This trainwreck is going to make a great movie.
It's already being made: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt5795144/
Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
81–90 of 182 posts
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went to Stanford (hence the screen name) ... Stanford students are generally sheep that know one thing for certain: That they are smart enough to get into Stanford and that they now have pretty much zero excuse to not be successful. They assume that other things (vision, relentless lifelong obsession) are means to ends. It is a fertile breeding ground for what Trungpa Rinpoche most accurately describes a "Spiritual…
I don't really know why this has to link back to Stanford.
Because Stanford cultivates this type of activity through a deep worship of commercial activities rather than pure pursuit of knowledge to a very smart but very impressionable group.
Colleges need to hold learning to the highest regard ... Holmes was constantly invited as a speaker to campus before she became disowned.
Look into Clinkle if you want another example. Kids are obsessed with getting rich quick and glamorizing that behavior and spoon feeding it back to them is a recipe for disaster. Snapchat is another example!
Institutions of learning and knowledge need to emphasize and glamorize that. Often times Professors themselves go to work for these companies ... the intellectual elite should feel that way about themselves: elite in their knowledge. A snobbish dismissal of material wealth might be exactly what the institution needs.
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#83I bet there are many other boardrooms around Silicon Valley who are panicking over this. There's so much pressure to be immediately profitable and show predictable year over year growth. How many have faked user trials or cooked the books in ways that would make Enron blush?
Look at facebook. 1.23 billion active daily users? Really?
And this is published in financial and technical press with precious little skepticism. FB must be happily counting every single incidental embedded bit of javascript that phones home from a facebook logo on an otherwise unrelated site count as an active user. And then some. One in 6 people on the _planet_. Every day. Think about the boldness of saying that with a straight face. But the hype machine is happy to keep echoing that claim.
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't - what happened?
I was curious and googled a bit. Relevant part: > In the past year and a half, the grandson and grandfather have rarely spoken or seen one another, communicating mainly through lawyers, says Tyler Shultz. He and his parents have spent more than $400,000 on legal fees, he says. He didn’t attend his grandfather’s 95th birthday celebration in December. Ms. Holmes did. > “Fraud is not a trade secret,” says Mr. Shultz, wh…
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
a legit company will only go to certain extent to defend. They can still survive.
An illegit company will go all / full lengths to attack and defend. illegit company life depends on this !
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't - what happened?
I was curious and googled a bit. Relevant part: > In the past year and a half, the grandson and grandfather have rarely spoken or seen one another, communicating mainly through lawyers, says Tyler Shultz. He and his parents have spent more than $400,000 on legal fees, he says. He didn’t attend his grandfather’s 95th birthday celebration in December. Ms. Holmes did. > “Fraud is not a trade secret,” says Mr. Shultz, wh…
Off topic: he's 95 years old?! I don't care how well connected he is, who thought it would be a good idea to have a nonagenarian on the board of a (supposedly) cutting edge health-tech company?!
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#86I told you her schtick was too smooth. 'I'm too driven to care about anything but my work' is always a red flag.
The whole 'coming out of nowhere' thing is another red flag. This idea that an undergraduate built revolutionary medical tech in their dorm room no less? Who invests in that? With no data, no trials, no feasibility study?
I could believe someone making a rbeakthrough and then leaving college to commercialize it. That's what happened with Google and a bunch of other unicorn firms, and I'm plenty willing to believe in the posibility of innovation/discovery by a fresh thinker who noticed a pearl among the gravel.
But when Elizabeth Holmes burst upon the scene, she just seemed too good to be true - gee, you're an original, off-the-wall thinker and innovator and you're a goody-two-shoes workaholic of the kind MBAs and investors fantasize about? Nah.
My sister is very much that hard worker/high achiever personality but she's intellectually very conservative and compartmentalized. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this - indeed it's part of what makes her good at her medical profession - but innovators usually also demonstrate a playful streak and a tolerance for failure rather than needing to be perceived as perfect.
I wonder if this apparent fraud will result in criminal prosecution. It would be a sad end for la Holmes to matriculate at San Quentin.
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#87I will keep repeating that: The fact that Elizabeth house is not FBI raided and she is not in jail without ability to talk to co-conspirators just show how you can run your scam enterprise by simply having the right people on your board.
Agreed, it's bullshit like this that makes it VERY clear that the law only applies to the poor and non-influential.
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#88Wow. Okay, this takes it from "Shit happens and people can be totally deluded" to actual, genuine fraud. Edit: Also, how can people be that stupid? You have to know the truth will eventually come out? Right? Or, no? I don't get it.
It's easy to fool yourself into believing that the fraud is just a temporary necessity while you work out the final kinks in your product.
Yes, it's unfortunate that "fake it 'til you make it" became such a popular meme in SV et. al.
There is value in that philosophy in some respects, but claiming that your medical tests are real and reliable when they are not most certainly does not fall under that particular umbrella.
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theranos and Boies teamed up to make his life hell. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161117/15475936076/thera... One might imagine what they'd attempt if he wasn't related to a boardmember, or if his parents didn't have $400K for legal fees...
Yes, that David Boies: https://www.forbes.com/2003/05/28/cz_vm_0528sco.html
[deleted]
Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings
#90Is this the first total collapse of a "unicorn" this time around? I can't think of any recent, high profile disintegrations of this order of magnitude.
Gilt Groupe and Fab both sold at significantly lower values than they had previously raised at, not sure if that counts as a "total collapse". I predict the next one will be Hampton Creek, given the criminal probe into their fraudulent buy-back scheme.
The federal probe into Hampton Creek has been closed. See: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/03/27/hamp...