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Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

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51–60 of 88 posts

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#51
post #2

> “Why is [Theranos] worthless? It’s worthless because this writer was like a badger going after her, like a hyena going after her, and then it became a bigger and bigger thing,” he said. “She got bullied into submission,” Draper explained, adding that if it weren’t for Carreyrou and other opponents, Theranos “could have been one of these big, huge winners.” And we would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for…

The Scooby Doo defense.

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#52
post #17

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/early-theranos-investor-tim-... As the founder of a healthcare company, Tim's statement here is the one that I found the most dangerous "If all she had to do was say this was a beta or whatever and all of us would be using it, would be loving it." When it comes to people's health you must have concrete evidence that your product works and is robust. B…

> Blood testing is not a field where people accept mistakes.

I don't think this is true. There are blood tests that don't always work. Lyme disease is one that is not accurately detected.

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#54
Tim Draper probably understands, privately, that Theranos is an unrecoverable loss. Privately, he has probably learned a lesson about doing better due diligence going forward. Publicly, he is doing what he thinks will benefit him the most: he is signalling to all prospective future investments, that, "If you take my money, I will stand by you through thick and thin." Some future founders might be turned off by this, but some will probably see it as invaluable.

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#55
post #2

> “Why is [Theranos] worthless? It’s worthless because this writer was like a badger going after her, like a hyena going after her, and then it became a bigger and bigger thing,” he said. “She got bullied into submission,” Draper explained, adding that if it weren’t for Carreyrou and other opponents, Theranos “could have been one of these big, huge winners.” And we would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for…

Remind me of my distant friend. He was constantly drink driving and eventually got caught and lost his drivers license. He couldnt get to work on time with buses constantly late, so they fired him. 5 years later he still blames the cop for being fired.

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#56
post #17

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/early-theranos-investor-tim-... As the founder of a healthcare company, Tim's statement here is the one that I found the most dangerous "If all she had to do was say this was a beta or whatever and all of us would be using it, would be loving it." When it comes to people's health you must have concrete evidence that your product works and is robust. B…

Ridiculous - you're not allowed to release a "beta" in medicine. (I don't use "healthcare" because it doesn't carry any connotation of standards or responsibility.) I guess this guy is from a universe where everything is software, and a dead human being can be rebooted?

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#57
post #18

The Drapers are weird. I guess the family has been rich for a long time and they've made a lot of investments, but I don't really see a clear track record of being particularly good at picking winners. I was at a Bitcoin trade show a few years ago and his son was there pumping his Bitcoin specific venture fund. Quite honestly, he struck me as an enormous asshole. He was on a few panels with people who actually knew h…

According to the BBC, Russia has been funding and promoting the California secessionists, among other similar movements. See: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41853131 Edit: This is a direct explanation of why "just 'cause" is misleading or incomplete, based on public information from mainstream media.

I don't know anything about this or about who the Draper family is or what they're involved in, but my reading of your parent's comment was that they were talking about splitting California into multiple states ("want to split California up"), not about California seceding from the union. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but these seem like very different things to me. One of them is about re-drawing very arbitrary lines, which are based on no clear principle I can suss out (maybe the strongest being that 50 is a nice round number?). The other violates a very clear principle ("Our Union shall not sever!") that the country's most widely respected leader fought a civil war to protect.

I personally have no strongly developed opinions on splitting states up; I'm interested in arguments in either direction. But the idea of splitting up a state with (at least) two portions that are quite far apart geographically and culturally doesn't seem ridiculous on its face. But I'm also not sure where that argument ends. I'm from another state - Illinois - that spans quite a few latitudes and has at least two quite different cultural zones. When I lived there, it always seemed to me that you could quite reasonably split the state into three: Chicagoland, the agricultural midlands, and the south. So if it makes sense to split up California, does it make sense for Illinois too? Are there other states that the same argument applies to? I dunno, I'm curious about it. But of course it is a non-starter politically, so it's just an intellectual exercise.

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#59
post #17

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/early-theranos-investor-tim-... As the founder of a healthcare company, Tim's statement here is the one that I found the most dangerous "If all she had to do was say this was a beta or whatever and all of us would be using it, would be loving it." When it comes to people's health you must have concrete evidence that your product works and is robust. B…

> Blood testing is not a field where people accept mistakes. I don't think this is true. There are blood tests that don't always work. Lyme disease is one that is not accurately detected.

Most blood tests are imperfect by nature (specificity and sensitivity are almost never equal to one). No need to point out a specific and very questionable example.

Re: Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

#60
post #38

So I haven’t really followed this, but were tests performed that directly compared Theranos blood testing vs existing blood testing? What were the results?

The Theranos folks discussed some results using the mini-lab vs Siemens equipment during a presentation to the AACC: [1]

My understanding is that their ability to perform some tests, and to do it accurately was real, such as their FDA approved herpes test. However the number of tests they could perform on a single sample (primarily due to volume?) was drastically lower than they claimed. They were also found to be diluting samples, and had poor lab practices in a number of instances: [2] [3] [4]

When dealing with people's health there is no room for inaccuracy as other's lives and well-fare potentially hang in the balance.

[1]: https://youtu.be/n6JRG733ReQ [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/28/study... [3]: http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-study-compares-blood... [4]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-devices-often-failed-a...

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