, even pre that where my co founder that we started mixer labs together and later we were both at Twitter at the same time. And he has a PhD in genetics, but he went into the software world and so on and he happened to get his genome sequenced and he brought the data and kind of like we started just looking at the data that he had generated from that. And one of the things that really struck us at the time was that there was kind of, it felt like there was this pretty interesting novel technology that was around genetics that enabled you to have pretty novel and deep insights into people's health, but for which the software tool chain was still relatively non existent. It was really still the domain of, you know, scientists who were using kind of, you know, pearl scripts to try to understand what was going on under the hood. And our initial thought process was like, well, it'd be interesting to see what happens if you have, you know, great Silicon Valley style engineers trying to make sense of all this data. As we started understanding the space better and just, you know, we're like, okay, what does the market currently look like? What are the applications of genetics that are out there? It turned out that, you know, genetics, I mean, had already been kind of as a field going on for a while. And in fact actually I had the personal relationship to it because I'm actually a carrier of a mutation in a gene that increases cancer risk. So I had personally experienced it as a patient. And at the time the experience that people had with genetics was one where it was this huge ordeal. It would cost like $5,000 to get tested. You need to meet with counselors and doctors and go back and forth with the insurance. It was like this big endeavor. But we literally, and we had at the time, there's a lot of attention to SpaceX and so on. And one of the things we were like, literally what does it look like if you put into a spreadsheet the pieces that it would take to do these tests with modern technology and really, does it really need to cost $5,000 or is it just because of the scarcity in the market and the market dynamics and we couldn't make any sense of why it would cost that much. And so almost like from first principles, we're like, okay, we think there's a way to do this at least an order of magnitude less expensive. And that kind of like kicked off, I think a bunch of questions in our mind because historically a lot of the pricing was set from a world where doing any kind of genetics used to cost thousands of dollars. And as the technology evolved down this exponential curve, the market didn't react, and the price to consumers or patients stayed the same while the underlying cost had completely changed. And so that's where we're like, we think there's actually a way to do this in a very different way, which might just change where this building block fits in the overall health landscape. So that was kind of a little bit the starting point. I obviously, a lot happened after that, but that was really kind of one of the first points where we were like, you know, thinking that there might be an interesting thing to do there and that we could potentially make a difference.