The Godmother of Silicon Valley and her former student want to fix how healthcare gets built

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........

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