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Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

wsj.com

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Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#101

Post by inetknght »

eastWestMath wrote: post #96
inetknght wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why didn't any one of the medical consultants or partners bring this up sooner? Outside of direct "I physically see this patient", people can forget they work in medicine where their answers can mean life or death decisions. In that situation people end up not wanting to bite the hand that feeds. When you have automated stuff that has high throughput with little or no human interaction, you seriously limit the oppo…

Any chance those physicians will be facing investigations?

I'd be willing to bet that it's not just physicians though. Lab staff on the back-end who actually do the work don't have the same rigor of training as medical doctors do.

Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

Mz wrote: post #10

Wow. 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.

> Also, how can people be that stupid? You have to know the truth will eventually come out?

People quite often think they can get away with things that, it turns out, they can't. The fact that something is true does not mean that people must believe it.

Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#104

Post by Apocryphon »

anigbrowl wrote: post #86
chromagnon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You have to admit, though, it does take a fresh thinker to be able to maintain this scale of scam. Just not a scientific prodigy.

Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#105

Post by apahwa »

ceejayoz wrote: post #63
tetrep wrote: post #56

Can't read the Journal article so not sure if it has this or not, but reply from Theranos: This is a one-sided filing by one party to litigation, and we will respond at the appropriate time in the appropriate forum. We disagree with much of what PFM alleges in its complaint. This is not, however, the time or place to contest their mischaracterizations of the record. We will litigate this case in court, where it belon…

> ... consistent with her longstanding, personal commitment to doing the right thing for the Theranos shareholder base... Uh huh. That's why the offer comes with a "you agree not to sue us" clause, I'm sure.

well, to be fair, if they cashed out and then sued as well then that would be double dipping a bit right?

Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#106

Post by LordHumungous »

floathub wrote: post #83
chromagnon wrote: post #8

I 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 w…

Well the stakes are a lot lower when it's social media or something. Theranos' problem was that it tried to take the Silicon Valley mentality to medicine, and as we've seen there's a little agency called the FDA that doesn't give a damn how hot or well funded you are. They will crush you into dust if you try to play games.

Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#107

Post by themgt »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
bronson wrote: post #46

Earlier 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

I remember in the 90s being a teenager reading Boies brilliant work shredding the Microsoft monopoly with such overwhelming skill, and he was almost a hero of mine. Since then I've realized he's just a hired gun, a genius with no morals or integrity who's in it for the money and nothing else. What a disappointment.

Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#108

Post by notahacker »

eric_h wrote: post #88
exhilaration wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the problems arise when you've moved beyond exaggerating putative customers' level of interest or how finished the software is to faking a solution which technical experts have very good reason to believe isn't actually achievable, or when your mistakes are likely to kill people. Often these two overlap, because when a solution is as important as life and death and the field is mature enough to actually have experts, you probably shouldn't assume the reason they didn't solve it was because their company culture wasn't as cool as yours.

That's why I'm somewhat more irritated about reading about an apparently very worthy electrical VTOL aircraft project featured on here boast of an apparently purely-hypothetical "300km range" on its website as if other engineers are just idiots for thinking battery weight might prevent that than I am about actually writing marketing material for people that have a lot more ability to solve problems than customers.

Re: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

#110

Post by chromagnon »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #80
chromagnon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Holmes hasn't actually claimed to have come up with any new discoveries or revolutionary technology while an undergraduate, I think. She had the idea for the company and decided to drop out. Of course, magazines like Inc. had no issues playing up her genius with Silicon Valley hyperbole. Several people -- her professor? I forget -- warned her the blood test wouldn't work, even before she dropped out.

As I recall, she had a co-founder who built the tech, including the whole dorm room story.

Holmes is the MBA part of the team.

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