‘Superbabies,’ Thiel Fellows and Holy Wars, With Orchid’s Noor Siddiqui
The Upstarts Podcast dives into a new, controversial category in reproductive health to kick off Season 2.
If you could fix the genetic lottery to ensure your baby was born healthy, would you?
When I asked this question of startup founder Noor Siddiqui, I pretty much knew how she would answer. Her startup, Orchid, has gained some attention – and notoriety – for claiming to offer such benefits to parents.
I didn’t anticipate how far she’d lean in, and how fast.
“If you have a baby the old-fashioned way, you’re basically rolling the dice, and you get an average outcome,” Siddiqui told me to kick off our conversation from a studio near her San Francisco office. “And if you come to us, you can stack the odds in your child’s favor and have a superbaby.”
For some, there’s probably a fine line between superbaby and supervillain. Not for Siddiqui. At first, she was taken aback by negative reactions to her product. Now she leans into the narratives to drive more attention to what she believes is massively important work.
And it’s partly why we were excited to have Siddiqui kick things off on Season 2 of The Upstarts Podcast.
If you followed our first season, you got to meet a wide variety of ambitious founders, from Canva’s Melanie Perkins to Runway’s Cris Valenzuela, with dog longevity, math, nuclear energy and space companies in between.
This season, we’re looking for more Upstarts: contrarians, iconoclasts and challengers who are punching above their weight, and doing things differently from company building approaches to weird and exciting technology.
Event alert: We loved seeing some of you at our Boston Tech Week event yesterday. Join us in New York next week to hear from the CEOs of Crosby, Merge and Modal next, and stay tuned for info about a special event at London Tech Week coming up.
That brings us back to Siddiqui. The first startup to read the entire genome of an embryo, Orchid is a category creator in an area that — due to a combination of stigma, hard science and historical lack of capital — doesn’t get the attention it deserves. (Occasional trend story and ideological sparring match aside.)
This isn’t sci-fi: since its 2019 founding, Orchid’s novel approach to genetic testing of embryos during the IVF process has assisted with a number of successful births; it already works with more than 100 clinics in the U.S. and abroad.
On this episode of The Upstarts Podcast, Siddiqui talks about her founder journey as a Thiel Fellow turned Stanford research dropout; why she compares previous testing to proofreading only the chapter titles of a book; and how she’s gotten used to the backlash that comes with ‘superbabies’ and a high price tag of $2,500 per screened embryo.
Plus, she talks about her Upstart Moment: sparking a new wave of reproductive tech startups that she sees carrying the field far beyond where Orchid can go alone.
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Below, we’ll share three of my favorite lessons from the episode: two focused on startup-building, one more philosophical.
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Startup lesson #1: Silicon Valley’s secret is risk-taking
On the show, this point starts out as a hot take: Siddiqui “hates the East Coast.”
But her bigger point is more nuanced: becoming a Thiel Fellow at age 17, and moving to the Bay Area to be around other startup founders, broke Siddiqui free from tracks she perceived would take her to law school, or medical school, or interning on Capitol Hill.
“The tolerance for failure is just so much higher. I just met so many people who just burned through tens of millions of dollars on what seemed a trash idea, and it was a trash idea!
And then it was like, ‘Okay, great, well now I’m going to do the other thing.’ And then the next thing is also a trash idea. Great, they get to put $100 million into that other trash thing. And the third thing is amazing, and then it’s a multi-billion-dollar company.”
Siddiqui notes the irony that she went to Stanford next, and had to be encouraged by an investor to drop out to start Orchid. But it’s not always a linear journey.
“I think the real value of the experience [as a Thiel Fellow] wasn’t the mechanical things I learned, it was more just, I don’t know, the license. The license to actually do the thing, and to have seen it go sideways for people, and be successful for people.”
Startup lesson #2: Even semicolons spark holy wars
Every episode, I ask our founder guest about their Upstart Moment. I’ve started to get better at deflecting the most boring answer: every day!
With Siddiqui, I didn’t have to worry. She went straight to an interesting topic: handling haters.
Coming of age in San Francisco, Siddiqui was insulated by a “positive environment” where backlash isn’t really worried about. Outside that echo chamber, she says she was surprised by how much she was affected by the “mob of angry people” reacting negatively to Orchid, or genetic testing for embryos, or even IVF altogether.
“I think I just didn’t expect them to affect me at all. And then because I was sort of like, ‘Well, why would you read mean comments? You could just stop reading them… but I think a lot of it was also just breaking my brain, as to why. I just really didn’t understand, honestly, a lot of the hate.”
We’ll go deeper on Siddiqui’s moral clarity in the next section. To stick to her founder process, her lesson from the backlash: “You can’t make things palatable for everyone.”
There will always be haters. Even technical founders, or builders in seemingly uncontroversial areas, can get caught up over a line of code, or a semicolon, or a logo change.
“These were really arcane technical decisions that the vast majority of people don’t even know anything about, and then there was just a massive holy war over that decision, and people were getting so much hate for it.
And I was like, okay, so it actually doesn’t matter whether you touch something that affects 100 people, or a million people, or a billion people. There’s always going to be people who feel really activated about it, even if you feel completely certain that what you’re doing is [right].”
Alex’s lesson: Facing a true believer
In our interview, Siddiqui tells the story of her mother’s blindness, and how it inspired her to work to ensure that, even if she couldn’t cure her mom, she could prevent her mom’s condition from being passed to the next generation.
It’s a relatable, even noble reason to launch a startup. It’s also one that might spark metaphysical questions for other people, at least among writers: Would Siddiqui’s grandmother, if an Orchid customer, have selected a different embryo? Would that baby have still grown up to be Siddiqui’s mom, as we think of her?
Siddiqui herself doesn’t seem to worry about hypothetical timelines. She’s out to right wrongs. “I just thought that was insanely unfair.” Trying to prevent such genetic conditions is, to her, “the most obvious thing.”
It’s with that lens that I find her answer about Orchid’s current high cost so fascinating.
In her future reality, Siddiqui envisions everyone with the chance to access IVF and Orchid, should they so choose. She applauds California for following some countries, such as Belgium and France, in covering IVF treatment under health insurance.
But ultimately, she has trust in society – and moral pressure – to push the government to step in.
”What I think is insanely cool about Orchid is, I think it is going to light a fire under everyone’s seat. Because obviously everyone is so disgusted by this idea of, ‘Well, why should it be the case that some segment of society gets to have super healthy babies and everyone else gets a random outcome, and we have no cures to actually reverse these diseases later?’
So, I think that that is actually a really great forcing function, that I hope will actually just lead to better outcomes for everyone. Which is that, ‘Hey, because this is going to lead to such massive health disparities and is such a big deal, we do need to cover it for everyone.’”
There’s an economic case to be made, too – healthier babies, like healthier adults, are cheaper to care for.
But Siddiqui almost sounds reminiscent of the leaders of AI labs when they argue that AGI will solve economic disparity, or that at a certain level of risk, AI will need to be safeguarded by the state.
In that future, the West Coast technologists bring fire down to the people; the East Coast lawmakers pass it around.