The Young Men And The Big C

While still in their 20s, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg built a $2 billion company to pursue an impossible dream—combating cancer with big data. They’ve not only made fast progress—they’ve also gotten rich trying

- Matthew Herper & Ellie Kincaid

In 2008, when he was 23, Nat Turner was on a hike in North Carolina with his six-year-old cousin, Brennan Simkins. Brennan’s legs got weak, and the weakness kept getting worse. He turned out to have a rare and deadly paediatric leukemia that kept coming back after treatment. When Brennan needed a second bone marrow transplant, several hospitals refused to do it and his family was losing hope— until they found a specialist who would help. Exasperated, Brennan’s father asked Tur ner: Why doesn’t one hospital know what others will do? Is there anyone collecting statistics?

“All right,” Turner remembers thinking, “there’s a lot of value for patients locked in the clinical data. We should be the ones who unlock it.”

For another recent college graduate, that might have been merely a fleeting “deep thought”. But Turner, along with his college friend and business partner, Zach Weinberg, was looking to start a third company. His first, an online food delivery business Weinberg and he started their freshman year at Wharton, had failed, but a second one, an online advertising business called Invite Media, sold to Google for $81 million in 2010, when they were 24.

Free from financial concerns and still working at Google, they were filling their office whiteboard with ideas about what to do next. They were fascinated by health care. “We were very titillated by it because it’s so complicated and neither one of us knew anything about it,” Turner says. Brennan’s experience became a beacon guiding them on a new effort.