Tag: Health

Why Data Nerds Love Healthcare

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NewCo Shift Dialogs, in partnership with EY

Massive data problems plus massive markets mean a big opportunity for companies like Color Genomics

Elad Gil, co-founder Color Genomics


Health care is a multi-trillion dollar market awash in data, but thanks to regulatory and political sclerosis, it’s been a difficult sector for NewCos to gain a foothold. But that hasn’t stopped a new wave of startups from trying, and perhaps the most interesting are focusing on the intersection of genomics, lethal disease, and preventative testing. We covered Grail Bio last year, and for this week’s Shift Dialogs, we speak with Elad Gil, a co-founder of Color Genomics, which like Grail is working on new approaches to battling cancer. And as Gil explains in our interview, there’s far more potential for Color’s services than just cancer detection — as genomic testing costs scale toward zero, the potential for saving lives scales up. Below is the interview in both video and text, edited for length and clarity.

John Battelle: Welcome, Elad. To start, what’s Color Genomics founding mythology? How did you and your co-founders come up with this idea?

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Let Them Eat iPhones!

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Blake Patterson | Flickr

The healthcare debate had its Marie Antoinette moment yesterday, as GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz told Americans to stop buying smartphones so they could afford health insurance under the new Republican proposal. “Rather than getting that new iPhone, that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care,” Chaffetz said.

The race was on for pundits and publications to calculate just how many iPhones one would need to forego in order to pay your insurer. For most of us, you’d have to be getting a fancy new phone every month or so to even come close (Lifehacker). But Chaffetz’s comment didn’t only prove his ignorance of the basics of both healthcare and telecommunications economics. It suggested he was fundamentally unaware of how essential a working smartphone — i- or otherwise — is for navigating everyday life and work in America 2017 (Brian Fung in The Washington Post).

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Stop Yelling About What Poor People Eat

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via The Washington Post

Kevin Folta wrote himself a rather interesting article.

In reading this article, it’s important to set aside our emotions and realize what Mr. Folta is and isn’t doing.

  1. He’s not attacking clean food, though he comes very close.
  2. He IS attacking the way it’s marketed and the socially divisive consequences of that marketing.
  3. He is praising conventional agriculture. Perhaps too much.
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Facebook Wants to Be Your Everything

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Mkhmarketing | Flickr

When a tech company hits the peak of its dominance, it believes it can be all things to all users. Think Microsoft in the ’90s, or Google in the aughts. Today, it’s Facebook’s turn.

This week, Facebook announced that, among all the other roles it now plays in your life — connecting you with friends, delivering your news, processing your text messages, and so forth — it will help you find a job (Kurt Wagner in Recode). Maybe you thought Facebook was supposed to be for your personal profile, and LinkedIn was for your resume? That’s so 2011 of you! Now Facebook wants companies to post job openings on their pages, and the service will pre-populate application forms with the user’s Facebook data before sending it in (via Messenger, of course). Where LinkedIn and Craigslist charge employers for listings, Facebook’s plan is free.

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Editing Genes? Proceed With Caution

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Andy Leppard | Flickr

CRISPR, the gene-editing tool, is busting biotech open, and it keeps evolving, writes Jim Kozubek (Time). New enzymes make edits more precise and accurate. “Technical limitations are evaporating,” Kozubek says. “The method is here to last. The ethics will only get more fraught.”

But the real challenge to CRISPR may still lie ahead — in the complex thickets of genetics itself. CRISPR lets researchers pluck out and insert individual genes. But the traits that make up a human being are the product of a complex interplay among multiple genes and the environment. Good and bad are rolled together and mixed up, and we’re only beginning to understand how. Even when we can identify a specific gene’s role in some undesirable trait, according to Kozubek, “genetic variants that predispose us to risk or supposed weaknesses are precisely the same ones that turn out to have small fitness advantages.”

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80 Million Seniors Will Need Care By 2035.

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With Honor, Seth Sternberg and team hope to redefine how we care for our elders

Seth Sternberg

After selling his first company, Meebo, to Google in 2012, Seth Sternberg was actively on the hunt for a new idea. Meebo was fun — it helped publishers engage readers through chat and advertising — but Sternberg and his co-founders wanted to have a larger impact with their second company. They came up with three criteria: First, the company had to make people’s lives fundamentally better. Second, the company had to be really hard to build, but address a real market need (as opposed to creating a new need, like Facebook did). And third, the company had to be have the chance to be really big — like $100 billion big.

