Google Life Sciences Exodus

http://www.statnews.com/2016/03/28/google-life-sciences-exodus/

by plinkplonk • 10 years ago

221 101 10 years ago

rdtsc• 10 years ago

Friends call him charming and farsighted — a “disruptor,” in the words of former Paramount Pictures head Sherry Lansing, who will “always challenge the way things are done.”

Well disrupting markets is cool, disrupting people not always.

From experience, usually managers who like to disrupt have some insecurity about them (they know they lack technical knowledge or other personal things) or they are under high pressure, which translates to going around disrupting things because it feels to them and to those above them that work is being done -- "look at all this work, we've re-organized practices 2x this year, switched to agile and so on isn't that great!" kind of stuff.

iofj• 10 years ago

I have never worked at a place were that wasn't the case for higher management. In some places that was 90% of what management did (ie. 100% of what was visible to reports plus more that wasn't even directly visible), in some places it was 30% or so (ie. 50% of what was visible to reports).

But I've never been at a place where turning the wheel (a -> b -> c -> a) wasn't a big part of what management did.

ilamont• 10 years ago

Former employees, however, characterized Conrad in less complimentary tones. They said he exaggerates what Verily can deliver, launches big projects on a whim, and rashly diverts resources from prior commitments to the next hot idea that might bring in revenue.

This reminded me of the Bloomberg article about Boston Dynamics: (1)

But behind the scenes a more pedestrian drama was playing out. Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale

Is it safe to say that despite Google's founders' expansive visions of the future, the company is not really interested in expensive "moonshots" that might take many years to realize? It sounds like the robotics and medical innovation labs are really more focused on inventions that will bring in cash in the next few years.

1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/google-is-...

Niksko• 10 years ago

That's a shame. I'd like to believe that large companies like Google could throw a bit of cash towards open-ended problems. Realistically it's large companies, governments (please no) and research institutions that can afford to think on large timescales. Governments don't and probably shouldn't, research institutions are fine, but large corporations with nice payscales also feel to me like they should be taking part.

nmrm22• 10 years ago

Government augmenting research institutions has been the only consistent source of funding for research that doesn't pay out in a 2-5 year timespan.

Theere's plenty of waste in the government, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the typical types of government waste or incompetence in for example the NSF. Unless you believe basic science is wasteful I guess.

dorfsmay• 10 years ago

Isn't a lot of medical research funded by governments? Wasn't Pasteur essentially working for the government when he made his discoveries?

astazangasta2• 10 years ago

Governments don't and probably shouldn't

The extreme irony of you writing this comment on the Internet should not go unnoticed. Are you really unaware of the extent to which the government underpins all of the interesting long range research in the country?

ThomPete2• 10 years ago

Governments are the only ones who actually benefit from thinking long term in the sense that they are the best distributer of the knowledge that comes out of basic research.

Quantum Physics was more or less a governmental sponsored project. The Internet was a governmental sponsored project.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is the ultimate risk taking and governments not private institutions should perform this as government are the ones who benefit the most.

dekhn15• 10 years ago

Historically, the governments have been the most effective long-term funders of science. THere is an entire class of scientists in the US (Europe, Japan, etc) who exist because of the government's heavy spending to train students (this has sometimes become a problem, for example the US trained so many bioscientists that when the funding froze a few years later, the market became saturated and many of us left for Industry.

MisterBastahrd• 10 years ago

You'd be writing this on a typewriter and pinning it to a board with a thumbtack in a town square if it weren't for government research into computer technology and the internet.

coliveira• 10 years ago

Government is in fact the only kind of institution that can finance science in the good and bad times. Companies have too much of a short-term profit-driven incentive to fund basic science. They can even do that for short periods, when everything looks rosy and they want to attract talent (examples are AT&T, Google, HP, etc.), but profit is so important that they will cut these investment as soon as necessary to improve other areas of the company.

mc32• 10 years ago

They're probably less interested in expensive moonshots and more interested in shoestring moonshots. More hyperloops and fewer MagLevs, for intercity transport, for examle.

crispyambulance2• 10 years ago

Yes, and the other thing about "Moonshots" is that they have profoundly clear goal. "Moonshot" is used to describe really ambitious undertakings and while that's true, the other part of "a moonshot" is having a specific endpoint which people are working towards.

