23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki On Owning Your Power
Anne Wojcicki, Chief Government Officer of 23andMe, photographed for Forbes by Aaron Kotowski in June 2019.
Aaron Kotowski/The Forbes Assortment
The cofounder and CEO of 23andMe spoke to Assistant Managing Editor Diane Brady about her path to energy:
I’m fortunate. My sisters and I had been all raised with this concept that you are able to do something. I by no means thought of my gender as a toddler. It was all about this mindset that the world is tremendous attention-grabbing and everybody is nice at one thing, so go discover what you’re good at. Discover your ardour. For me, that was science. My sisters (YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Pediatrics professor Janet Wojcicki) pursued passions that had been vital to them.
My mother (author/educator Esther Wojcicki) is the kind of one who very a lot had the mentality that legal guidelines had been meant to vary. There is no such thing as a such factor as a hard and fast rule to her. We had been advised, “If you happen to assume one thing is silly, then change it.”
I keep in mind after I was little, she wished a park close to my home. There was an empty lot close by, so my mother simply lobbied the town and arranged help, after which it grew to become a park. She simply will get issues achieved and is an exceptional drawback solver. She by no means talks about having a protracted checklist of issues to do. There’s no whining. She’s simply extremely environment friendly and he or she seems on the world prefer it’s completely solvable.
What I took away from my mom, greater than something, was this perception that each one issues may be solved. Our FDA points felt like an issue that I needed to remedy. All of the sudden, the entire world checked out us like we had been the unhealthy folks as an alternative of what I see as an activist model making an attempt to empower folks by giving them entry to their very own genetic data. I used to be seeing headlines like “23 and Silly.”
The FDA stuff grew to become an issue to unravel. It gave us a possibility to drive actual change and educate folks about why this mattered. We confirmed the world that customers have the power of getting difficult genetic data on their very own with no healthcare supplier.
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I imagine in giving folks energy. Once I see a girl get railroaded in a gathering, I’m very fast to textual content her or Slack her to say, “you need to communicate up. Now.” The identical is true for compensation. There are moments after I say to somebody, “you’re not being aggressive sufficient.” I assist them perceive the context and what their friends are doing.
Info is highly effective. It’s the way you construct belief and the way you give folks energy. Some folks would reasonably imagine a star than an scientist with information. We’re seeing the demise of the skilled. We have to educate folks on what’s actual science. The best way you make discovery is with information. Once you pool information and and are available collectively to crowdsource discovery, you drive change. I wish to empower folks to assist them make higher choices. It is a lesson I realized from my very own mom, and one which I would wish to pay ahead. — As advised to Diane Brady
* In 2013, the US Meals and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered 23andMe to cease advertising its DNA evaluation pending regulatory evaluate. The FDA has since granted approval to a brand new service and subsequent assessments.
