The inside story at uBiome, disrupting Wall Street from within, and Peloton’s prospects

Hollis Johnson / Business Insider

Hello!

When the three founders of the "microbial-genomics" startup uBiome began collecting human poop, they kept it in an erstwhile storage closet, inside secondhand freezers from a discount-lab-supply website. It was a far cry from a state-of-the-art facility.

So starts Erin Brodwin’s inside story on uBiome, a startup that convinced Silicon Valley it was worth $600 million before the FBI came knocking. Hers is a great report on how a citizen science project became a clinical-testing company with big-name backers, and the corners some say it cut along the way. You can read the full story here.

Erin’s story is a reminder of the risks when the Silicon Valley tech ethos of "move fast and break things" runs into the healthcare principal of "do no harm."

She worked on another story, with colleague Shana Lebowitz, on the VC’s ultimate guide to sniffing out risky healthcare startups — and not getting tricked into backing them. Emma Court had a story on the four slides from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends reports that should be a warning for tech companies that want to disrupt healthcare.

And you can read our recent series on how technology is reshaping healthcare here.

Separately, if you missed our IGNITION: Transforming Finance event on Monday, you can catch up on what you missed here. You can also check out a few clips from the event:

We’ll be hosting more events like it, focused on specific industries, across the US in the coming months. If you have any ideas for live events you’d like to see or feedback from our event on Monday, let me know.

— Matt

Quote of the week

"Unicorns are amazingly deflationary vehicles. They’re deflating rents, they’re deflating driver salaries, they’re deflating all kinds of things." — Famed short-seller Jim Chanos explains how Silicon Valley unicorns have pushed prices lower.

In conversation

Alex Nicoll and Dan DeFrancesco talked to Monzo CEO Tom Blomfield about the UK digital-only bank’s decision to launch in the US.
Meghan Morris talked to Clare Flynn Levy, the founder of Essentia Analytics, which gives traders as much performance feedback as athletes so they can make better decisions. She explained why it can be hard to convince some veteran traders to look in the mirror.
Rosalie Chan talked to RapidAPI founder and CEO Iddo Gino about how he turned a tool he made for newbie programmers into a product used by over a million developers.
Megan Hernbroth talked to Scott Tierney, cofounder and former partner of CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), about his $175 million fund for his venture firm, Valo Ventures.
Shona Ghosh talked to Markus Villig, founder and CEO of Bolt, a major European Uber rival backed by Daimler and China’s Didi Chuxing. He said the company has profitable quarters because it doesn’t set cash on fire.
Lucia Moses talked to Andrew Morse, the executive vice president and general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide, about its decision to pull its high-performing Anderson Cooper news show off Facebook Watch.
Emma Court talked to Dr. Sheila Gujrathi, CEO and cofounder of $1 billion biotech Gossamer Bio, about the three jobs that prepared her to be a first-time CEO.
Tanya Dua talked to The Hershey Company’s CMO Jill Baski about the company’s decision to launch its own in-house ad agency. She said overhead costs are down 25%, output is up fivefold, and there’s been over $4 million saved in agency fees.

Finance and Investing

Meet the JPMorgan banker with no technical expertise who’s now in charge of one of the biggest data projects on Wall Street

Rob Casper stands up and takes a piece of laminated paper from behind his desk. Standing in his 39th floor office in JPMorgan’s glass-walled midtown Manhattan headquarters, the bank’s chief data officer wants to make a point.

Hedge-fund managers are overwhelmed by data, and they’re turning to an unlikely source: random people on the internet

Hedge funds are sifting through so much data that they might just turn to random people online to help with it.

Merrill Lynch’s ‘thundering herd’ of advisers are winning over troves of new millionaires, and the growth is coming from a surprising place

The wealth management division at Bank of America Merrill Lynch had an explosive year in 2018, and 2019 is off to a torrid pace as well, adding thousands of new millionaire clients.

Tech, Media, Telecoms

Inside Salesforce’s $15.7 billion takeover of Tableau, which came together at Marc Benioff’s San Francisco mansion and almost died last week amid wild market swings

Salesforce’s $15.7 billion acquisition of Tableau, announced Monday, started with a text, came together over a meeting in a San Francisco mansion, and very nearly fell apart multiple times.

Peloton, the $4 billion fitness startup with a cult-like following is about to IPO. Insiders reveal why it’s business is set to explode.

Michael Duda knew from the first time he met John Foley that he wanted to make a bet on Foley’s fitness equipment startup, Peloton.

VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk says his bootstrapped digital media company is generating more than $130 million and is coming for WPP and Omnicom — with no ‘meaningful competitor’ in sight

As the advertising establishment heads to Cannes for the annual, rosé-soaked ritual of making deals and collecting awards on the French Riviera, Gary Vaynerchuk wants the marketing world to know there’s a new type of agency holding company in town.

Healthcare, Retail, Transportation

The biggest health system in New York used to make 80% of its revenue from hospitals. A decade later, that’s down to half.

Out the window of Northwell Health’s New Hyde Park, New York, offices sits an expansive 1.4-million-square-foot building.

Investors just launched the first VC dedicated exclusively to psychedelics, which they call the ‘next wave’ after the cannabis boom

As the legalization of medical cannabis has swept the globe, it’s also paved the way for another new health frontier: psychedelic medicine.

Here’s the pitch deck Careem used to secure its first round of venture capital, which led its first investors to a 100x return when Uber bought the company this year

Uber has struggled to attain the same dominance in the tricky region of the Middle East that it’s built in places like the United States.

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