81–90 of 557 posts
Ok, this is the money line in that press release for me: “The charges against Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani make clear that there is no exemption from the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws simply because a company is non-public, development-stage, or the subject of exuberant media attention.” For all those entrepreneurs are trying to "fake it until you make it" be aware that the SEC considers your…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> shouldn't these two simply be in prison right now? Compare and contrast with Shkreli sentencing. Some animals are more equal than others.
I'm not really sure that's fair. In fact, IANAL and have zero knowledge of law, but the two had seemingly nearly opposite intent of their crimes. Who knows what was going on in the girl's head, but it sounds more like a bunch of idiot investors gave a lot of money to a dreamer who wanted to make an impact and didn't know when to quit and fold her hand rather than an elaborate con. That gets taken into consideration b…
Until you said 'her', I actually thought you were referring to Shkreli. He ran a hedge fund starting at 23, and when he lost a lot of the money, he made bigger bets and tried to earn the money back rather than admitting his losses.
> I remember reading about the board a few years ago and just looked it up again. Several generals, Henry Kissinger...huh?
Shkreli raised money from Steven Cohen's SAC Capital, the family of Fred Hassan (former CEO of Schering-Plough), and Brent Saunders, the current CEO of Allergan.
Their stories, though they differ in industry, seem quite similar when compared in detail.
>Theranos and Holmes have agreed to settle the fraud charges levied against them. Holmes agreed to pay a $500,000 penalty, be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years, return the remaining 18.9 million shares that she obtained during the fraud, and relinquish her voting control of Theranos by converting her super-majority Theranos Class B Common shares to Class A Common shares. D…
Presumably she's still pretty wealthy, enough not to have to work again or to lie-low for the next decade before staging a comeback.
People keep complaining about lack of jail time. As has been repeated in a number of subcomments: The SEC cannot send people to jail. Full stop. They have only civil authority. They refer criminal cases to the US attorneys/DOJ, and offer assistance. All evidence suggests they did so here. The decision to criminally prosecute or not is out of their hands.
Is Holmes still rich after this? I can't tell just how much of her wealth she's being forced to return in form of shares.
Do we know if she was rich before? Maybe she was able to cash out a lot of her shares during some of the financing rounds, but she also could have just been "rich" on paper by owning many Theranos shares. If she was rich by virtue of holding Theranos shares, her wealth has decreased a ton in the last couple years since the value of the company has surely plummeted.
> Holmes was paid a salary of approximately $200,000 to $390,000 per year between 2013 and 2015
Ok, this is the money line in that press release for me: “The charges against Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani make clear that there is no exemption from the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws simply because a company is non-public, development-stage, or the subject of exuberant media attention.” For all those entrepreneurs are trying to "fake it until you make it" be aware that the SEC considers your…
Lets not pretend that everyone isn't just following the leaders here with grandiose messaging. Major tech corporations have done this as much as small startups. IBM's Watson comes immediately to mind. The difference is whether or not you can come through with some percentage of your promises. The ones who can eek out some kind of repeatable traction long enough to exit are successes, the ones who never get to scale a…
That isn't "We are on shaky ground with new, unproven tech." That's "We know it doesn't work. We are comfortable lying about it because money."
I wonder if Holmes was male if she would be treated like Martin Shkreli and attacked in every horrible way possible. Don’t see much rhetoric against her.
But Shkreli has brought on himself another order of magnitude of personal criticism because of his statements and actions beyond the price fixing. In my experience from the days after his sentencing, people who know nothing about tech or healthcare know his name and react to it with scorn, while quite few of them know the name of his funds or companies.
The book The Chickenshit Club https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute... by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist tells a more thorough and comprehensive, though infuriating and tragic, story.
Ok, this is the money line in that press release for me: “The charges against Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani make clear that there is no exemption from the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws simply because a company is non-public, development-stage, or the subject of exuberant media attention.” For all those entrepreneurs are trying to "fake it until you make it" be aware that the SEC considers your…
Holmes was, in many ways, embodying that HN mentality, acting on the basis:
- that an entire industry has been doing it wrong
- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup
- that once you have enough success you can just rewrite the laws that were slowing you down
- that no one knows what they're doing anyway, major projects are 100% guesswork, and you should just "fake it till you make it"
- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice
- that you can outsmart an industry before even passing or placing out of sophomore level classes
- that any self-doubt must be Impostor Syndrome, and so it's not worth your time to even check if that doubt has a factual basis
Yes, I've posted this twice before but I'm citing it and admitting to it, and it got heavily upvoted both times (thanks to Algolia for making comments so easily searchable btw):