23andMe's Fatal Flaw | Defying Gravity? | 2
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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars 23andMe's Fatal Flaw early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. It's March 2023 and Ann Wachitzki has won a rare honor. She's no longer merely the founder of the DNA testing company 23andMe, she's now a Barbie doll too.

Tomorrow is International Women's Day and to mark the occasion, toy company Mattel is honoring seven female leaders in STEM with their own Barbie dolls. Well, at least in their likeness. Among the featured women are the Bay Area Wachitzki sisters, Susan, CEO of YouTube and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe and Janet, professor at UC San Francisco.

Wuchitski and her sister's transformation into doll form is part of an effort to encourage more girls to seek a career in science, tech, or engineering. It's also great advertising for 23andMe. With a new Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie about to be released and 23andMe valued at $1.75 billion. Things are rosy. It feels like 23andMe is delivering on the big promises Wuchitski made to investors in its startup days.

She said then it would help people discover the secrets of their DNA while creating a valuable pool of genetic data for medical research. And now, that promise seems to have come true. But 13 years earlier, it looked so different. 23andMe lacked customers and was getting heat from regulators for selling DNA tests without approval. So how did Wachitski go from that to being so successful she's now been made into a doll?

And is this a transformation built on solid ground or a castle made from sand? This is worth pondering because there's a fatal flaw lurking deep in 23andMe's business model, and it's set to bring the whole business tumbling down.

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In the last episode, Ann Wuchitski started DNA testing business 23andMe in 2006 with investment from her then-boyfriend, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. But after four years in business, it found itself struggling to get customers and facing a federal government crackdown on the sale of DNA tests.

Now, it's early 2011, and the pressure's on. Wuchitski needs to do something big, or 23andMe may end up as nothing more than spit at the bottom of a test tube. This is Episode 2, Defying Gravity? It's March 2011, and in Los Altos, California, Wuchitski's opening her latest business, a kid-friendly cafe called Bumble.

She's decided her hometown in Silicon Valley is short on the amenities she wants as a new parent. So she's changing that. Bumble's just the start. In the next few years, she'll also open a craft store, an arcade, and an indoor play space. While the community's spirit is laudable, there's a warning sign here. As an entrepreneur, your focus is one of your most valuable assets. To run your business, you have to be obsessional about the details.

Wuchitski is now juggling five other ventures besides 23andMe and is investing in real estate. Her roving, eager mind has always been one of her most notable traits. But is she getting distracted? Right now, 23andMe is in trouble. Five years and several investment rounds on from launch. It's still short on customers. Not many people are willing to pay $400 to dribble into a tube to learn about their personal genetics.

At the same time, the FDA is objecting to the company suggesting its tests are useful for healthcare, which threatens to eliminate a big chunk of its potential audience. And in medical journals, scientists are criticizing consumer gene tests for misleading consumers. So, outside of the cheerful interior of Bumble, clouds are gathering.

But Wachitski's always working at something. And now, she's working on a new plan to turn 23andMe's fortunes around. In December 2012, Wachitski secures another round of investment. It's 23andMe's biggest yet. $50 million. That massive cash injection is going to allow 23andMe to make aggressive plays to get sales moving.

Price has long been a major deterrent for potential customers, so 23andMe is going to use investors' money to drop the price of its tests to just $99. A price cut like that means a significant drop in revenue. But there is method in this madness. Because Wachitzki now believes that the big money isn't in selling tests. It's in packaging the results from those tests and selling the anonymized data to researchers.

And the more people's DNA it has to sell on, the more valuable that data becomes. So, by selling its kits at bargain prices to millions of people, 23andMe will build a DNA database and hopefully generate big bucks. But it's not just cutting prices. It's also funneling investor dollars into advertising.

I might have an increased risk of heart disease. Arthritis. Gallstones. Hemochromatosis. I'll look into that. Stuff we might pass on to our kids. Foods I might want to avoid. Hundreds of things about my health. Getting my 23andMe results. It really opened my eyes. The more you know about your DNA. The more you know about yourself. And 23andMe's big push for sales is about to get an unexpected helping hand from a Hollywood action movie star.

She's battled CIA assassins and evil scientists as a movie star, but Hollywood A-lister and global activist Angelina Jolie is now waging a real-life war against a disease that threatens to cut short the lives of millions of women. In May 2013, actress Angelina Jolie announces she's had a double mastectomy.

