A Colorful Business

By Aaron Krol 

June 22, 2015 | Before they sold cut-rate tests for breast and ovarian cancer, Elad Gil and Othman Laraki worked at Twitter. It’s one of those great Silicon Valley success stories: a small team, a good idea, a rapid acquisition. In 2008, the two tech developers left their jobs at Google to found Mixer Labs, a startup focused on geolocation — tools that tell app developers where their users are. Their platform got the attention of the executive team at Twitter, who scooped up Mixer Labs a year later. Gil and Laraki got to be Vice Presidents at one of the world’s largest social media companies, and Twitter got the tags on tweets that tell you what neighborhoods they were posted from.

But that was 2009, when Twitter was riding a new wave in the way we communicate. Now it’s just treading water. Gil and Laraki, successful angel investors with a knack for sensing the next tech trend to crest, have moved on from social media to genomics, where they expect their skills will be gladly received.

“If you think ahead to the future of genomics,” said Gil in an interview with Diagnostics World, “we think it morphs from a wet lab problem into a data problem. How do you deal with this information over a lifetime?”

His answer is Color Genomics, the genetic testing company of which he and Laraki are now CEO and President, respectively. Color’s first product, a test covering 19 genes that affect women’s risks of developing breast and ovarian cancer, is a forceful demonstration of how small a barrier the wet lab processes have become. By using the latest DNA sequencers, a high level of parallel testing, and some custom lab automation, Color is able to profitably sell its tests for $249 apiece — roughly one tenth the going price.

Read the whole story at Diagnostics World.