Lara From LaunchSquad On The Today Show This Morning
Some days, it seems that I can’t escape the clutches of the Wojcicki family. In 1993, Esther Wojcicki, better known as Woj to her students, became my high school journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, permanently molding me as a writer. When I visited her a five years later, she informed me that two Stanford students had started a company, Google, in her daughter Susan’s Menlo Park, California garage. Five years later, I became Esther Wojcicki’s student-teacher, and she let me student-teach her journalism and English classes, which were my fondest memories of my years in public education.
Tomorrow, Anne Wojcicki’s company 23andme is being profiled on the Today Show, and our own Lara was interviewed for the segment. Two weeks ago, the Today show production crew came into LaunchSquad’s San Francisco office for a surprisingly easy interview.
“It was relaxing and professional; it was really not a ’showy’ type of situation. The producer came in with the camera-guy, and they were just regular people, and you could tell they were really professional by how easy it was,” Lara said. The Today Show spent two hours just filming Lara’s gene journal and another two hours interviewing her. That’s over three hours of shoot time, which will be edited down to a five minute segment. The producer told her that usually turn it around the next day.
The field producer, used to working with slightly nervous interview subjects, worked with Lara a bit to soften her up.
“He could tell I was a little nervous, so he was asking other questions that had nothing to do with the subject matter - ‘What do you do at LaunchSquad?’ - that kind of thing. After about ten minutes I forgot there was even a camera there.”
At first, Lara was a little nervous about sharing her experience; 23andme cautions clients not to share their results with anyone.
“I opened the [privacy] door by blogging about it,” she said. “But, it’s an emerging tech company, and we work with emerging tech companies.”
Some of the 23andme subjects were a little blasé about their experiences.
“Everyone he spoke to was unimpressed, saying things like ‘It was cool and fun, but I didn’t understand most of it anyway.’ The interesting thing about 23andme is that in 5 years they’re going to have a larger sample size of what they’ve genotyped, and as time goes on, the gene journal will be more meaningful because they have a larger sample size.”
23andme’s gene journal has increased from 16 to 50 types in the last two months alone.
“They’re obviously doing more research,” Lara said. “The most interesting thing is what’s going to happen in the future, in five or ten years.”
Score another one for Woj.
The episode airs at 7 a.m. on your local NBC affiliate.
Trackback
Trackback url for this entry.