How 23 and me burned through billions.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. If there were such a thing as Silicon Valley royalty, Anne Wajiski would be it.

She is the CEO of Genetic Testing Company 23 and me.

She's also the sister of former YouTube CEO Susan Wageski

and Professor Janet Wajiski. The trio was featured

last year as a set of Barbie dolls. Anne met her now ex-husband Sergei Brin when

he and Larry Page rented her sister's garage as the first

office for what was at the time a new startup called Google. They got married in

2007 right around the time and co-founded 23 and me, which promised the keys to your ancestry

with little more than some spit in a test tube.

But after touching a $6 billion valuation not long after going public three years ago, those

paper billions are now worth next to nothing.

The NASDAQ has threatened to de-list 23 and me, whose stock is trading for less than a dollar.

Ralph Winkler has been writing about what happened for the Wall Street Journal.

They had gotten hundreds of thousands of people to spin into one of their test tubes to give a DNA sample.

Then all of a sudden the stories are spreading of people finding new parents or finding

siblings they never knew about.

And it becomes this very viral holiday gift.

The problem was the business by itself never made money.

You only need to take their DNA test once, but they were getting your data on the back end and the hope was, hope still is, use that data in research in particular to develop drugs.

But that's a long road, takes a lot of money,

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