Katie Jacobs Stanton worked for Yahoo, Google, Twitter, and the White House. Her next stop: the top marketing job at a startup.
Co-founded by Twitter alumni Elad Gil and Othman Laraki, Color Genomics offers genetic testing to help people understand their risk for developing common hereditary cancers. A big part of the pitch is affordability: The company’s breast and ovarian cancer risk tests are priced at $249.
Since her departure from Twitter in January 2016, Stanton has been dabbling in some projects at Color Genomics, including an initiative to provide free genetic testing to over 100,000 people from underrepresented communities. She already had financial ties to the startup: In April 2015, #Angels, an investment group Stanton is a member of, picked Color Genomics as its first investment.
Now, she’ll join the company as chief marketing officer in mid-August.
“I’ve always been drawn to mission driven technologies that democratize access to information so I jumped at the opportunity. Color’s mission of democratizing access to genetic testing takes this principle one important step further: it can save people’s lives,” she wrote in a post on Medium. Stanton shared the grief of losing both her grandfathers to cancer, writing “Cancer touches all of us.”
“I wanted to join something bigger than myself and importantly, make my kids and family proud,” Twitter’s ex-VP of global media said of her decision to enter the biotech and precision medicine fields. She took to the social media platform to announce her new gig:
Former boss Jack Dorsey retweeted it—does that count as a stamp of approval?