Mary Minno first met Esther Wojcicki when she was 15.
Walking into Wojcicki’s journalism class at Palo Alto High School, she was new to Silicon Valley. About 20 years later, Minno’s still in the area—and after nearly a decade in Big Tech, most recently at Google, she’s teaming up with her former teacher. Wojcicki—often called the Godmother of Silicon Valley—has joined Minno to launch Treehub, a residency program focused on academic founders in biotech and healthcare.
“Our idea is to bridge labs-to-launch for the best and brightest computational health builders out of academic circles,” said Minno, who became interested in healthcare amid the trials of her last pregnancy and the difficult diagnosis of a loved one. “I became a little bit problem-obsessed. And I’m a student of Esther’s: I believe in iterating on things until they’re correct. I couldn’t believe that we can let the healthcare system operate the way it does. All of us wind up in that bed one day.”
Wojcicki is famous for her “fail fast and revise” philosophy, and her 2019 book How to Raise Successful People. (All her daughters have become leaders in tech and medicine, including late YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki. The least well-known of the three, Janet, is a leading UCSF anthropologist and epidemiologist.)
“All learning involves failure,” said Wojcicki. “You just need to do it again and do it again until you get it right… You couldn’t get a bad grade in my class. You could just revise until you got it right, because all these mistakes that people were making were just examples of them just not knowing it… but when they revised, they understood it and they did it perfectly.”
This ultimately applies to Treehub, which is backed by the AI Health Fund that’s deploying $10 million over the next 18 months into founders straight out of academia (and who will have to, presumably, fail fast and revise). So far, Minno and Wojcicki have invested in 12 companies, including Clair Health, which is looking to build the first continuous hormone monitor for women, and Nestwell, which assesses home health by tracking mold and chemical exposure. The residency’s backers so far include venture capital OG Tim Draper and Anne Wojcicki, who told Fortune via text that it’s the right time for something like this.
“We’re in a window right now where AI can fundamentally reshape the healthcare industry, but only if the founders with the science are given the capital and mentorship they need to succeed,” Anne wrote to Fortune.
Treehub is indeed emerging in the context of a broader moment in the AI boom around healthcare, where there’s an extremely high level of optimism among founders and investors about the changes AI could reasonably bring about. There’s also an urgent sense that the time between academia and commercialization can compress.
“Things stay in academia for far too long,” said Minno. “We can and need to commercialize these things faster, and we need to get people healthier more rapidly.”
Term Sheet Podcast… This week’s episode features Esther and Mary! Esther shares her leadership and parenting philosophy that works as well in the boardroom as it does in the classroom, and Mary talks more about the philosophy behind Treehub. We touch on healthcare, AI, and 23andMe. Watch the episode here.
Cursor’s $60 billion opportunity… Last night, news dropped that Cursor and SpaceX have been working together and that Musk’s rocket-maker could buy the company for as much as $60 billion. It’s a complex but interesting answer to the question I asked in my last magazine feature: What will become of Cursor? Read the story here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
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The post The Godmother of Silicon Valley and her former student want to fix how healthcare gets built appeared first on Fortune.