She made the choice after DNA testing revealed she has a mutation in her genes that greatly increases her chances of developing breast cancer. And now, she's encouraging other women to get themselves tested. And that increases interest in 23andMe's tests. It looks like sales are primed to take off. It's got major celebrity endorsements, a new low price of $99, and a clear use case for its tests making headlines.

But 23andMe's fresh momentum is about to slam right into a wall. It's November 2013, and the axe has finally fallen. The FDA has been investigating the home DNA test market that falls under the FDA's responsibility to regulate products that could affect public health. Now, after years of investigation, it's reached a conclusion, and it's bad for 23andMe.

It orders 23andMe to stop marketing its $99 tests. This is due to the inaccurate results these tests sometimes return that might cause consumers to undergo unnecessary medical procedures. 23andMe can't say it wasn't warned. The FDA had told the company this might happen.

But the company failed to engage with the regulator to get approval for selling health tests. Now, that lack of engagement will cost 23andMe dearly. The FDA's order to cease marketing arrives just as the company's sales move into high gear, thanks to the price cut and the Angelina Jolie effect. Now the company's unable to cash in.

23andMe thought it could work around the rules. But now that that plan has backfired, its popular health tests are off the shelves and it can only offer ancestry tests. And now it'll have to work with the FDA to start offering health tests again by going through the approval process it spent years not engaging with. And that could take months, even years. Look, there's a lesson here.

Silicon Valley's favorite motto might be move fast and break things, but when the thing you're breaking is FDA protocol, that's not disruption. That's just a lawsuit waiting to announce itself. You know, there's a tradition in tech of asking forgiveness rather than permission. But while that might work for software, healthcare and health data is not the place to play that game.

Remember, when regulators start knocking, it's not a nuisance. It's a sign your business model might be skating on thin legal ice. In healthcare, skipping steps risks not just a fine or telling off, but getting shut down. Entrepreneurs learn the rules early or risk building a business on borrowed time. While dealing with the FDA shutdown, 23andMe launches its tests in the UK.

Laws are more relaxed over there. Even so, there's no ducking the fact that this is a major setback. To make matters worse, Ancestry.com is moving into the DNA test business. Ancestry is building on its huge customer base of people interested in tracing their family histories. It already has more than 2 million subscribers to its website in the U.S. alone. Selling DNA tests to those customers seems like a natural move for the company.

and Ancestry's backing its entry into DNA testing with plenty of TV advertising. Growing up, we were German. We danced in a German dance group. I wore lederhosen. I decided to have my DNA tested through Ancestry DNA. The big surprise was we're not German at all.

It's going to be awkward explaining all that time wearing lederhosen now, but maybe not as awkward as 23andMe trying to explain to its investors why the business just got hobbled by the FDA and is now losing market share to Ancestry. And it's going to be a long road back to business as usual.

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Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. ...co-founder of 23andMe, and congratulations after a four-year... In April 2017, and after four years of negotiations, 23andMe finally gets FDA approval to start marketing its health tests in the U.S. again, following a very limited return to the market in 2015.

But there's a catch. The range of disease risks it can test for is now much smaller. And the cost of those tests is now $199, up from that sweet spot of just $99. Yet despite that price increase, 23andMe is still losing money.

It gets worse. While the company was benched by the FDA, 23andMe's competitors have gained ground. Ancestry's already sold 5 million DNA tests. 23andMe has sold just 2 million. This is the true cost of trying to get around the FDA for all those years. 23andMe had a first mover advantage, which could be priceless in a new field. And yet, it squandered it.

CEO Ann Wachitzki isn't deterred, though. She's got her eyes on a bigger prize than helping people with their family trees. Specifically, licensing 23andMe's DNA database to pharmaceutical and medical researchers. She's also about to fight back with support from some very high-profile helpers, starting in Christmas 2017 with a certain Oprah Winfrey.

All right, hard to believe it's already that time of year again. Time for Oprah's Favorite Things. That's right. And if you're looking to learn about your ancestry, you can try Mountain View-based 23andMe's DNA test. Oprah calls 23andMe the ultimate selfie, and it's on her big annual list of her favorite things, right there in between a lunchbox that helps with portion control and a hammock. And an Oprah endorsement guarantees a major sales spike.

