rfc

Nice! This is really cool. Well done.

Very cool... nice work.

Your germ line genome rarely changes. Your exome changes all the time. Your gut biome changes all the time. There's massive market opportunity but a ton of regulations around how to tap into that market opportunity.

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.

1) You have your own selection bias as we all do. I'm not ignorant to that. However, many of the folks that have gone through similar transformations don't come from "easy" backgrounds. They had their own tragedies (financially, emotionally, etc.) that they had to overcome. Being born into poverty is an excuse to sidestep responsibility of your own life.

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.

Alright, I'll bite. This is such a victimhood mentality and a ridiculous statement.

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.

This. The only current driver of cost reduction in genome sequencing at the moment is subsidization.

My only hope is that we can extend this to biotech as well. The amount of IP theft and insane Chinese government subsidization of biotech that USA-based companies live off of is disturbing. They are so addicted to BS money and are so entrenched that these companies fear they can't back out. I say - Rip The Bandaid Off.

Modular housing that grows with your life. Biggest problem there is effective expansion joints that would hold the houses together.

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.

The ones I'm most familiar with are: Acxiom, Datalogix, DataSift, Equifax, Full Contact, and Experian. There's always Twitter as well but they are mostly abstracted data and you can't just waltz in and get their firehose.

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.

What sucks is that I get the reason why the researchers don't care or gloss over it. It's why I initially got into the space: there's something magical about working on massive data sets and unlocking possibilities with it.

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.

Yep! I was shocked when I got the data packet. I had no idea that I could get that much data on individuals.

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.

The White House also evaluated personalization technology to use on whitehouse.gov so that they could serve particular "stats" during major events (election season, SOTU, etc.).

I took up issue with "Great Hack" as well. At some of my previous companies, we evaluated purchasing data from a lot of these vendors for a data hydration purposes, Cambridge Analytica included. They didn't offer to sell but we did have conversations around leveraging their platform to create insights.

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.

I was going to use a throwaway but f-it. You, sir, are literally 100% correct.

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.

This is our biggest gripe with the service. We have a lot of consumers that ask us to perform gene sequencing for them expecting to get something similar to 23andMe. It's always a hurdle to explain the difference between what we do (targeted gene sequencing) and genotyping chip. They're a worlds difference and requires some reading.