Not deserving of jail time: VC funded, Charismatic founder with a fraudulent business.
How is financial fraud not deserving of jail time?
The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
11–20 of 91 posts
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#12If it's useful for anyone, I made a list of all the ways engineering media can be manipulated (including journalists):
https://github.com/nemild/hacking-engineers
I added this example to it since it's a particularly good example of how marketing/PR uses threats of access and cherry picked demo sessions to get their favored view out.
(Contributions welcome)
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#13Someone 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…
I would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we were so easily misled.
Many people were skeptical, even right here on HN. Sometimes, their voices are drowned out by those that like to accuse the skeptical of being pessimistic. Optimism can be inherently unscientific--it can often be a manifestation of what we want rather than what is scientifically likely. To me, the battle has always been between optimism and realism.
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#14I 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…
While I agree with you, there aren't any known case of people dying from Theranos: https://www.quora.com/Did-people-die-from-relying-on-Therano...
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#15I 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…
You have to consider that if these journalists get a reputation for publishing "hit pieces", they'll stop getting access.
Does that make it right? No. But consider the journalists incentives. Also consider what happens if said journalist gets a reputation for publishing negative articles.
It's the same reason you hardly ever see articles bashing popular stocks or investments even though they are outright scams or wildly inflated (eg: bitcoin).
People say they want hard hitting tough news, but I actually think the reality shows this isn't the case.
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#16I 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…
Perhaps she didn't have the budget to pursue her questions further. Journalists don't have a blanket obligation to chase every story. They work for a living, just like the rest of us.
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#17Someone 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…
I would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we were so easily misled.
Theranos is an interesting case. Benedict Evans tweeted something interesting the other week [0], how Theranos, unlike virtually every other Silicon Valley startups, was very East Coast in style. Particularly with its board full of old, famous politicians and DC figures like Kissinger and General Mattis.
I didn't really hear much about it until the WSJ blowup, but my perception was that Theranos wasn't in whatever scene that other startups are in when they get coverage from TechCrunch, etc. I know Tim Draper was an early VC backer (his daughter was childhood friends with Elizabeth Holmes), but did other Silicon VC know much about Theranos?
I know Theranos did end up getting TechCrunch-west-coast-style coverage (I mean, before WSJ blew it up). But I'm pretty sure that its very first press splashes were with the Wall Street Journal in Sept. 2013 [1] and then the New Yorker in Dec. 2014 [2].
The WSJ article was very interesting. Not just because it's ironic, given that a WSJ investigative reporter would be taking Theranos down. But because of the setup. It was weekend interview feature assigned to a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial board member. And, unlike the New Yorker piece, was almost entirely a puff piece. Interestingly enough, though, the author describes the experience of having blood drawn via the fingerstick/nanotainer setup (i.e. the tech Theranos was aiming for).
Having your first public splash in the WSJ Weekend Magazine seems like a very East Coast thing. Amusingly, when Theranos was burning down, it was revealed that Rupert Murdoch had a $125 million stake in Theranos [3]. Which probably explains the WSJ puff piece, since Murdoch owns the WSJ.
This is all to say that Theranos's early years as a startup seems to have been much different culturally than the usual Bay Area startup. I wonder how Theranos would've fared or been different if it had operated like a highly-funded SV startup (Color, Clinkle, or any other high-funded startup that didn't die out) with the same hype and attention.
[0] https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/972501945813381122
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler
[3] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/03/24/rupert-m...
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#18That is a heartening example of good journalism. But nevertheless, there is one thing that I did not like with the way Ms Gold handled the story. She had an idea in mind of what kind of story she was going to write, and when reality did not pan out according to her plan, she just decided not to write the story.
If she had written about her experience she would have had a very important story and could have saved investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#19I 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…
You have to consider that if these journalists get a reputation for publishing "hit pieces", they'll stop getting access. Does that make it right? No. But consider the journalists incentives. Also consider what happens if said journalist gets a reputation for publishing negative articles. It's the same reason you hardly ever see articles bashing popular stocks or investments even though they are outright scams or wil…
Oh yeah the BTC mafia can get any journo fired. That's why we haven't seen anything criticizing BTC.
Wat?
Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm
#20Here's something that Theranos was deliberately misleading about: how many tests can be done on one prick's worth of blood?
Before the downfall, the website claimed that hundreds of tests could be performed with a single drop of blood. But, is that hundreds of tests on one single drop at once? Or is it one test per drop? Squeezing dozens of blood drops out of multiple pricks would not be easy or painless.
Nowhere on the website, or in any press releases, or in any interviews that I could find, did Theranos clarify this. If they could do 100+ tests on a single drop of whole blood it would be a revolution, and there would be no reason to hide it. But, if it was one 4-hour test per drop, that's actually worse than current state of the art, and they would have every reason to hide it.
This is one of the things that would have been clear if journalists had spent more time talking to lab experts, rather than Theranos' PR and laypeople in their offices.