The rise of Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andMe who's about to be worth more than $1 billion when the genetic-testing giant makes its public debut
- Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andMe, could be worth $1.05 billion when the company goes public.
- Wojcicki cofounded the genetic testing company in 2006 after a career on Wall Street.
- Wojcicki is fitness-obsessed and frugal, has three kids, and was married to Google’s Sergey Brin.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Anne Wojcicki is about to join the ranks of billionaire CEOs minted in Silicon Valley.
Wojcicki’s genetic testing startup, 23andMe, is going public in a reverse merger with a blank-check holding company owned by Richard Branson. The deal could value the 15-year-old company at $3.6 billion. Wojcicki’s stake in the company could be worth $1.05 billion once the deal officially closes.
The SPAC follows an unexpected year for Wojcicki, 47, and the company she cofounded: Despite a round of layoffs in early 2020, Wojcicki in February told Insider’s Megan Hernbroth and Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer that the pandemic reinvigorated the lagging consumer-genetics industry. Even so, 23andMe’s revenue has been dropping over the years, according to regulatory filings released as the company prepares to go public.
Read more: 23andMe is going public. We spoke with its CEO about its road to IPO, and what the future holds for the consumer-genetics industry.
With Wojcicki gearing up to take 23andMe public, here’s a look back at how she got her start and built a genetic-testing empire.
Wojcicki was born and raised in Palo Alto, California
Anne, Janet, and Susan Wojcicki.Getty
Both of Wojcicki’s parents are academics: her father, Stanley, chaired Stanford University’s physics department; her mother, Esther, taught journalism at Palo Alto High School. Wojcicki’s sister Janet also works in academia as a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Wojcicki’s other sister, Susan, is the CEO of YouTube.
“My parents really looked at us always as like mini adults,” Anne Wojcicki told CNBC Make It in 2018. “I think the one thing that my parents really did is they gave us a taste of freedom. And they encouraged it. They encouraged us to find our passions, they weren’t controlling.”
Wojcicki played ice hockey growing up — she told Fast Company in 2013 that she switched to the sport after figure skating “started to be a little bit like Honey Boo Boo on ice” — and later attended Yale University. She graduated in 1996 with a biology degree, according to The New York Times.
After graduating from Yale, she pursued a career on Wall Street
Post-graduation, Wojcicki began working for a biotech-related hedge fund. She told Fast Company that her academic parents were offended by the choice.
“It was always embarrassing to come home. People were like, ‘Oh, Anne, you Wall Street girl,'” she told Fast Company.
Wojcicki worked on Wall Street for about a decade as a healthcare analyst at firms including Investor AB and Passport Capital.
Wojcicki in 2008.Fred Prouser/Reuters
Wojcicki launched 23andMe in 2006
Along with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza, Wojcicki founded 23andMe with the goal of providing the ability for people to look at their own genome and understand what it means. (Avey and Cusenza have since left the company.)
23andMe received backing from Google, GlaxoSmithKline, Sequoia Capital, Johnson & Johnson, and others. In total, the company has raised over $873 million in funding.
23andMe’s saliva tests — which can test for genetic predispositions, ancestry, and inherited traits — initially cost $999, but now costs as low as $99.
Things took a turn for the company when, in 2013, the Food and Drug Administration sent 23andMe a warning letter, calling its spit collection vial “an unapproved medical device” and placing limits on genetic testing for consumers. The company stopped providing health analyses based on consumers’ DNA and was limited to offering only ancestry results.
By 2015, the company overcame regulatory hurdles and was able to begin offering health information to customers once again.
Since then, 23andMe has partnered with GSK; has created tests that can detect if consumers have an elevated risk of developing diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s; and is working on creating its own drugs for conditions like cancer or heart disease.
Sergey Brin and Wojcicki.Donald Bowers/Getty Images for The Weinstein Company
Wojcicki married Google cofounder Sergey Brin in 2007
Wojcicki met Brin through her sister, Susan: In 1998, Susan Wojcicki rented Brin and Google cofounder Larry Page her garage in Menlo Park, California, in order work on their young company, Google.
While they were dating, Brin would leave Anne Wojcicki notes in Braille about where to meet or leave her voicemails in Morse code, Wojcicki told The New York Times in 2017.
Wojcicki and Brin married in May 2007 in a super-secret ceremony in the Bahamas. According to the San Jose Mercury News, guests weren’t told the location of the wedding and were instead flown to the Bahamas on the jet owned by Page and Brin. Once there, they were taken by boat to a sandbar where the ceremony was held — Wojcicki and Brin wore white and black swimsuits, respectively, and swam out to the ceremony site.
The couple had two kids together whose last name is Wojin, a portmanteau of their parents’ last names.
Wojcicki and Brin separated in 2013 and divorced in 2015. It later came out that around the time of the separation, Brin started an affair with a Google employee in her mid-20s, who was also in a relationship with another high-level Google executive at the time.
Wojcicki told The Times that one person who helped her through her divorce from Brin was Ivanka Trump, who she described as “super-supportive.”
Alex Rodriguez and Wojcicki.Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Wojcicki later dated former Major League Baseball player Alex Rodriguez
The couple met through friends around 2015 and dated for about two years.
Wojcicki told The Times in 2017 that Rodriguez was “a really sweet guy,” smart, and a good person, but that their respective parenting obligations and lives on opposite coasts made the relationship unsustainable.
Wojcicki’s mom, Esther, told The Times that while she liked Rodriguez, the pairing was “a mismatch.”
“He had no academic background. We couldn’t have an intellectual conversation about anything,” Esther Wojcicki said. “I wish J-Lo all the luck in the world.”
Wojcicki has said she lives frugally and doesn’t like ‘froufrou things’
Brin is worth $91.3 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, but Wojcicki told The Times in 2017 that she’s not a fan of “fancy cars and houses and the right dress.” She sometimes has her kids sleep in their clothes to save time in the mornings and wear their clothes into the shower on trips to save on hotel laundry costs.
She said at the time that she cuts her kids’ hair herself, mostly shops at Payless for shoes, and rides her bike to work.
“It’s so easy to be like, ‘I don’t have to do laundry again. I don’t have to cook again.’ But then you’re not normal,” she told The Times.
Wojcicki is also fitness-obsessed, riding her Peloton bike, taking two daily walks, and doing online yoga classes during the pandemic. Forbes wrote in 2019 that 23andMe’s headquarters “looks like a cross between a Silicon Valley startup and a fitness club.”
Wojcicki in 2019.Mike Coppola/VF19/Getty Images for VF
Wojcicki gave birth to her third child, a daughter, in July 2019
Wojcicki told Forbes while she was pregnant that she decided to have the baby by herself because she wanted a third child. “So like, guess what? I executed,” she said.
“Whether you’re in a relationship or not should not dictate whether or not you have the ability to have children,” Wojcicki told Forbes. “I’m very stubborn. When there’s something I want to do, I get it done.”
After the birth of her daughter, Wojcicki became outspoken about the need to normalize breastfeeding and offer support to new mothers. She told the Washington Post in 2019 that 23andMe has created a support system for parents or hopeful parents, including on-site breastfeeding rooms, a 1,500-square-foot playroom for employees’ kids, and benefits for parents that include paid parental leave, fertility benefits, adoption assistance, and surrogacy reimbursement.
“I’m in a luxurious position where I can do this, and normalizing it is part of how I can help people,” she said.
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