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Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

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Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#291

Post by mnemonicsloth »

matte_black wrote: post #166
abalone wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fake it til you make it" generally refers to acting like you believe in yourself even if you're filled with self-doubt. Not actual fraud.

You can believe in yourself without faking anything, and it’s healthy to do so. Faking it implies you want to give others the impression you’re already a big shot, and it dilutes out the accomplishments of people who actually made it. The downside should be that if you’re faking it and you don’t make it, your shame should be relentless and brutal, and no one should ever take you seriously again. Also, even if you mak…

> You can believe in yourself without faking anything...

I don't think so. Self-doubt is natural. Mandatory, really. Someone who never has moments of self-doubt is a bad investment risk; it means they probably aren't thinking hard enough about what could go wrong. But concealing those doubts is also mandatory: if you can't, it may be a sign that you have more problems than you know how to deal with.

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#292

Post by neurotech1 »

fragsworth wrote: post #268
lxm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted it somewhat differently. The money paragraph seems to be > claimed that Theranos’ products were deployed by the U.S. Department of Defense on the battlefield in Afghanistan and on medevac helicopters and that the company would generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014. In truth, Theranos’ technology was never deployed by the U.S. Department of Defense and generated a little more than $100,000 i…

What does "PPM" stand for?

Private Placement Memorandum

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/offeringmemorandum.asp

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#293

Post by dang »

specialp wrote: post #207
dang wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt that the comments you're referring to existed, but the HN community has been overwhelmingly skeptical about Theranos for years, to the point of cliché.

Yes you are right later on people had more skepticism especially after the FDA piled on. The argument I am making is the initial claims they had about testing a single drop of blood were pretty outrageous to anyone that even knows a little bit about how this stuff works. Look at some of the downvoted comments they said exactly this! There are things that can be said well we didn't know they were hiding this, and ther…

I skimmed those threads and read them pretty differently. Even many of the pro-Theranos comments were careful to say things like "How can I know to trust their numbers?" and "the enormous change her company is saying is possible" (emphasis added). Those seem to me to have aged pretty well, and then there are the many skeptical ones, including from people like you who have direct experience in that field.

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#294

Post by [deleted] »

fragsworth wrote: post #268
lxm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted it somewhat differently. The money paragraph seems to be > claimed that Theranos’ products were deployed by the U.S. Department of Defense on the battlefield in Afghanistan and on medevac helicopters and that the company would generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014. In truth, Theranos’ technology was never deployed by the U.S. Department of Defense and generated a little more than $100,000 i…

What does "PPM" stand for?

[deleted]

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#295

Post by icebraining »

marcosdumay wrote: post #236
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. "We had $50 million in bookings this year" - Misleading because it seems like that should mean $50 million in revenue but all of the bookings were for 10 year contracts so it is really only $5 million in revenue, but it is not fraudulent because it isn't factually untrue. "We will be able to raise prices enough to be profitable" - Often optimistic to the point of delusion, but without a time machine it is not…

Every founder is optimistic to the point of delusion. It's a requisite. Investors know how to deal with that. What they don't know how to do is deciding if "those complicated papers that use words you never even heard before say we can do X" is a lie or not.

How so? Isn't that what due diligence is? You get a third-party expert (be that in accounting or biology) with a signed NDA, and have them verify those results.

What they probably can't handle is outright fabrication.

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#296

Post by dang »

SilasX wrote: post #227
dang wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't copy and paste content into Hacker News, regardless of how good you think your past comments were. The threads here are for conversation, not reciting from the record. There is no "HN mentality", just a large statistical cloud that people see what what they want in. Most of that cloud has been the opposite of what you're suggesting. Commenters here have been not just skeptical but cynical and outraged by…

>Please don't copy and paste content into Hacker News, regardless of how good you think your past comments were. The threads here are for conversation, not reciting from the record. Would you mind giving some guidance on what I should have done in the situation? I was doing the best I could against the constraints. The situation was that someone made point X, to which I have point Y as a reply. Both X and Y, in some…

Writing a new comment would be fine! and linking to an old one would also be fine. I agree that what you did is better than #4 (and am grateful for that) but it's still not kosher. Think of how good conversation works. People can make the same points in different contexts without literally repeating past statements. Something about creating each statement in the moment—even though there are only so many ideas to go around—serves conversational flow.

I don't agree with you at all about what the typical HN commenter is endorsing; it seems to me you're adding a lot of interpretation to a lot of disparate information and constructing something of a straw man.

By the way, if anyone is interested, only a small minority (10% if that) of HN users are in Silicon Valley. And plenty of those identify more against it than with it.

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#297

Post by taurath »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #173
taurath wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that competence only matters when other people are giving you money, and doesn't matter at all when you're giving people money. I think you're really overestimating the downsides.

Reputation is everything in this business. I think you're underestimating the downsides.

Every VC has 100s of failures. He just proved that he will go to bat for his startups even if they're doing fishy stuff :P

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#298

Post by anigbrowl »

DannyBee wrote: post #62

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.

I don't see any mention of the matter being referred to the Department of Justice in the press release. I mean sure, DoJ surely watched what is coming out of the SEC and will decide separately, but (as we see here) the casual reader who is unfamiliar with agency structure will understandably conclude that the government is done with her.

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#299

Post by danso »

charlesdm wrote: post #41
edanm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree [1], but I don't think that's why there's a difference between the cases. First of all, the Theranos people haven't yet been brought up on criminal charges, but it's still possible they could be, no? Secondly, I think there were lots of material differences between the two cases that caused them to be prosecuted differently. You can't just lump every instance of fraud as the same thing. [1] The reason…

On showing remorse: it's a bit ridiculous to think of this, since showing remorse does not mean you actually feel remorse. But it might mean you are intelligent enough to realise you need to show remorse to get off the hook.

Martin Shkreli was extremely intelligent, and the court recognized that. He continued to not show remorse (I think it's arguable that he did a bit more than simply not show remorse), why shouldn't the court believe that he truly is not remorseful?

Re: Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud

#300

Post by googlryas »

hacknat wrote: post #240
nodesocket wrote: post #221

I'll be very curious to see how and if her charges compare to Martin Shkreli who got the book thrown at him (7 years and $7.4m). Shkreli was a scapegoat mostly because of his public/social media persona, cockiness, and arrogance. Meanwhile the crooks that caused the financial meltdown have not been charged with anything. Bene vixit, qui bene latuit— "He lives well who conceals himself well."

Shkreli had an ongoing fraud and sec violations before Turing Pharma. Though it looks suspicious, his prosecution is coincidental with the Turing stuff and revolves around the truly atrocious management of his hedge fund. Shkreli deserves what he got, but not because of his public bravado or raising the price of a drug, but because he actively embezzled money and created a Ponzi scheme.

Was it a Ponzi scheme? I've read that he basically lost his investors money in a real investment failure, and then 'donated' some of his shares from his other, unrelated company to make the investors a profit and look good.
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