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. Beyond raising future Silicon Valley leaders like Anne and Susan Wojcicki, the educator spent decades pioneering a media program at Palo Alto High School. Watching her students thrive has been “the best gift ever,” Wojcicki told Observer. Now, she’s going into business with one of them.
Wojcicki is partnering with Mary Minno, a former Google senior product manager and one of her former 10th-grade students, to launch an A.I.-focused health care fund alongside a residency program called Treehub. The venture, which quietly launched in October and was unveiled today (April 22), aims to support founders emerging from 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 Observer. Some companies need help communicating complex scientific ideas, while others require guidance in navigating co-founder dynamics or building partnerships. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this.”
The AI Health Fund has already invested in a dozen companies and expects to back around 60 as it deploys roughly $10 million over the next 18 months. Based in Los Altos, Treehub offers more than capital, providing mentorship, data and programming designed to help founders avoid common startup pitfalls, including internal conflict. “We have to help them get along and not hold grudges, not be vindictive,” said Wojcicki.
Wojcicki’s track record in Silicon Valley extends beyond her classroom. She is the mother of Janet Wojcicki, a pediatrics professor at the University of California, San Francisco; Anne, the co-founder of 23andMe; and Susan, the former CEO of YouTube who died in 2024 from lung cancer. She also founded a widely influential high school journalism program that has since expanded nationwide. Her work is guided by principles she calls TRICK—trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness—which she plans to apply at Treehub.
“As people get older, they become more constrained,” said Wojcicki. “Kids don’t have that, and so they can actually take a look at the system and say, ‘Wow, why aren’t they doing that?”
Minno, who stayed in touch with Wojcicki over the years as she worked at Google and Facebook, approached her with a plan to rethink health care after a loved one experienced a medical crisis.
“I showed up to Esther’s house four months post-partum, holding my son, and I was like, ‘You have to help me fix health care,’” said Minno. “What we need to do is develop a new system by which we programmatically facilitate and accelerate the adoption and distribution and success of companies that can make it better.”
They recruited Roxana Daneshjou, an assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford Medicine; Alexander Ioannidis, an assistant professor of biomedical data science and genetics at Stanford, and Minno’s father, Derek, president of Point Capital, to help lead the effort. Anne Wojcicki will serve as Treehub’s operating partner. “We see family as a feature, not a bug,” said Minno.
The AI Health Fund focuses on three areas: precision outcomes, care efficiency and frontier science. It is particularly interested in academic founders with deep domain expertise, such as Stanford professor Dennis Wall, whose work on digital interventions for pediatric autism is among its early investments.
Looking ahead, Minno and Wojcicki plan to expand beyond health care into areas like climate. “We won’t need to worry about health if we don’t have a planet,” Wojcicki said.
They also hope to scale Treehub beyond its current base, where roughly 75 percent of founders come from Stanford and UC Berkeley, to universities nationwide.
“We want to take this model and prove it works here, and then have it work everywhere,” said Minno. “There’s no time to wait and solve these issues.”
