Is is just me, or does anyone else find the fact that Anne Wojcicki, recently wed to Sergey Brin, has received $3.9 million in venture capital for her startup, 23andMe.com, from Google, in part to pay Mr. Brin back for a personal loan he made to the company?
I don’t want to rain on the wedding, but that’s odd. More so because Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has told The New York Times the deal “…was all done by the book beyond belief.” It’s a strange sentence construction that seems to underscore the oddness of the investment.
Typically, the last thing an investor wants to see is their money being paid back out to cover previous loans rather than invested in additional development.
Brin “recused” himself from the deliberations about the investment, but he was certainly involved in the fiduciary sense in the outcome of the deal. Not to mention, marrying one of the cofounders. It seems to me that, simply in order to maintain some semblance of propriety, Google could have refrained from making this investment.
Maybe more troubling is the fact that genetic connections mined by Ms. Wojcicki’s company will “eventually benefit Google and its users.” If you thought cookies were bad, wait till Google is in your genes.
23andme.com says “genetics is about to get personal.” It is personal already, this sounds just plain intrusive.
