The Shape of an Idea Made Material

I wrote elsewhere about 23andme and it's still bugging me. It's apparently founded by three people, two women and one man, and my understanding is one of the women, Anne Wojcicki, serves as the face of the company. 

there's definitely a pipeline problem and it's vastly worse than you think because the reality is most MEN also don't know how to start and run a successful business

I have a long history of being highly controversial and it's challenging to sort out root causes and find meaningful solutions because wherever you go, there you are. 

It's nigh impossible to determine "I'm controversial because X!" and then try to mitigate X in specific. Aggregate data showing that "on average women do more poorly in business" doesn't really tell you why.

I have an entire blog -- Feminine Character Works -- devoted to my hypothesis that men are expected from birth to pursue serious careers, women are expected from birth to get married and have children and raise them and therefore a very large part of why women can't compete with men career wise is due to the garbage between our ears put there by other people because of those expectations, not the bits between our legs per se, much less secondary sex traits like less upper body strength.

And my first impetus was to put this piece either there or on a blog called Witness to Destruction. It's here because this site is about the architecture of ideas with a business focus.

Because a business is your brainchild. 

You can -- oopsie -- have a biological child like I did by trying to have a good time in a lawful fashion with your spouse and having your flaky rhythm method of birth control fail. You can't accidentally birth a thriving business that way. 

I've heard stories of wealthy young entrepreneurs going out drinking and waking up the next morning and, oopsie, they paid cash for a local bar while drunk. That's sort of the business equivalent of getting drunk and waking up in Vegas and realizing you're married. 

But you don't grow a business unintentionally because, unlike a human child, if you don't feed and care for the business and it dies, they don't typically put you in jail for that. A business can die of neglect without significant negative consequences. 

"Oh, my side project never became profitable and it's essentially a hobby I stopped wasting time on." If no one got hurt, that doesn't get you sued or something. 

So when you grow a business from scratch successfully, the business has your mental fingerprints all over it and with enough analysis you can reasonably infer what they were thinking. You can even sometimes infer baked-in assumptions they likely don't want to admit in public. 

I sympathize with the desire to pay their bills without fighting some big heroic fight. That's my goal and has been for years and I'm failing at it.

That quote is from the very first link at the top of this post. 

My desire to earn a living doing something "trivial" -- like blogging or making a comic -- is a goal of avoiding stupid levels of drama I tend to attract and a goal of trying to be inoffensive. 

Her goal -- presumably Anne Wojcicki or whomever is most strongly influential here -- is most likely to be swimming in dough for relatively little effort. And this is a root cause of 23andme obviously lacking scientific rigor and business ethics.

The company has never taken this seriously though serious consequences to their customers go way back.

They apparently neither want to "clarify" to the public reasonable uses and expectations for what was pretty obviously initially intended to be good clean fun at the time it was dreamed up nor do their due diligence and pursue the large scale expensive studies required to give it actual scientific rigor supporting claims they can detect things like Native American heritage. 

I'm not the first person ever to notice these claims don't hold water. Native Americans talk about that online.

But Native Americans are easily dismissed as not a business threat. So you can assume that they likely are well aware this isn't really cutting it and are choosing to not remedy or, worse, they pay no attention to what people say about the business and don't care at all.

Either way, they aren't doing their due diligence in a business everyone knows is causing serious consequences like divorce.

I believe it says:

1. They don't want to give up the money from people taking the product seriously and ordering it for serious purposes because that's a very big chunk of their market.

2. Nor give up the money to meet the implied standard of rigor because gathering that much data is expensive. 

When I was in GIS school, up to 60 percent of the cost for a Geographic Information System was reliable data. Good quality, scientifically rigorous data in adequate quantity for telling minorities their heritage won't come cheap.

Conclusion: The founders are lazy and greedy and don't want to fix this because having no ethics is highly profitable.

Below are some additional observations that are in no way intended to say "The founders should not be held responsible for the consequences of their actions."

I sympathize with wanting something "easy" to do because big business tends to be rooted in the old boys club and women seem to rarely really break into that. 

My life experience suggests to me that part of why I'm a failure in business and don't have a real career is because men routinely treat women like nothing but a piece of ass no matter what she does, which makes it extremely challenging to get anywhere as a woman.

