
Google Life Sciences Exodus - plinkplonk
http://www.statnews.com/2016/03/28/google-life-sciences-exodus/
======
ilamont
_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-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/google-is-said-to-
put-boston-dynamics-robotics-unit-up-for-sale)

~~~
Niksko
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.

~~~
astazangasta
>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?

~~~
dekhn
In a sense, the Internet is the poster child for this, because the
alternatives funded and promoted by the telecom industry was so closed that it
never grew. The rapid growth of the internet happened because the government
funded it for many years (pre-ARPAnet, ARPAnet/NSFNet/etc, then Internet)
before it was really ready to expand rapidly. Then, when it was growing
rapidly, it funded people to study tech that allowed it to continue to grow
rapidly.

AT&T and ITU and others never would have been able to do this with the tech
they promoted- we'd all be using 56Kbps modems to call BBSes today if they had
won.

~~~
rubber_duck
>AT&T and ITU and others never would have been able to do this with the tech
they promoted- we'd all be using 56Kbps modems to call BBSes today if they had
won.

This is such a ridiculous statement I can't tell if it's sarcasm (from the
post I guess not - but that's the kind og argument I'd make if I wanted to
make a strawman argument on this), extreeme hyperbole or you really beleive it
?

~~~
dekhn
I've studied the history of the internet and have also talked extensively with
ppl on both sides of the discussion. At best we'd still be using ISDN which
isn't much better than 56kbs

------
searine
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.

~~~
refurb
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.

~~~
dekhn
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").

~~~
danieltillett
The real nail is that each individual is unique. There are not X number of
disease cases out there, there are Y number of more or less closely related
disease states. We might say that someone is suffering from the disease of
high blood pressure, but the underlying causes and hence ideal treatment is
unique to that individual. Add in idiosyncratic responses and the drug
discovery problem is almost impossible.

------
ZeroGravitas
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.

~~~
mturmon
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.

------
tryitnow
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.

------
iainmerrick
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
>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.

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

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

------
rdtsc
> 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
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.

------
onetimePete
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.

------
1_2__3
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
Having worked for Andy and Conrad I don't think that comparison is true at
all.

------
amelius
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 (?)

~~~
dekhn
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.

------
RickS
> _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
> they're always guys

Marissa Mayer might qualify.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

------
Balgair
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](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.

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

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

There may be more synergy than you think.