The goal of Verily is to "tackle big mysteries of disease prevention and health". That's rather vague and they even admit that they will "evolve the mission" over time.

Bell labs was perhaps the closest thing to having a bunch of smart people getting together and solving interesting problems-- unfortunately, today, in the era where results-oriented project managers run the show, magical places like Bell labs are a thing of the past.

tryitnow3• 10 years ago

This is completely unsurprising. In fact, I bet you could go back and look at old articles from the business press from decades ago that described similar happenings in older technology conglomerates.

When I learned corporate finance it was pretty much a given that a conglomerate should trade at a discount.

Now Google is somewhat insulated from share pressures because they have two classes of stock. This makes the owners think they can use it as their personal playground.

But Google will eventually succumb to shareholder pressure. Why? Because so many employees are soooo heavily invested in Google stock. So even if Larry and Sergey want to do all this cool stuff their executive staff is incented to follow the market. And not only the executive staff but employees at almost all levels. Just so much comp is tied to share prices.

Just think if you were a Google exec with your net worth tied up in Google stock and you're charged with making strategic decisions about where to invest Google's capital budget, you're going to be pretty tempted to direct it towards revenue generating opportunities over and above "science fair" projects. Sure, you'll do your best to kowtow to the CEO's personal projects, but ultimately you and your fellow execs are going to behave more like hedge fund managers. And I wouldn't blame anyone who does.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

I agree. Let's point out that none of these divestitures or strategic allocation decisions would happen without Larry or Sergey.

As you allude, Google's ability to deliver depends on the share price. While they are free from activist shareholders, they aren't free from competition for talent. A rising stock price keeps employees happy. Employees with lots of out of the money options get jealous when their friends experience IPOs.

yongjik• 10 years ago

Counterpoint: The majority of Google employees aren't anything near "heavily invested" in Google stock. Sure, they get some, but the amount is dwarfed by their regular salary and bonus. For them, stock is "nice to have", but not a big deal. In fact, I'm pretty sure most of them would rather say "Who cares about stock price? Let's do some cool stuff!"

I think most Google employees would fall into either (1) those who don't have enough stocks to care much about stock price, and (2) those who have too much money to care.

ocdtrekkie• 10 years ago

You might also look at last week's articles about Tony Fadell and NEST.

Boston Robotics and Nest were both heavily characterized as having issues working with Google proper. And both Nest and now Verily have both been recently characterized as having issues with leadership.

Apparently Tony Fadell told the Dropcam founder that he hadn't 'earned the right' to report to him.

It seems Alphabet companies have a lot of trouble brewing these days.

notatoad• 10 years ago

Were all the various alphabet companies ever supposed to be going for big picture "moonshots"? That's the stated goal of the X Lab, but the other branches are for projects that have "graduated" from labs and are supposed to be producing revenue or at least real products in the near term.

Animats• 10 years ago

That's what's discouraging. Google seems to have made a mess in mobile robotics, getting most of the good people and then screwing up the management of them. Life sciences is a bigger field, and Google isn't a big player there, so they can't trash the whole field, but this seems to be a similar screwup.

Google's secretiveness is hurting them. They don't get public feedback when their management screws up. This allows screwups to continue longer. If their R&D people were presenting papers at conferences and filing patents, as AT&T, IBM, and Xerox did in the days when they had big labs, this problem would have been caught earlier.