23andMe is also getting traction with its plan to sell anonymized DNA data. In 2018, it strikes an exclusive $300 million deal with GlaxoSmithKline. The deal will let the British pharmaceutical giant use 23andMe's growing pool of DNA results for drug research.

The medical world sees big potential in drugs that target specific genes. But developing these treatments requires data, the kind of data that 23andMe is collecting. But it's not all roses. Despite FDA approval, 23andMe is now getting criticism due to the limitations of its disease testing. As an opinion piece in the New York Times points out, FDA approved is not the same as clinically useful.

Remember how interest in 23andMe's test increased after Angelina Jolie revealed she'd had a double mastectomy? She'd taken a DNA test that revealed she had a mutation in one of her genes that increased her risk of breast cancer. 23andMe tests these genes for mutations. The test focuses on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes where cancer-linked mutations can occur. But there are thousands of these mutations.

Technological limitations mean 23andMe can only test for three of them. The three mutations it tests for are mostly those prevalent among people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. And that's a tiny sliver of the US population, just 2%. Because 23andMe's tests don't look for the other mutations, they miss a huge amount of people whose BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes carry a mutation.

And it's not just missing them. People are getting false reassurance from their 23andMe results. But to know that breast cancer gene tests aren't all clear requires people to engage with complex topics like gene mutations and medical statistics. And with attention focused on Lizzo dressing up as a DNA test for Halloween, well, few customers notice the debate about the shortcomings of 23andMe tests.

There's worry around 23andMe's business model too. Specifically, concern about a fatal flaw that's been baked into its business plan from day one. Problem is, your DNA doesn't change. It's fixed for life. So once you get a 23andMe test, there's no reason to buy another test. It's a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Now look,

One-time buy is a rarely great business. It's why some companies build in planned obsolescence, like smartphones that seem to get slower with age or washing machines that are designed so that they're more expensive to repair than to buy new. After all, if one washing machine could see us through our entire lives, there wouldn't be much of a business in making them. 23andMe sells DNA tests at a loss and to consumers who most likely won't buy one again ever because their DNA doesn't change. You get the problem, right?

Wuchitski is smart and creative and fearsomely well-connected. But 23andMe is selling snowballs in a freezer. Once you buy one, why would you ever buy another? That's not a customer pipeline. That's a puddle. In reality, the only thing that seems to be keeping the 23andMe show on the road is its investors. This is the Silicon Valley community that Wuchitski seems to have been born to tap into.

She may be a hit with Google and their ilk, but it's getting harder to ignore the fact that 23andMe doesn't really have an answer to that fundamental problem. A one-shot novelty product, where's the growth in that?

This means two things. One, those investors need to exit soon or risk losing everything they put in. And two, 23andMe needs a new business plan, one that can replace the broken business model it's been relying on until now. It's time to pivot, and hard. By early 2021, aided by a near-endless wave of publicity, 23andMe's DNA tests are selling well.

The company's gone from around 2 million customers in 2017 to more than 12 million. But it's still losing money. There are also concerns that the market for these tests might be nearing the point of saturation. With its DNA tests burning cash and the plan to license its DNA database failing to deliver big bucks, Wuchitski changes direction.

23andMe will now become a pharmaceutical company that'll create drugs based on the DNA data it's collected. The potential seems huge. The pharmaceutical industry is gigantic. In 2021, it's worth $1.2 trillion. But it's also built upon the bones of so many companies that didn't make it.

Developing new drugs is tough, so tough, that only around 13% of all global drug development programs end in approval. Competition is fierce. Promising drugs can fail in late testing after a decade of work. On average, it takes 10 to 15 years to bring a drug to market. And that process costs billions of dollars, not millions. There's a reason the main players in pharmaceuticals are so big and entrenched.

It's one thing to shift your strategy, but pharmaceuticals? An industry where the success rates are microscopic? It's not just bold, it's death or glory. Startups considering this kind of leap need to ask, do we have the cash? Do we have the patience? And do we have the expertise to survive the valley of death between promise and payoff? If not, stay in your lane or bring along a partner who knows the road ahead.

Still, Ruchitsky's looking low on options right now. 23andMe's main asset is its bank of DNA data, and exploiting that to the max feels like the only way the company can make good on its promises to investors, but to even have a chance of making this work. 23andMe needs access to billions of dollars of capital, and there's only one place to go to get that kind of money. The stock market.

