This is an admirable mea culpa by the author. Sure, he is certainly casting blame on Theranos. However, he also issues an unqualified apology at the end of the article, stating "So I blew it. And I should have included all these colloquies in the original story. I regret the error." Many others in his position would have concluded with a pseudo-apology such as, "I'm sorry that I let them deceive me."
How Theranos Misled Me
71–80 of 89 posts
Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Palantir was a scam ??
They're incredibly shady. $750k in lobbying helps https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00005517... Their VC firm was the CIA: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125200842406984303 Cashing fat the .gov to "fight terrorism" doesn't help make US citizens any safer, but does the founder wealthy enough to buy castles & fly his Stanford undergrad floozy around the world on private jets. Nice work if you can get i…
But why does any of that mean they aren't a technology company?
It's as if by 'tech company' you really mean 'fashionable, liberal, consumer web startup or ex-startup', which isn't a reasonable definition of 'technology'.
Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Palantir was a scam ??
They're incredibly shady. $750k in lobbying helps https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00005517... Their VC firm was the CIA: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125200842406984303 Cashing fat the .gov to "fight terrorism" doesn't help make US citizens any safer, but does the founder wealthy enough to buy castles & fly his Stanford undergrad floozy around the world on private jets. Nice work if you can get i…
If $750K of lobbying makes them shady, what do you think of millions of dollars spent on lobbying per-quarter by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Apple? [1]
Their VC firm was not the CIA. It was In-Q-Tel, which was founded by the CIA (yes, there is a difference). In-Q-Tel has also funded companies such as FireEye. [2] What's your opinion of them?
I don't really know how to respond to the claim about "Cashing fat the .gov", because I can't parse that sentence. I will point out that Palantir has been increasingly shifting to a corporate client base.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-facebook-amazon-lobbying...
Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#74Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Palantir was a scam ??
They're incredibly shady. $750k in lobbying helps https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00005517... Their VC firm was the CIA: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125200842406984303 Cashing fat the .gov to "fight terrorism" doesn't help make US citizens any safer, but does the founder wealthy enough to buy castles & fly his Stanford undergrad floozy around the world on private jets. Nice work if you can get i…
Palantir getting investment from In-Q-Tel gives them more credibility. The intelligence community is clearly their target market. Getting investment from that community in an overt and legit way doesn't fire any alarms to me.
Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#76I did not know much about Theranos before the recent skeptical articles started to appear on newspapers regarding the falseness of their claims. The larger question is, how do you get to a $9B valuation without having rock solid technology or evidence to prove the effectiveness of their technology? I would assume that the VCs in SV are a pretty smart bunch. How on earth did this happen in the first place? If Theranos…
> I would assume that the VCs in SV are a pretty smart bunch.
They're also gamblers, and they win when they sell the hot potato for profit, not when the company becomes profitable.
Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had to bet I would say Elizabeth had something promising at the beginning, but it just didn’t pan out and she got herself in very tight bind. It is fundamentally impossible to get results to the level of accuracy the FDA requires from a single fingerpick for most assays. It is not an issue of sensitivity, but that there is too much variability due tissue and capillary effects. The one thing we can all agree on i…
It seems possible that there wasn't much initial due diligence nor a working product at the beginning: > Tim Draper, the venture capitalist, said Holmes, who was friends with his daughter growing up, is the first entrepreneur he knows who kept quiet about her business From what I understand, Tim Draper, of DFJ Venture invested in Holmes when she was a Stanford student. > DFJ, formerly known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson…
> It seems most likely to me that this investment was based on her personality and/or personal connection
isn't that how most founders get their initial $$? At least the ones I know. One got his money from his parents because his dad is a world famous cardiologist and the other one because he was friends with a bunch of people on the board of YC.
Heck, even the go pro founder got a ton of $$ from his parents.
Elizabeth holmes was no different.
Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the later back-and-forth stuff states that even for the tests they can do, they were using third party equipment for "scaling" reasons. They're not good at PR and this reporter isn't good at getting answers. What a mess.
I believe Theranos was almost on to something, and it didn't pan out. You know, science. So they used smoke-and-mirrors instead. Countless startups have used the same strategy - using hubris to hide failure long enough to either fix problems or get sold. Most startups don't mess with people's lives. Theranos deserves every bit of the scrutiny they're under now.
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Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#79Not to get all tinfoil hat, this sudden press attack on Theranos seems so synchronized.
Theranos was offering standard tests at a lower rate. I'm guessing the market price is so high, it's quite easy to generate positive cash flow from it. Could it be the incumbent industry players do not want a new competitor into the market? Also Martin Shkreli got arrested recently. Who benefits most from arresting Shkreli? The pharmaceutical industry he shone the light on. Now where can you buy one of those hats?
Well, Shkreli is a special kind of stupid. Rising the price 50x fold, openly saying he doesn't think it's a problem, saying he'll reduce the price but not doing it, drew quite a bit of anger from people, all that while having a history of shady business... I'm quite sure he was warned not to do this and stay under the radar by other people in the industry
Re: How Theranos Misled Me
#80The company seems to be grasping at straws in desperate attempts at damage control now that everyone seems to be catching on that the company is perhaps more hype than substance. Certainly not the first time in business history that a product has failed to live up to initial expectations, but if theres a feeling that people were misled about what was real vs. conceptual then it can get ugly quite quick.
"not the first time..." What other product/company has not lived up at this scale, and with this capitalization?
Autonomy.