This is a downside of trying to protect intellectual property by secrecy, rather than patents. You lose external feedback.

mappingbabeljc• 10 years ago

One area where Google does seem to avoid this secrecy is in AI: both Google Brain and DeepMind are consistently publishing papers & in many cases putting them up on Arxiv pre-publication.

entee• 10 years ago

Presumably, once they actually get results that can be published they'll do so. If they don't, they'll have a lot of trouble gaining credibility in the biosciences.

That said, in science bad management is kind of the norm. Many big labs in academia are horribly run yet consistently publish huge results. In industry the counterbalance is the ability to easily move on to a different employer, which seems to be what's happening. If true, the bad management should correct itself. One hopes.

Full disclosure: I work at a company that could be seen as in the same area as Verily.

searine• 10 years ago

Biology is hard in a way that directly conflicts with silicon valley managerial thinking.

There is a reason pharma and biotech companies are slow lumbering giants. It's so they can absorb the impact of R&D failures.

toufka3• 10 years ago

The trouble is that there is some (new) biological science that takes the old massive and powerful tool and applies them to low-hanging fruit that were (until recently), not worth the effort. I've been waiting for some of these moonshot-ish plans to take on these problems, rather than try and compete with the Goliath drug companies. Sadly, since they keep hiring from drug-company stock, they keep getting the same result.

x0x0• 10 years ago

examples?

refurb4• 10 years ago

I was going to mention this. Andy Grove wrote a number of papers where he said "if biotech just does what the tech sector does, we'd have hundreds of new drugs".

The fact is, it doesn't work that way in biology. When developing new biotech, you'd be lucky if you understood 5% of what a new drug does in the body (sometimes it's 0%!). Serendipity plays a huge part in new drug discovery, although most companies don't like to admit it.

Also, I'm not surprised that Google has matured to the point where "moonshots" don't work so well. You see it in biopharma as well. Huge companies, with billions of dollars of R&D spend fail to produce new innovation on a regular basis. It's the small biotech companies that seem to come up with the innovations, often on a much smaller budget.

The reasons for that are multiple, but it does come down to a big company worrying about how they will grow their $100 billion company by 10% (finding $10B in business isn't easy) and the fact that with large companies comes structure, process and other things that stifle innovation.

dekhn15• 10 years ago

I don't think Andy was completely wrong, or right, in his thinking that if biotech copied tech, they would be more successful. He was naive, and didn't really understand the underlying structural reasons for the inability to translate the tech sector to the biotech sector.

I went from academia to industry to learn how to do what Andy said: make biotech copy tech. In many ways, I was extremely successful: I built Exacycle, which took Google's style of warehouse computing and made it available to a number of biology researchers. The scientists who were successful with it basically had to drop a lot of the preconceived notions about how to solve problems- they were accustomed to spending a huge amount of time setting up their simulations or drug docking (months or years of prep work before running sims for a year). Exacycle converted this to a rapid cycle where they could test an idea in a day on 600+Kcores/sec, make a few tweaks, and run again. This greatly sped up the productivity of scientists.

Ultimately, these ideas weren't well received in biotech until we published a bombshell paper on GPCRs that spoke to them in their language. Even then, it wasn't a product that I think any biotech would want to buy (this is the part where Andy was spot-on). I think Google/Verily paid attention to what we had to say and hopefully, they'll be able to succeed in ways that biotech does not.

At this point, though, I think the nail is in the coffin for rational drug design as a multibillion dollar investment for pharma. It's just not productive enough. Instead, I think pharma needs to solve the inverse problem: for every drug that is already approved for something, what diseases can it impact (the RDD problem is "for a given disease, find a drug that modulates the disease").

sbierwagen• 10 years ago

  The fact is, it doesn't work that way in biology. When 
  developing new biotech, you'd be lucky if you understood 
  5% of what a new drug does in the body (sometimes it's 0%!).

Very recent example of this: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/03/28/the...

  What’s rather alarming is the sequence of this current 
  minimal cell: of those 473 genes, 149 of them are of 
  unknown function.