In June 2021, 23andMe joins the NASDAQ, and it gets there using a special purpose acquisition company, SPAC for short. What's a SPAC? Well, SPACs are a route to taking a company public that doesn't involve an initial public offering or an IPO. With an IPO, you sell shares in your business directly to the public. SPACs offer an alternative route onto stock exchanges. They're shell companies that have already gone through the IPO process.

These shell businesses don't make any products or offer services of their own. They just exist on paper. And they wait until a private company like 23andMe comes along to buy it in order to go public. SPACs are a faster and usually cheaper route to get listed on the stock market than an IPO. And they also involve less transparency and scrutiny. There are fewer disclosure requirements with the SPACs, so you're really trading on your reputation.

And that's a wave that 23andMe's surfed like a pro since it first launched. 23andMe enters the Nasdaq valued at $3.5 billion, including debt. Luchitsky admits she's been concerned about going public, but she feels that the COVID pandemic has increased interest in genetics. So the moment makes sense.

On day one, 23andMe stock rises 21%. At its peak, the stock market will eventually value 23andMe at $6 billion. But there's a catch. Public markets are far less forgiving than private capital. Once you're listed, you're answering to analysts, not just true believers with skin in the game.

Momentum won't carry you. Only your financial metrics will. Lizzo and Oprah, they won't get you across any finish lines in this world. Armed with cash raised from going public, Wachitski looks for ways to shore up the company's financials, which will be exposed to all in quarterly reports. In October 2021, 23andMe buys telemedicine firm Lemonade. That's aid as in band-aid.

I know, I probably wouldn't go with that name either. Lemonade offers online doctor's appointments and prescription drug deliveries. It's an established player. It's the kind of business that can assure analysts that 23andMe's got cash coming in, not just going out, while it tries to make its drug discovery pivot pay off. A month later, in November 2021, 23andMe announces the creation of an internal drug development operation staffed by 100 scientists.

The company reveals it's collaborating on clinical trials for one drug while nearing trials for another. And the first drug in development might be used in the field of immuno-oncology, using the body's immune system to fight cancer. 23andMe is also looking into drugs for treating neurological and cardiovascular conditions. But it stops short of giving any more details away. Sounds promising, but too vague for anyone to be sure if it'll pan out.

And that's an issue, because the initial high of going public is already starting to fade.

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It's November 8th, 2023, and 23andMe's investors are listening in to an earnings call. It's been two years since 23andMe set up its drug discovery unit, and it's been tough sledding. The task of developing pharmaceuticals is proving costly and slow, so the business still depends on its consumer-facing business for income. But its DNA tests are still money losers, and that's making investors nervous.

So today, Wuchitski's framing the company's latest quarterly results in the best possible light. And she needs to. 23andMe's stock price has nosedived from $300 to $15 in the past two years. We're continuing our work on product margins. We signed a new $20 million data licensing deal with GlaxoSmithKline.

We've launched a new total health membership for consumers. It's a subscription service that offers our customers biannual blood marker testing, plus access to clinicians and training in genetics.

Wuchitski believes total health is a way to solve 23andMe's fatal flaw by turning people who buy 23andMe kits into recurring customers. But when the earnings call opens to questions, analysts and investors are skeptical. And what I'm hearing here are moves to attract additional consumer revenue. But where's the research revenue growth? Consumer revenue is still 97% of revenue.

That's a question that many 23andMe stockholders are asking. Wuchitski told them the big money is in research, but the portion of 23andMe's income that comes from research is shrinking, not growing. Meanwhile, 23andMe is reporting net losses this quarter of $75 million. That's up $9 million on the same time last year. Put another way, the company is moving further away from profit, not closer.

And this decline is about to accelerate. As November 2023 continues, 23andMe's stock price gets brutalized. By the end of the month, it's in the trash. The company's minimum bid price, the lowest price you could buy some 23andMe stock for, dips below a single dollar. And that triggers something that no listed company wants.

A public letter from the Nasdaq warning 23andMe that if it does not get its minimum bid price above a dollar soon, it will be banished from the stock market. Wuchitski now needs to go all out to regain investor confidence and avoid 23andMe getting delisted. But before she can respond, 23andMe gets a devastating sucker punch. In December 2023, 23andMe announces it's been hacked.

