Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe, the struggling DNA testing company , doesn’t think this is the right time to examine her leadership style. “What will be most interesting is writing the story in three or four years,” she told me on a call this week.
She has a point, though she was also illustrating something about how she engages with people. Wojcicki, as she said of herself, likes to debate ideas and challenge others. Not everyone responds well to that, she told me.
But as I report in a new piece, some former employees at 23andMe say Wojcicki’s approach to leadership is more complicated and damaging than she suggests, and that her shortcomings played a role in the company’s staggering decline and may even help explain the shocking resignation last month of all seven of the company’s board members. The directors and the CEO had reached an impasse over the latter’s plan to take the company private; still, resigning en masse is an unheard-of step for a startup board.
(This was a blue-chip board that included Roelof Botha, head of Sequoia Capital and Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube, who had known Wojcicki for years and worked with her late sister Susan Wojcicki, the former chief executive of YouTube.)
Over the past 18 years, Wojcicki has been celebrated for her brilliance and unconventional and fun approach to running 23andMe. Much of the admiration was earned, say the former employees who talked to Fortune . That the company has sold test kits to 15 million customers, was once worth more than $6 billion, and become a giant in genomics is “all down to Anne and her determination,” one person said. But Wojcicki also needs to take responsibility for the company’s fall from grace, they say, as the company’s valuation dropped to about $150 million recently.
Wojcicki has a tendency to be controlling, to put herself in the center of decisions, and to not give her senior leaders the freedom to run their departments. The North Star at the company was “Is Anne happy?” said another former senior employee. Wojcicki also crowdsourced solutions to her company’s woes, turning to her vast network of Silicon Valley luminaries instead of her team. The combination of these habits led to latencies, said the first person, and some strategic mistakes.
The CEO pushed back against these criticisms and said that while she will surely be looking back one day to see what could have been done differently, she has always made decisions based on conditions in a given moment. What’s more, she loves to hire smart people and let them lead, she told me, in her first on-the-record interview since the board resigned.
Over the past few years, she pointed out, like many biotech leaders who have watched their once high-flying companies flounder, she has had to deal with the biotech market collapse, the pandemic, and a rise in competition in the consumer genomics field. 23andMe also suffered a major data breach, sparking fears in customers who had trusted the company. Market dynamics help explain the 23andMe trajectory, she believes, and it’d be wrong to conflate those issues with leadership style.
Wojcicki, who controls 49.75% of voting rights at the company, has said she will not entertain outside bids to acquire 23andMe. In our call, she said she could not talk about the board crisis or whether she’s searching for new directors. “I’d love to know more about that,” I told her. “Me too, frankly,” she quipped, before repeating her only public comment about the issue: the board’s actions surprised her.
“I think we can navigate and land this plane,” she said about 23andMe’s fate, “but it is absolutely complicated.”
Read my full piece here .
Lila MacLellan
Twitter: @lilamaclellan
Email: lila.maclellan@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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