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Hello and welcome to the A16Z podcast. Sequencing the human gene has dramatically

changed how we understand how we as human beings are coded. We're now entering a phase of building

an applications layer on top of the sequencing layer. So how do we make sense of and apply

all this new information that genomics gives us? And what will this translate

into as it meets the realities of the health care system? This conversation, which took place at our

annual summit event in November 2017, includes Carlos O'Reya, co-founder and CEO of Jungla, and Gabe Ott,

co-founder and CEO of Fremome, and was moderated by A16Z general partner Jorge Condi.

The first human genome project took $3 billion over 13 years to generate a single human genome.

Today we can do that same amount of work for about a thousand bucks in a couple of days.

In 1999, a writer by the name of Matt Ridley writes a book called The Genome,

An Autobiography of a Species in 23 chapters.

That book was a fascinating example of the optimism that we all had as the first human genome

project was coming to an end.

But what we've also learned is that reading the DNA isn't the same thing as understanding

it.

We've gone through this period

of really trying to make sense of all of this information. But what's extraordinary is that now

that we can sequence DNA quickly and reliably and cheaply, we've created this incredible sequencing layer

on top of which we can build applications. So I think that's one of the big questions is

how do we think about actionability? How do we think about deriving meaning from our ability to

...