What do actor James Franco, former NBA player Jeremy Lin and writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs have in common? They were all students of Esther Wojcicki. Besides raising future Silicon Valley leaders like Anne and Susan Wojcicki, the teacher spent decades pioneering the media program at Palo Alto High School. Watching her students succeed has been “the best gift ever,” Wojcicki told the Observer. Now, you will go into business with one of them.
Wojcicki partnered with Mary Minno, a former Google senior product manager and one of her former 10th graders, to launch an AI-focused healthcare fund with a residency program called Treehub. The venture, which was quietly launched in October, is being launched today (April 22), aiming to support innovators coming out of academia as they turn ideas into companies.
“The premise is very simple: invest in people before others are willing to invest in them,” Minno told the Observer. Some companies need help communicating complex scientific ideas, while others need guidance in navigating the dynamic of co-founders or building partnerships. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this.”
The AI health fund has already invested in a dozen companies and expects to back about 60 as it spends about $10 million over the next 18 months. Based in Los Altos, Treehub offers more than capital, providing training, data and programs designed to help founders avoid common startup pitfalls, including internal conflict. “We have to help them understand each other and not hold grudges, not retaliate,” said Wojcicki.
Wojcicki’s record in Silicon Valley extends beyond her classroom. She is the mother of Janet Wojcicki, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco; Anne, founder of 23andMe; and Susan, the former CEO of YouTube who died in 2024 of lung cancer. He also established an influential high school journalism program that has since expanded across the country. His work is guided by principles he calls TRICK—trust, respect, independence, cooperation and kindness—which he plans to implement at Treehub.
“As people get older, they get stressed,” said Wojcicki. “Kids don’t have that, so they can look at the show and say, ‘Wow, why aren’t they doing that?’
Minno, who stayed in touch with Wojcicki over the years as he worked at Google and Facebook, approached him about a plan to rethink health care after a loved one experienced a medical crisis.
“I came to Esther’s house four months after giving birth, holding my son, and I said, ‘You have to help me get health care,'” Minno said. “What we need to do is create a new system where we do it systematically and accelerate the adoption and distribution and the success of companies that can make it better.”
They hired Roxana Daneshjou, an assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford Medicine; Alexander Ioannidis, assistant professor of biomedical data science and genetics at Stanford, and Minno’s father, Derek, president of Point Capital, help lead the effort. Anne Wojcicki will serve as Treehub’s operating partner. “We see family as something, not a mistake,” Minno said.
The AI Health Fund focuses on three areas: accurate outcomes, care efficiency and frontier science. It is of particular interest to academic innovators with deep domain expertise, such as Stanford professor Dennis Wall, whose work on digital interventions for childhood autism is among its early investments.
Looking ahead, Minno and Wojcicki plan to expand beyond health care into areas like climate. “We wouldn’t have to worry about life if we didn’t have a planet,” said Wojcicki.
They also hope to scale Treehub beyond its current base, where about 75 percent of founders come from Stanford and UC Berkeley, to universities across the country.
“We want to take this model and show that it works here, then make it work everywhere,” said Minno. “There is no time to wait and solve these problems.”