The culprit is a lone hacker who calls themselves Golem. The hacker used compromised passwords to steal the DNA test results of 6.9 million 23andMe customers from a total customer base of more than 14 million. Most of the people who had their data swiped were people of Chinese or Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Soon, that information is being sold on the dark web.

This major data breach crushes 23andMe's brand reputation, just as the company desperately tries to stop being kicked off the Nasdaq.

Lots of companies get hacked and have sensitive information revealed or sold. It's never good news. But for a company built on sensitive personal data, the breach isn't just bad. It's brand ending. Customers have given 23andMe their most personal asset, their literal genetic code.

Code that reveals all kinds of information and secrets, along with millennia of family history. And when that gets out, it isn't just a cybersecurity failure. Many see it as a betrayal. If you're a business owner handling user data, take note. Your systems have to be airtight, your security obsessive, your response plans well-rehearsed. Because once trust cracks, it's nearly impossible to reseal.

Wuchitski built her company on the coiled brilliance that lives inside every human cell. But now, her DNA dream is unraveling fast. As spring 2024 begins, 23andMe is in crisis. It's losing millions and battling to stay on the stock market. Its push into drug development is years away from delivering results. And its data breach has scorched its brand reputation.

At its lowest point, 23andMe's stock price sinks so low that the company's market value is worth less than the cash it has in the bank. In effect, the company itself is worth less than zero. It couldn't get worse, could it? The company's also being sued for the data breach and will have to cough up $30 million to settle it.

And in a misjudged PR move, Uchitsky is blaming 23andMe customers for the hack because their passwords got compromised. It's not a good look at the best of times, let alone when your company's pivoted from poster child of the DNA revolution to a raging dumpster fire. As 2024 grinds on, 23andMe's bank balance runs dry. In August, Uchitsky is forced to shut its drug discovery unit.

The unit's closure ends her hopes of drug discovery riches. Now, it's back to telehealth, gene tests, and licensing DNA data. But with its miserable valuation and its broken public trust, few investors see that as a viable solution. This is as close to the financial equivalent of total organ failure as most companies ever get. But Wuchitski is always thinking, always making plans.

Back when 23andMe was thriving, she still found the time to open a kid-friendly cafe and a video game arcade after all. Along the path of her journey, she's pivoted from consumer tests to medical research licensing and drug development. The promise of all that led to a stock market valuation of $6 billion. And now, she plans to save 23andMe again. This time, by taking it off the stock market.

It's September 2024, and in San Francisco, Wuchitski is meeting with 23andMe's board of directors. She wants to take the company private again, but she can't do that without the board's agreement. So she needs to win them over. I won't pretend that it hasn't been harder than we expected, but I don't think that we've executed yet on what the vision actually is here.

Going private will get us back on track by letting us refocus on the big picture, not the next set of quarterly results. The board's seven independent members look unimpressed. They've heard this too often in recent months. Patrick Chung is a longtime board member. He's always admired the way Wuchitski sticks to her goals despite the obstacles.

But even he has reached his limit. We hear what you're saying, Ann, but I don't believe what you're proposing is the answer. You know, the thing I've found with people who are dismissive is you just have to prove them wrong. But you're not proving it. After months of work, you've yet to give us a fully financed, fully diligenced, actionable proposal. Look, we're out of time. I need to remind the board that I still hold 49% of the voting stock in this company. There's a moment's pause.

The independent board members anticipated this, and they've already decided on how to handle it. Chung looks at Wuchitski. Well, in that case, I have to tell you, while we continue to support your mission, we're just too far apart on how to move forward. Wuchitski is stunned. She can't believe she's hearing this. Chung continues. Because of that difference in opinion, and because of your concentrated voting power...

I'm sorry to say that we believe that it's in the best interests of 23andMe's stockholders that we all resign from the board. A mass resignation from the board. For Wuchitski, it's a hammer blow in a year that has been nothing but hammer blows. Her sister Susan died a month ago from lung cancer. Her company is facing a humiliating delisting from the Nasdaq. Now, the board has walked. Her dream is dissolving before her eyes.

The days of being an iconic Bay Area CEO who got turned into a Barbie doll are over. 23andMe is hurtling towards bankruptcy. By the time 2025 rolls around, Wuchitski has laid off 40% of 23andMe's employees. It's a bid to stem the bleeding, but it's way too late.

