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| Esther Wojcicki wants to help healthcare startup co-founders get along. |
| That might seem simple, but co-founder disagreements are a big contributor to startups falling apart, she said. She’s got the track record for it: Her nickname is the "Godmother of Silicon Valley," and she had an early inside look at Google. |
| "If we can help the young, very smart young people that come up with these brilliant ideas, we can change the system, and that's what we need," Wojcicki told me, referring to the healthcare system. "We need innovation from people that are not, so to speak, corrupted by the old system." |
| Wojcicki is part of a group of Silicon Valley veterans who are launching a new residency program to support budding healthcare startups. |
| The Stanford-connected program, called Treehub, aims to work with startups really early on — even before they’re formally companies. The group includes Wojcicki (the mother of Anne, 23andMe founder, the late Susan, former CEO of YouTube, and Janet, a professor at UCSF), plus investor Tim Draper and Stanford professors. |
| Mary Minno, Treehub’s founding partner and ex-Googler, said the plan is to invest $10 million over 18 months in cohorts of companies across AI and healthcare. So far, Treehub has worked with companies such home health startup Nestwell, dermatology startup Precision Radiance and an unnamed noninvasive brain computer interface company. |
| "What we care about is what Esther has done her whole career, which is finding exceptional talent early, and then supporting them in an outsized way so that they can take flight faster," Minno said. "If we think it can better the healthcare system, and we think we can help them, then we're interested in it," she added. |
| - Lydia |
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