23andme is having a gobbing party in NYC tonight—presumably at the Roxie. You didn’t know punk was back, did ya?
Indu will be there (sadly I had to stay chained to the computer). But there’s a little more 23andme news today in that they’ve dropped their core price to $399 and have inked a deal to get access to Ancestry.com’s database of users. Not quite an impulse purchase yet, but still getting down there.
And if you want to know what 23andme is up to, you can see Linda & Ann’s interview/demo at All things D last May. Of course you can see Linda at Health 2.0 next month, but I’m not sure we’ll be quite the pushovers Mossberg & Swisher are…at least we’ll keep them to 3.5 minutes! 
I’m still trying to figure out whether the DTC genomic market is a gimmick or actually has some value (and I don’t mean value the way a VC does! I mean whether society should be spending health care dollars on genomics when we do such a shitty job treating diseases we do understand). But it’s good to see some real activity in at least postulating the concept.
Categories: Matthew Holt
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Thanks 23andme for killing the market…dropping price (by over 50% permanentaly) sends a bad signal. It means your brand and product aren’t valuable. And it means price wars. Think about it, I can’t imagine the cost of providing this service to be much under $200 including the kit, mail, lab, regulatory overhead, insurance, and web services. (Maybe more like $400 or $500) Then you have salaries and other overhead. Where is the profit? which means you’re purchasing customers with VC money which isn’t sustainable. Typically this wouldn’t be done until all the high value customers are acquired (the market is mature). Because everyone is competing in a downward spiral – like selling hardware (e.g. dell, memory etc.) the market becomes commoditized. So I have to assume all the high value customers have been acquired, or no one wants to purchase it, or the management team is still learning.