I strongly suspect the so-called casting couch is alive and well and that it's far from uncommon that women with seemingly serious careers get their titles and promotions in part by granting sexual favors. 

And it isn't being talked about because if you are a woman with "a serious career" and you admit publicly that was something you did, you are probably toast no matter how much evidence there is that you deliver on results. 

Opening doors that way does not make you meaningfully powerful and respected by industry insiders even though sex per se isn't necessarily a problem. Lucille Ball and her husband revolutionized broadcast TV for the express purpose of finally having children together. 

They were sleeping together, everyone knew they were sleeping together and their sexual involvement had zero bearing on anything. What they did have to combat was racism and the fact that industry executives told them "The American public will never buy your real husband as your fictional husband on TV because he's Cuban." 

As a necessary part of the process for getting backing, they did a road show version of the show first to provide adequate supporting evidence that audiences would accept it.

I strongly suspected that Elizabeth Holmes was most likely sleeping with wealthy, powerful men to get their public backing while nominally having her own company valued at $10 billion before it was revealed to be a fraud and went to $ZERO valuation overnight. I bit my tongue and didn't say much about it because I felt that would go extremely badly, but eventually we learned she had been secretly living with a much older man who had invested money in her company while she claimed to be celibate.

If she had openly admitted to it, people would not have interpreted his financial stake in the company as strong evidence a competent investor believed in her product. They would have interpreted it -- correctly -- as an older man paying for sex with a much younger woman. 

It may have also been kept secret to facilitate her being able to quietly put out to countless other men with money and power pulling strings and putting money in her pocket. Because she got crazy high valuations and crazy good positive press with high profile movers and shakers participating for a stupidly long time.

These were not stupid and incompetent men. At least one -- Henry Kissinger -- was infamous as a ladies' man.

So that always gave me pause. Someone not easily fooled buys her bullshit for years and helps her get government approvals and vouches for her giant pile of hot air to people...because????

Maybe it's that part where he's an infamous ladies' man.

I say this as someone who won't do that because I want to be taken seriously and my firsthand experience suggests getting sexually involved with men actively closes doors career wise. So, shock of shockers, I remain a big fat nobody. 

I was involved long distance with a man named Tom Fejeran who had been an urban planner in Guam until shortly before we met. It's pure coincidence I got involved with him and he had that background at a time when I was aspiring to become an urban planner because I didn't meet him through Cyburbia or anything urban planning related.

I met him through a mutual friend from a different part of my life.

I asked him to read my Solano Rail plan and I sent it to him and he never gave me any feedback on it at all. He was telling everyone he knew he was going to marry me and had changed careers and we talked constantly and I never got the feedback I requested. 

I have absolutely no idea why I never got the tiniest bit of feedback from him on it but I didn't. And that's not an isolated incident. 

My experience has been business and pleasure don't mix. If a man has any interest in me romantically or sexually, he's probably now pretty much useless as a business contact.

Odds are good that whether they got funding via the casting couch or not, the female founders of 23andme don't really have the connections required to pursue 23andme like a serious business. 

Married men who give you money for your business idea probably want you to go away and not make people wonder if there's any funny business here. They want to get money out of it and bragging rights about being modern new age guys treating women like equals with no appearance of impropriety.

Sex or no sex, they don't want to spend inordinate amounts of time making chit chat, having dinner, meeting you at a bar for a drink to briefly dicuss your latest business bugaboo etc. They don't want the rumors to fly.

I wrote a piece years ago on some blog that is no longer public titled A Decade Late and Millions Short. The title was meant to convey the idea that female founders have a much bigger problem than being chronically "a day late and a dollar short."

This does not prevent them from reading the exact same online discussions by Native Americans that I've read that encouraged me to dig deeper and led to my conclusion this aspect of the service is a sham.

These kinds of problems go back years. I've seen nothing suggesting they are remedying such in earnest.

The law doesn't say business owners need to do their due diligence...unless they are greedy, lazy or the wrong gender to readily become part of the old boys club, in which case, hey, cool, feel free to bilk your customers rather than have some uncomfortable conversations and figure out how to solve it.

If the law said that, there would be essentially no female founders. If you want the title and the money, you need to do the work. 

If you can't be bothered, then don't be all shocked if the business dies or you get sued into poverty or end up in jail like Elizabeth Holmes.