ThrowawayH4MCb

There are. The people laid off didn't significantly contribute to that work, however.

Bringing drugs to market requires a lot of money. And the whole process takes a long time (order of a decade).

Subsidizing the tests or doing more marketing would sell more tests, but wouldn't speed up drug development. And doing so would burn up money that could be used for drug development.

And even though the licensing deal is promising, there has been no drug brought to market yet based on 23andMe's data. So it's a hard sell to investors.

A bunch of engineering directors were brought in from external sources a few years back, and that really changed the atmosphere.

Before then, we seemed to try to hire smart engineers and give them independence to solve problems. Those new directors lowered the hiring bars to grow their teams, and the culture got way more rigid and corporate.

Current, unaffected employee here. Throwaway for obvious reasons.

A big chunk of the layoff is the new lab that we built in Phoenix. That only made economic sense in the scenario where we were selling far more kits than we succeeded in selling.

The rest of the layoffs have a similar root cause: a massive overestimate of how much we were going to sell.

I'd blame the shortfall on some combination of growing privacy concerns from customers, failure to understand the demand elasticity as we cut back on discounts, maybe some slowing of consumer discretionary spending, and maybe saturating the market.