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At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

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Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#61

Post by AJ007 »

Mithaldu wrote: post #4

I'm honestly getting kind of annoyed with seeing stuff about Theranos, since everyone writing about them is beating about the bush, and only ends up describing how Theranos communicates with a startling lack of earnestness. Example from the video, paraphrased: Mod: "What prick tests are you able to do, using no commercially available lab equipment?" Holmes: "[lots of waffling] We're currently only doing the Herpes te…

You are just used to confrontational rating grabbing interviews. The fact that someone does not answer a specific question is valuable, just not as entertaining. The more questions the interviewer can deliver, the better. She dug her own grave.

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#62

Post by ekianjo »

> He replied to the employee, who no longer works at Theranos, denied all the claims and questioned the employee’s understanding of statistics and lab science.

> Quality-control failures were due to the “newness of some of our processes, which we are improving every day,” Mr. Balwani wrote.

> He added: “This is product development, this is how startups are built.” The reply ended with an edict that the “only email on this topic I want to see from you going forward is an apology that I’ll pass on to other people.”

I would rather question Balwani's understanding of Lab Science and Statistics as someone who has never had a remote experience of lab science in the first place. And about his understanding of Statistics, I have no idea where he thinks he has any authority either. MBAs are not particularly known to be very good at grasping probabilities.

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#63

Post by chetanahuja »

ekianjo wrote: post #55

> Sunny Balwani is an entrepreneur and a computer scientist. Sunny joined Theranos after dropping out of the Computer Science program at Stanford University. He received his MBA at UC Berkeley and undergraduate degree from UT Austin. Honest question, can you claim to be a Computer Scientist if you drop out from a computer Science program ? To me it sounds like calling yourself a Doctor after dropping out following th…

Sounds like he dropped out of a graduate degree from Stanford. If his undergrad degree from UT Austin he might have a plausible fig leaf to go around calling himself "a computer scientist". Though I certainly wouldn't call somebody who with just an undergraduate degree a "scientist" in any field unless they've proven themselves by practicing such science in a credible manner for a reasonable period of time.

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#65

Post by Zigurd »

jjoonathan wrote: post #52
Zigurd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's all very moral, but what Theranos is doing is mostly engineering. So while "hype the fuck out of it, raise big money, and fake it 'till you make it" might feel all icky, it's not a unique plan. Will we be saying the same things about Palantir? Maybe, maybe not. There's not that much difference between Palantir and Theranos. What has Palantir got that others don't? Answer: The ability to raise money at inc…

That's what I thought at first, but $400M and 12 years should have been enough to put together a pretty solid uTAS seeing as microfluidic integration wasn't exactly bleeding edge back then either. But they seem to have drunk their own kool-aid and created a working environment so toxic that they sabotaged their own chances to fake it till they made it. They might still get there, but even if they do there's a lesson…

Somehow the ability to spend money scales pretty well relative to the ability to raise it.

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#66

Post by isolate »

chetanahuja wrote: post #63
ekianjo wrote: post #55

> Sunny Balwani is an entrepreneur and a computer scientist. Sunny joined Theranos after dropping out of the Computer Science program at Stanford University. He received his MBA at UC Berkeley and undergraduate degree from UT Austin. Honest question, can you claim to be a Computer Scientist if you drop out from a computer Science program ? To me it sounds like calling yourself a Doctor after dropping out following th…

Sounds like he dropped out of a graduate degree from Stanford. If his undergrad degree from UT Austin he might have a plausible fig leaf to go around calling himself "a computer scientist". Though I certainly wouldn't call somebody who with just an undergraduate degree a "scientist" in any field unless they've proven themselves by practicing such science in a credible manner for a reasonable period of time.

I prefer an operational definition: a scientist is somebody who does research using the scientific method. But then again, this eliminates a bunch of CS people, since they're mostly doing math and engineering.

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#67

Post by interesting_att »

randycupertino wrote: post #60
blakeross wrote: post #37

I wrote a parody of Theranos as a TV pilot that is increasingly becoming true: http://www.pricks.com/ (I'm sharing this here because the Hacker News community seemed to enjoy my Season 3 premiere of Silicon Valley [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179894 ], but apologies if others feel it detracts from the discussion.)

I was just thinking that someone needs to write a novelization of this Theranos nonsense & turn it into a screenplay and voilà:- Silicon Valley's "Wolf of Wall Street" or the next "The Social Network" ... I'm sure someone is already writing it up.

I thought Arrested Development has been parodying the tech scene well.

Seasons 1-3, which aired during the Bush era, showed the lives of incompetent and corrupt property developers + military contractors.

Now the main running gag is a BS non-existent app.

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#68

Post by pkaye »

GabrielF00 wrote: post #36

Does the composition of Theranos' board strike anyone else as very weird? It seems much more like the board of a foreign policy think thank than a biotech start up. There are three former cabinet secretaries (state and defense), two former very senior military officers, two former senators (one regarded as a foreign policy expert), a bigshot DC lawyer, and the former CEOs of Bechtel and Wells Fargo. The only physicia…

Their early strategy was to get military contract but it didn't go too far because they needed to get FDA approval or something.

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#69

Post by epistasis »

ekianjo wrote: post #49

Interesting, Theranos' funder's behavior is what you would expect from someone who knows nothing about Science: - make bold claims - avoid going into details ("trade secrets", sheesh) - make investors believe in your "vision" - give talks about successful entrepreneurship to polish one's image And still nothing reliably demonstrated. What amazes me the most is how clueless investors are. If they don't care about Scie…

> What's next, a new take on homeopathy ?

Not too far off, actually:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/12/04/and...

Re: At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

#70

Post by bby »

randycupertino wrote: post #12
tristanj wrote: post #2

> In April 2014, she got a long email from another employee. The employee alleged that Theranos had cherry-picked data when comparing Edison machines to traditional lab machines to make the Edison look more accurate, according to a copy of the email. > For one test, the device’s accuracy rate increased sharply after some information was deleted and manipulated, the employee wrote. Edison machines also allegedly faile…

Glassdoor actually removed a few of the more scathing negative reviews about working there. I think Theranos advertised on Glassdoor so they removed some of the even worse reviews... there used to be some even more negative ones.

Can someone post those reviews? I'm curious to read them. Hopefully there is a daily cache of glassdoor that we can look at.
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