After a years-long valuation free-for-all, every member of 23andMe’s board of directors just resigned — a move that apparently took its ever-optimistic chief executive by surprise.
This week, seven of the DNA testing kit company’s eight board members resigned in an open letter addressed to company CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki, effectively accusing her of slow-rolling their buyout offers as she attempts to take the company private.
“While we continue to wholeheartedly support the Company’s mission… it is also clear that we differ on the strategic direction for the Company going forward,” the newly-resigned directors wrote, adding that Wojcicki’s 49 percent ownership of 23andMe made voting against her fruitless.
The CEO, who is now the final remaining board member, responded to the resignations in a memo to employees that said she still intends to buy back the company, which went public in June 2021 and subsequently lost almost all its value.
“I am surprised and disappointed by the decision of the directors to resign,” Wojcicki wrote in her address to “Team 23,” which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. She said that she’d soon be hunting for new directors and added that “outside of the short term pressures of the public markets,” taking 23andMe private will still “be the best opportunity for long term success.”
Wojcicki and the newly-resigned board are now under private investigation over the details of the deal to take the company private, and 23andMe’s shares are now hovering around $0.34 per share, down from a high of around $16 during its salad days.
Throughout this debacle, Wojcicki has remained Pollyanna-ish in her optimism about 23andMe’s future despite losing almost all of its value amid a data breach scandal that exposed genetic information on nearly seven million customers.
This past February, for instance, the CEO was chipper in an interview with Wired as she discussed the company’s new drug discovery projects — despite
“I think it’s a really exciting time,” Wojcicki told Wired. “I think that there’s going to be incredible advances in healthcare, and honestly, I’m most interested in how you shift the curve on people.”
