The Right Side of History Test
Pick a fight where the future is already walking toward you, then just outlast the backlash.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Wojcicki's core internal narrative at 23andMe was that the company was 'on the right side of history' — that consumer access to personal health data was where the world was going regardless of who objected today. She treats that judgment as the load-bearing decision: if the direction is inevitable, backlash is just weather to be endured, and the job becomes treading water long enough for reality to catch up. She calibrates the claim with historical analogues — gay marriage being illegal when the company started, oral contraceptives now sold without prescription in New York, booking a hotel by phone in the middle of the night. The test separates two very different situations that feel identical from the inside: being wrong, and being early. Only the second one rewards patience.
Origin
23andMe launched direct-to-consumer genetic testing into open hostility from the medical establishment — doctors refusing to share a table with her, an FDA warning letter in 2013, and press calling the company '23andStupid.' Rather than treating the hostility as market feedback, Wojcicki and her team adopted 'we're on the right side of history' as the internal frame that made a seven-year regulatory slog survivable.
Core principles
- 01Backlash is survivable when the direction of travel is inevitable; it is fatal when you are merely early to a bad idea.
- 02The question is not 'do people like this now?' but 'will this be normal in 30 years?'
- 03Conviction about direction is what lets a team tread water through years of no progress.
- 04Norms move faster than they appear from inside the storm — use historical precedents to calibrate.
How to run it
- 1
Name the future norm
Write down the specific world-state your company assumes: 'people will have the right to their own genetic data without a clinician gatekeeper.' It must be a norm, not a product feature.
Pro tip If you can't state it as something a person in 30 years would find blindingly obvious, you don't have a direction — you have a preference.
- 2
Find the historical analogues
Identify norms that flipped inside a generation and were equally contested at the time. Wojcicki uses gay marriage and prescription-free contraceptives to show younger employees how fast 'unthinkable' becomes 'obvious.'
Watch out Analogues prove that norms CAN flip, not that yours will. Don't mistake rhetoric for evidence.
- 3
Diagnose the source of opposition
Separate objections to the idea from objections to the redistribution of control. When incumbents object because they lose gatekeeping power, that is a signal the direction is real and the fight is long.
Pro tip Wojcicki noticed the controversy was never really about genetics — it was about direct-to-consumer bypassing the system.
- 4
Convert conviction into endurance
Use the direction-of-travel story as the team's morale infrastructure during the flat years. The purpose is not to win arguments externally but to keep the team treading water internally.
Pro tip Tell the story to new and young employees explicitly — they lack the memory that makes the norm-flip credible.
Watch out Endurance without a data programme (see Lead With Data) is just stubbornness.
- 5
Be patient on the timeline, not the work
Accept a multi-year clock on the norm changing while running the hardest possible work in the meantime. Patience applies to when the world arrives, never to your own execution.
In the wild
When the FDA ordered 23andMe to stop returning health reports, observers expected the company to either retreat into ancestry-only testing or fold into the clinician-gatekeeper model. Wojcicki instead treated the world's direction as fixed and chose the hardest path — doubling down on direct-to-consumer and proving safety through submissions.
→ It took roughly seven years to win back the health reports, but the company retained its direct-to-consumer model and helped normalize consumer access to medically meaningful genetic risk data.
Wojcicki tells younger employees that when 23andMe started, gay marriage was illegal and even Obama publicly opposed it — a fact they find mind-blowing. The story shows how a norm that felt permanent flipped within their own lifetime.
→ Employees internalize that the current hostility to consumer health data is a temporary state, which sustains morale through slow regulatory years.
Common mistakes
Using 'right side of history' to dodge falsification
The frame is only useful when you also carry data proving the thesis. Without evidence, 'the world will catch up' is an unfalsifiable excuse that lets a wrong company run for a decade.
Confusing being early with being right
Both feel identical from inside the backlash. Founders who skip the diagnosis step — is opposition about the idea or about control? — cannot tell them apart and burn years on the wrong fight.
Being patient about execution, not just the timeline
Waiting for the world to change is not a strategy. 23andMe spent the waiting years generating 250+ publications, not idling.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders attacking regulated, gatekept, or culturally-loaded categories where the product is obvious in hindsight but heretical today.
Not ideal for
Businesses whose thesis depends on a norm nobody else is moving toward, or founders using 'inevitability' as an excuse to ignore real market rejection.
From the transcript
“We used to always tell ourselves internally that we were on the right side of History and I think knowing that the future is going…”
“I love telling my younger employees that when we started the company gay marriage was illegal... the world was so different but it was so…”
“In 30 years people are not going to be thinking about like oh sorry you're in Las Vegas and I'm in California and so I…”
From the episode
Anne Wojcicki: How 23andMe is Disrupting the Healthcare Industry
Anne Wojcicki