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Google Ventures‘ Bill Maris Investing in Idea of Living to 500

This article is a year old, but it is the first I’ve seen it. This guy has access to hundreds of millions of dollars per year and has this wonderful quote to go with it: “If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes,” Bill Maris says.


Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the freedom to invest it however he wants. He’s looking for companies that will slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life.

Ask Ray | Ethan Kurzweil debates the role of tech firms in personal privacy

Dear readers,

My son Ethan Kurzweil — who is a partner at Bessemer Ventures Partners — tracks the future of web innovation, social and legal concerns about privacy, and start-ups who have an edge with their business or consumer applications, like team sourcing or software-as-a-service.

He appeared on C • NBC business affairs show Power Lunch. Episode debated the recent news about the US government and law enforcement asking Apple to release private data on an iPhone used by terrorists.

Illumina, the Google of Genetic Testing, Has Plans for World Domination

You could say that Illumina is to DNA sequencing is what Google is to Internet search, but that would be underselling the San Diego-based biotech company. Illumina’s machines, the best and cheapest on the market, generate 90 percent of all DNA sequence data today. Illumina is, as they say, crushing it.

But as lucrative as that 90 percent slice is for Illumina now, the whole pie is likely to get even bigger in the future. Less than 0.01 percent of the world’s population has been sequenced so far. So recently, Illumina has made bold moves positioning itself for the future: The company is consolidating its core hardware business—this week, it sued an upstart competitor, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, for patent infringement—while moving into the genetic testing business with new ventures like the liquid cancer biopsy spinoff, Grail.

The company is a looking toward a future in which a lot more people gets genetic tests—and a lot more often. “Grail’s business will be very different than Illumina’s core business,” Eric Endicott, Illumina’s director of global public relations, said in an email. “We are at a tipping point in genomics, where a broad community of scientists and researchers continue to translate the potential of the genome from science to discoveries and applications.”

Cybercrime warrior: Symantec’s Michael Brown

80 million cyber attacks per year — 400 every minute — but as many as 70 percent of them go undetected. And, these numbers are anticipated to go drastically higher now “Ransomware” is paying off for hackers.


Using the internet is a risk most businesses and individuals take for granted. But as more data is stored online, the world is becoming ever more vulnerable, the head of global internet security firm Symantec, Michael Brown, says.

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