The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

Everyone there too rich for jailtime?

Someone needs to make an anthology of first-person stories about trying out Theranos. I actually thought the OP article was by John Carreyrou because I saw it in his tweets (and it makes sense that they'd pull the fire alarm upon seeing him), but it's by a reporter (Jenny Gold) from Kaiser Health News, who apparently visited there (Nov 2014) before Carreyrou's WSJ investigation was published in October 2015.

The only other stories I can think of are:

Eric Lakin (DeciBio Consulting), 10/2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/what-...

Jean-Louis Gassee (former Apple exec), 10/2015: https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-accou...

Melia Robinson (Business Insider), 10/2015: http://www.businessinsider.com/i-tried-theranos-2015-10

I started to write a thoughtful and balanced analysis of this article...but then I stopped myself.

The reason I stopped myself is that I thought about all the journalists like this lady who played the same game with Theranos and continue to play similar games with all of the rotten corporate and government entities in the county. Then I started getting genuinely pissed off!

What. the. f*ck did I just read?

She openly admits to the following:

1. She came to the story with a predetermined framing of the story.

2. She allowed herself to be bribed with the “treat” of talking to Elizabeth Holmes and then backed off under threat and misdirection while pretending to be immune to such behavior.

3. She sat on the story because she couldn’t spin it the way she had intended in advance and allowed herself to be threatened.

I am not exaggerating, she literally writes “I lost the story so I moved on...”

Lost the story directly translates to: “I knew what I wanted to report and what would get clicks, I didn’t get that so I gave up.”

4. She proudly presents this article years after the fact pretending to retroactively have known something was wrong...and to have maintained her journalistic ethics while openly admitting to dropping the story once it didn’t fit the framing she hoped to apply to it.

5. She waited until well after the tide of public opinion had turned against Theranos to capitalize on the work of others who actually did the hard journalism to get clicks.

This lady should be fired, she is not a journalist. Why should we give her a pass when hundreds of other fake journalists did exactly the same with Theranos? When do we all say: “Enough is enough?”

This is everything wrong with American media in one article, the attempts to feign journalistic ethics after the fact while generating more clicks is sickening. People died from Theranos!

One of the most concerning aspects of the Theranos investment has been the total lack of due diligence in this process.

Putting aside the technology for a moment (it could be considered difficult to evaluate for most investors), due diligence failed on multiple counts. For example, Holmes told potential investors they had over $100 million in revenue when, in reality, they had close to $100,000 in revenue. That's a bit like trying to tell someone a SMB SaaS business with ~100 customers has the same traction as, say, Algolia. Hard to understand how this passed through the filters.