These were the questions turning over in Sternberg’s mind as he visited his mother several years ago. Almost immediately, he noticed she was having trouble driving, and realized she’d need help if she was going to stay in her own home back in Connecticut. Sternberg had built a life and a career on the other side of the country, in Silicon Valley — he couldn’t be around to care for his mother every day. Who could he trust to help?

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Coke Cuts Sugar, Boosts Profits

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Nik Voon | Flickr

Nutrition experts and health activists have been pushing Americans to drink less sugar water. That has sparked soda-tax campaigns and put pressure on the soft-drink companies, which don’t want to get cast as the next cigarette industry.

Now Coca-Cola has discovered that one of its responses to this pressure — selling its products in smaller portions, at a higher unit price — has a salutary side effect: It has boosted Coke’s profits (Bloomberg). Is this is a case of doing right leading to doing well? Or simply an instance of milking some desperate last profits from an aging product category before the march of demographic change leaves it behind? Either way, anything that helps people reduce sugar calories — or even better, replace them with more nourishing alternatives — deserves a cheer.

Could Diversity At the Top Have Saved Twitter?

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Doctor Jordan Shlain on The Healthcare Hairball: Part II

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This is Part II of my conversation with Dr. Jordan Shlain. For Part I, click here.

It strikes me that many of those lessons that you were beginning to learn in the late 90s laid the foundation for the company that you started about five years ago, HealthLoop.

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Comb the Hairball: Why Healthcare Is Broken and Sugar Dominates Our Diet

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A conversation with the peripatetic Dr. Jordan Shlain on the “hairball” of healthcare, insurance companies, sugar in our food, and why you have to keep filling out the same form over and over


Dr. Jordan Shlain is a fixture in the Silicon Valley scene, a sharp witted, opinionated, and always on physician whose unusual career includes founding several health-related companies, inventing a new approach to private practice, co-founding a non-profit dedicated to redefining society’s approach to sugar in our foods, and launching Tincture, a publication which seeks to elevate our cultural conversation around health. Shlain also frequently flies to Washington, DC, where he speaks to policy makers about the frustrating realities of healthcare as a practicing physician.

Shlain is also a close friend, and he happens to be my doctor as well. He’s deeply connected to nearly every specialist in the Bay area and beyond, and is certainly a good man to know should you ever find yourself in a complicated or challenging health crisis. His approach to patient care is not for everyone — his practice, which has offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, is high end and quite selective. But while many doctors are experimenting with atypical approaches to primary care, Shlain stands out for his outspoken beliefs about how our healthcare system is broken, and what it will take to fix it.

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Incomes Rise — Are Happy Days Here Again?

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JD Hancock | Flickr

Wait, what? U.S. household incomes are way up. That’s right, you’re not hallucinating — new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show the median American household income rose 5.2 percent in 2015, to $56,500 (The Wall Street Journal). That’s lower than it stood at the most recent economic peaks, in the mid 2000s and the late 1990s, but still, it’s impressive — and the fastest growth rate on record, too (The Washington Post). The poverty rate is also down, as is the percentage of the population without health insurance. The long tide of recovery is finally lifting a whole lot of boats, with the gains spread widely across the population. The one major exception? People who live outside of metropolitan areas aren’t gaining. Here, as in so many other realms, cities are driving the future. The big questions now are: Can we keep these gains up? Will they make a difference in the perception of inequality stoked by long-term trends in income distribution? And will populist discontent simmer down — or will we face a “revolution of rising expectations,” as people who get a little taste of economic betterment demand a fuller portion?

Sugar’s road to pariah-hood. Industries like the tobacco business don’t become pariahs overnight: The lengthy process starts with a demonstrated danger to the public and ends with strict regulations and a lot of corporations giving themselves new names. One of the most important in-between steps is the revelation that the industry manipulated scientific research to hoodwink the public. Big Sugar just checked off that box (Bloomberg). A new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine documents a successful 1960s-era effort by the sugar lobby, which paid Harvard scientists to emphasize the heart-health dangers of fats and minimize links between heart disease and sugar. Yes, those were different times, but we’re still living in the world these policy influencers shaped. If the sugar-beverage industry hopes to escape the dead end that swallowed up Big Tobacco and threatens the fossil fuel industry, it needs to come clean and demonstrate that it’s not still polluting our data supply. (For more on the sugar story, see our NewCo Shift Dialog with Dr. Jordan Shlain and our piece on sugar here.)

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