In the simplest possible bacterial cell, we don't know what fully 31% of the genes do. They're of vital importance to the cell, they're manufacturing proteins it absolutely cannot do without, and we don't know what any of them are.

agumonkey2• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the guy who thought he cracked the mechanism behind anesthesia. Then he realized he did not. Crazy.

6stringmerc• 10 years ago

For all the issues I have with for-profit medical care as a root concept, I must say that "disrupting the clinical trial red-tape" is not a phrase I'm interested in seeing anytime soon.

randycupertino• 10 years ago

"disrupting the clinical trial red-tape"

that's how you get Theranos.

onetimePete• 10 years ago

Turns out people are hard. You can be a brilliant mind, but that doesn't equate to being a good social engineer. No real, tested science on getting all those complex components together and work productively.

tryitnow3• 10 years ago

After reading this article, it's no wonder. Conrad hasn't been a real technical person in decades. He's a hard-charging business type who learned from a billionaire real estate guy.

Nothing wrong with that personality type it's just totally not a fit with Google or frankly with managing any sort of technical people.

ZeroGravitas• 10 years ago

Hmm, first quote is from Rob Enderle, who has in my past experience either being a quote-for-hire who will say whatever the journalist wants them to say, or just totally wrong of his own volition. Either way, as annoying as that "Didn't read past..." thing is, seeing his name was enough for me to close the tab.

mturmon2• 10 years ago

I was dismayed by that too, but there seems to be a lot of first-hand sources as well. It's a long piece and a very short quote from Enderle.

RickS• 10 years ago

he exaggerates what Verily can deliver, launches big projects on a whim, and rashly diverts resources from prior commitments to the next hot idea that might bring in revenue. This has led to what they describe as difficult meetings with business partners, and resignations by demoralized engineers and scientists in the face of seemingly impossible demands.

Someone has already made the comparison to boston dynamics, but doesn't this also sound just like the recent problems within dropcam/nest?

Does anybody have a counterexample of somebody with this personality leading a team to greatness?

It feels like a personality type like this is mentioned more often than not when my technical friends leave companies. Somebody has to frame the memo that guys like this (they're always guys) will kill your org.

endtime• 10 years ago

they're always guys

Marissa Mayer might qualify.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

Gini Rometty, Ellen Pao, Meg Whitman, and Carly Fiorina don't exactly have stellar reputations either.

I don't think it's a guy thing - I think it's a corporate culture thing.

You get failure and disaster whenever you have overpaid and undertalented management. Gender isn't particularly relevant.

You especially get failure and disaster when upper management runs a corporation as its own personal cash cow and makes decisions for reasons of self-promotion, self-image, or plain greed, instead of for sound growth-oriented reasons - never mind employee welfare.

vadiml• 10 years ago

This article cites Rob Enderle. Remembering his performance during SCO/IBM saga I would be very cautious to make conclusions based on his analysis.

iainmerrick2• 10 years ago

What I still don't get is why Google thinks they're good at moonshots, or why they're a good idea in the first place. Google is great at tons of stuff, but all this rhetoric about moonshots seems really empty and baseless.

trhway• 10 years ago

why Google thinks they're good at moonshots, or why they're a good idea in the first place.

this is the only way to deal with a perpetuum mobile of a money printer they've got in house and the resulting 70B+ cash pile problem, and to avoid it growing into 200B problem that Apple is battling (when did you hear anything new from Apple? - yep, this is how left unchecked small issue grows info a big problem). So, either moonshots (probably a lot of them and god forbid one turns into a money printer too) or pay the dividend like IBM.

iainmerrick2• 10 years ago

Or why not cut your margins right down, helping your customers and hurting your competitors, like Amazon?

1_2__3• 10 years ago

Larry's standard M.O. Hire and empower megalomaniacs because he thinks everything runs too slow and the right way to speed it up is to act like a startup, with one huge personality driving everything.

