Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 104 posts

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#31

Post by mathattack »

osteele wrote: post #13
wyldfire wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seemed to me as if the author semi-sheepishly is admitting being caught up in the fervor surrounding Theranos: > I used to refer to it pretty regularly as the Blood Unicorn, Elasmotherium haimatos, because it was a Silicon Valley unicorn with a peak valuation of $9 billion that managed to raise $700 million from investors. I suppose if "unicorn" is meant to describe fundraising activities, it's accurate. They real…

I believe this[1] is the article in which the author, Matt Levine, introduced the phrase “blood unicorn”. That article continues with a quote about Theranos's “bait and switch”; the author concludes the section with “‘There will be an appropriate time and place to talk about the past,’ said Theranos; my guess is that the place might be court.” EDIT: This article[2] (also by Matt Levine) predates [1]. “And here is a u…

Matt would appreciate your use of footnotes!

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#32

Post by magic_beans »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #27
subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

I apologize for the formatting issues. It is one of the reasons I shut this blog down. But here are some of my thoughts from a few years ago: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/05/theranos-cul...

Wow this is a fascinating argument that rings — to me, also a woman, very much having also experienced some of this - so vividly true.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#33

Post by ng12 »

olivermarks wrote: post #30

I'm sure there are all sorts of dark actors in the shadows on this one. Holmes is being hung drawn and quartered in public, but there were many other people involved in building up this chimera. The board of directors are an interesting bunch and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is a colorful character. Holmes may have been a patsy, who knows... Bloomberg and most other media companies pumped Theranos up for all it was worth,…

Was she the CEO or not? If the CEO does not bear responsibility for egregious, dangerous fraud who does?

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#34

Post by sephlietz »

ng12 wrote: post #33
olivermarks wrote: post #30

I'm sure there are all sorts of dark actors in the shadows on this one. Holmes is being hung drawn and quartered in public, but there were many other people involved in building up this chimera. The board of directors are an interesting bunch and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is a colorful character. Holmes may have been a patsy, who knows... Bloomberg and most other media companies pumped Theranos up for all it was worth,…

Was she the CEO or not? If the CEO does not bear responsibility for egregious, dangerous fraud who does?

I think the point is that others likely should also be held responsible. Not sure I understand your argument here.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#35

Post by olivermarks »

ng12 wrote: post #33
olivermarks wrote: post #30

I'm sure there are all sorts of dark actors in the shadows on this one. Holmes is being hung drawn and quartered in public, but there were many other people involved in building up this chimera. The board of directors are an interesting bunch and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is a colorful character. Holmes may have been a patsy, who knows... Bloomberg and most other media companies pumped Theranos up for all it was worth,…

Was she the CEO or not? If the CEO does not bear responsibility for egregious, dangerous fraud who does?

Fair but she might be a clueless rube who got played...

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#36

Post by Nomentatus »

joezydeco wrote: post #25
subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

I honestly believe Holmes, as a sophomore at Stanford University, believed she had come across an idea that nobody had ever thought of before (low-volume microfluidic immunoassays). The exception is that this science had already been explored, for decades , by the major companies that specialized in this technology. There simply was nothing to show that worked, yet, so there was nothing to commercialize. And the big…

A Steve Jobs-like ability to live in her own reality distortion field, plus much of the salesmanship, but minus Steve's very acute (not perfect) sense of what currently impossible problems were on the cusp of being solved, creating future practical products.

There were two companies that I simply couldn't understand, at all, from media reports in the last couple decades. One was Enron, 'tother Theranos. Turned out there was a reason why.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#37

Post by ng12 »

sephlietz wrote: post #34
ng12 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was she the CEO or not? If the CEO does not bear responsibility for egregious, dangerous fraud who does?

I think the point is that others likely should also be held responsible. Not sure I understand your argument here.

I'm specifically disagreeing with the usage of the term "patsy", which implies that she's not morally complicit on grounds of naivete.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#38

Post by smsm42 »

Reading this article, I've had a nagging feeling - ok, the founder may have presented a wrong picture, but isn't it the task of tech journalists to call them on that? I am sure some would always be fooled, but how comes pretty much all of them, according to the article, were fooled? And not by some ingenious heist that takes a genius to unravel, but by buying a device from another company, showing it to journalists and telling them "we invented this new awesome thing" and nobody is the wiser? Where's the added value in journalists then, are they reduced now to repackaging press-releases and writing "oh, we've got fooled again" postmortems? OK, let's say they don't have the expertise. A lot of people do. Did they ask those people and report what they are thinking? How comes then I am reading both "any person with med test background should have seen it" and "nobody was seeing it"? If a thing like this happened with some software system, there would be a place for deep redesign of monitoring and evaluation systems, that should have prevented such failure. Yet it happens again and again with reporting and as far as I can see no work is done to fix it.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#39

Post by 2YwaZHXV »

hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

Existing analysers already use very small samples.

See Siemens Advia 1800 specs under "Microvolume Technology" https://www.healthcare.siemens.com/clinical-chemistry/system...

It only uses 30ul of sample to run up to 15 assays.

How is that any different from what Theranos was doing?

Only difference is that you collect a bigger vial when using the Siemens machine. And then don't use most of it. So why not collect a smaller vial?

Post reply on HN