Bay Area based company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Now there are questions about what happens to all that personal information the company has collected over the years. It's March 2025 and 23andMe has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

As the news breaks, California's state authorities publicly advise people to delete their data from 23andMe. It's now likely that their DNA data will be sold to whoever offers the most money. It's hard not to think of the parallels. When 23andMe launched back in 2006, the health market had just seen the collapse of an entire industry. This one was built around offering cheap body scans to people who wanted to know more about their insides.

For around $1,000 a scan, customers could bypass doctors and go directly to storefront imaging centers to check for tumors or polyps. This was a great idea right up until suddenly it wasn't. By 2005, the body scan industry was gone, sunk by a handful of problems that should have been clear from the start. Insurers wouldn't pay for scans without prior diagnosis, while customers wouldn't pay out of pocket for frequent scans. And that's pretty much the whole ballgame right there.

On top of that, the false positive rate was alarmingly high. Anxious customers often raced back to their doctors with what they thought were frightening results, only to be told there was nothing wrong. Any of that sound familiar? But while 23andMe crashed and burned, there's an early frontrunner in the race to buy 23andMe and its data. An entrepreneur in Silicon Valley fixture. Name? Ann Wachitzki.

Yep, you did not miss here. Straight after the bankruptcy filing, Wuchitski quit as CEO so she could bid to buy her former company's assets and revive her DNA plan. Again, I know what you're thinking here, but it's worth remembering something. Founders and CEOs often have an almost spiritual connection to their vision. It's what drives innovation in the best cases, but it can also cloud judgment.

Ann Wuchitski has believed in 23andMe to the bitter end. But belief alone won't balance the books. Entrepreneurs, ask yourself, are you listening to the market? Or are you doubling down because you're too close to what you've worked so hard to build? Remember the ancient proverb that's been guiding people for millennia and will never go out of style. Sometimes you have to let go or you'll get dragged.

The future of 23andMe remains very much in question. In May 2025, drug maker Regeneron Pharmaceuticals offered $256 million for the business. It looked like Wuchitski's plan to hold on to 23andMe and its data had failed. But two weeks later, Wuchitski struck back, offering almost $50 million more than Regeneron. As we record, the outcome is unknown.

We don't know if Regeneron will bid more or bow out. But either way, it looks like 23andMe will continue in some form. But the grand ambitions it was founded upon seem unlikely to return. 23andMe wanted to give ordinary people the power to understand the stories written in their genes and to use the same data to transform medicine. It had the dream, the investment, the goodwill, and a whole bucketload of hype behind it.

But none of that matters if the fundamentals don't work. 23andMe built a great brand, but it was never able to overcome the fatal flaw in its business. Most people only need their genes explored once. Genetics is complex, while a lot of the interest in genetics is fairly casual in nature. And making drugs out of even the best data is not an easy or cheap thing to do. 23andMe's 20-year journey of spending for no profit is a warning.

A warning that if the fundamentals of your business aren't there at the start, you're in trouble. Hoping you'll find a way to fix it later down the line is a high-risk plan, if it even counts as a plan at all. From Wondery, this is episode two of 23andMe's Fatal Flaw for Business Wars.

A quick note about the recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said at the time. These scenes are dramatizations, but they're based on research. I'm your host, David Brown. Christian Donlan of Yellow Ant wrote this story. Research by Marina Watson. Sound design by Josh Morales. Kyle Randall is our lead sound designer. Fact-checking by Gabrielle Drolet. Voice acting by Chloe Elmore.

Our managing producer is Desi Blalock. Our producer is Kate Young. Our senior managing producer is Callum Plews, produced by Tristan Donovan of Yellow Ant. Our senior producers are Emily Frost and Dave Schilling. Karen Lowe is our producer, Americus. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery.

This is Nick. And this is Jack. We're best friends, ex-finance guys, and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, The Best Idea Yet, we're bringing you the untold stories behind your favorite products. For instance, can you guess which billion-dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone-covered tracksuit? Or which cartoon turned four turtles into a global toy empire by accident? It started as a joke. Last one, which cold beverage was so hated by Starbucks

they actually ended up acquiring it. Spoiler, the Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame, and then he bought it. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy Couture to the Orange Mocha Frappuccino. Join us every week to learn how your favorite things got made. Follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. And if this podcast lasts longer than 45 minutes, call your doctor. Ha ha ha ha!