He tried it with Andy/Android, Vic/G+, and Conrad/Verily, among lots of other places. It doesn't work very well, but it looks like it has great 'velocity' so he's happy.

kmonsen• 10 years ago

Having worked for Andy and Conrad I don't think that comparison is true at all.

Balgair• 10 years ago

Good Lord, there is so much to unpack in this article. Lets start here:

In short, he wants “to defeat Mother Nature,” Conrad told STAT in a brief interview last fall when the Verily name was unveiled.

I mean, welcome to every doctor and bio researcher ever. Bio is hard, very hard. Think of it this way, your code is actually alive and trying to kill you back. Doyah' think that might increase the complexity and timelines for debugging a bit, maybe?

* And its researchers have published just one scholarly article — about a spoon for people with hand tremors.*

I actually saw some of this too. It's a neat idea, The Bodine lab at CU Denver does some cool stuff with this too, using rubber-bands and not electronics that run out of batteries. It's cool stuff, really, but its a 'if all you have is a hammer' myopic outlook for the problem. I concede that the leapfrogging would be great from there.

A new car has up to 400 different sensors. You know the oil pressure. You know how much air’s in your tires. But we don’t do that for people,” Conrad says on a promotional video posted on Verily’s website. “Instead of episodic, reactive health care, we should provide preventative and proactive health care,” personalized to the individual.

Let's ignore the privacy issues that places like 23andme are dealing with when it comes to this level of detail. The cost alone and the time needed to validate these things are non trivial. If you have, I dunno, black skin or freckles, how much more complex did you just make the problem for an optical sensor? Yes, I can hear you already, you start putting in a case struct in your code, blammo, done. Ok, now for every single sense you add, you have to do this all over. Then you have to train this on the staggering variety of healthy human geometry. The time and more importantly, the power, needed to do this increases factorially (I think) with each new sensor paradigm. Oh, and then you sweat a little bit or go outside. In short, this is really hard.

Verily says it has two wristbands in the works: one to read diagnostic nanoparticles that would detect cancer or other ailments at very early stages, another to continuously monitor skin temperature, pulse, and other heart activity.

Ok, this is a pop-press article and I will give a pass to the band that is essentially a fit-bit. Journalists are low-paid compared to their hours and utility to society and, as such, can make very big differences seem mundane. However, the cancer screening band sounds too good to be true. As such, it likely is. I admit, I have no idea what this thing is or how well it works, but there is a significant test it needs to pass: is it better than a dog? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection)

Ok, look, I make it seem like these guys are fools. They are not, they are all very smart and very hard working people that want to see the world as a better place. However, the SV bubble that includes YC and their ventures into biotech, is just foolish here. \

Bio is Hard, full stop.

Bio wastes colossal amounts of cash in failed ventures, more so than in tech, though I have no data to back this up. Bio is not something that you 'hack', it hacks you (see any disease or disability). I get it, VCs see the profit margins on Viagra and their mouths get wet. Here is what you need to know though, in biotech the road to success is very very difficult, but once you get 'there' you essentially have a monopoly due to that barrier to entry. But don't confuse that monopoly with the the reality that many grad students and VCs imploded in failed ventures too.

Mad respect to those folks working under this guy, but SV needs to understand that debugging yourself is neigh impossible.

amelius2• 10 years ago

Offtopic: given that the life sciences are the promised new hi-tech boom, I'm wondering why there are so few posts about it on HN (?)

dekhn15• 10 years ago

Life science was the promised boom 25 years ago when I started undergrad as a mol bio major. Very little progress. I check back in every decade or so and things proceed slowly.

amelius2• 10 years ago

Medicine and an advertising agency, I'm not sure if they are such a great combination anyway.

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

A distressingly large function of many pharmaceutical companies is "drugs marketing".

There may be more synergy than you think.

Google Life Sciences Exodus

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