111–120 of 533 posts
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> It's illegal to say "I have a working antimatter drive prototype; give me a million dollars." Holmes and Balwani did the latter. It's only illegal if you don't actually have one.
In that sentence, "antimatter drive prototype" is defined to mean "a thing you couldn't possibly have," so don't be a pedant.
Basically, Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be a billionaire and restore her family's fortune. She started a medical tech company but didn't include any scientists or doctors on her board. Demos and employment were tightly controlled by NDA, and structured so as few people as possible knew about the scam. Somewhere between 1-8M (10-100%) of blood tests Theranos performed on hacked machines from other companies are suspect or outright wrong. Her company rode the "unicorn" wave at just the right time to get lots of funding and publicity, even though it has been operating since 2006.
I have been in this exact place before. For the two of them, this day will be just about the worst of their lives. This is ordinarily when hard-core criminals are taken into custody. If their experience was like mine, they had to show up in front of a magistrate with their lawyers, plead not guilty, then go to a dungeon for about 30 minutes while they get handcuffed, fingerprinted, mugshotted, and DNA-swabbed. Then,…
Can you expand on your experience with indictments like this? It rings true to me that, in general, the average person would have much more compassion for 'bad' people in 'bad' situations if they could live a day in their shoes.
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Holmes and Balwani had some experience with microfluidics (IIRC), which is certainly sufficient chemical background to give them a credible belief that they could do what they wanted to do (run blood tests on smaller sample sizes). The ultimate problem with their goal is that when you do a finger prick, a large fraction of the sample is not blood but interstitial fluid and skin layers, which makes the results noisy a…
Holmes dropped out after 3 semesters. As far as I can tell she took one intro chemical engineering class. Not what I would call experience with microfluidics.
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After the company launched professionals in the medical testing said it was impossible. I believe it was even posted to HN. They stated it was impossible to get the results they would get from the amount of blood given.
Well, to be fair, experts in the field called the original iPhone impossible. Turns out in this case they were right.
I remember a ton of doubt, after launch, that it would be successful, but those people weren't really experts.
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> From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought "Doing xxx would be super useful" but didn't have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. So, just like most VC favorite startups?
I've been involved with many vc funded startups and have never encountered a situation where nobody knows how to achieve the core product vision. Nobody knows how to achieve profitability...sure.
Yeah, I was referring to profitability, which, for a for profit company (and one that wants to attract investments), should be part of the core vision, and without which there's no product (just something akin to "selling" $10 bills for $5).
That said, wouldn't all the "pivoting" companies prove that nobody there knew how to achieve their core product vision?
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This is ordinarily when hard-core criminals are taken into custody. It's basically like being free, but you have to stay out of trouble and report all contacts with law enforcement. There's a small chance they'll have to go this route anyway, since the government can snatch the money They're not going to have to serve consecutive 20-year terms for what they're accused of Holmes will be offered, I'm guessing, about 6-…
The most recent true crime documentary series on Netflix, 'The Staircase,' talks about this. The defendant, a wealthy individual, ends up paying around $750,000 out of pocket for his defense. He asks the question what this would have looked like if he was poor.
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For reference, here's the very first HN submission about Theranos in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349
Interesting. Skinming through the comments, very little criticism, everyone in awe. Only way down there is someone stating how hard it is to get regulatory approval. I guess that‘s HN still in full fanboy mode, before all those startups started to display their dark sides.
I find the self-driving, or near-future Mars colony fanboyism here a little harder to take, because a much larger segment of the user base should know better.
Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought "Doing xxx would be super useful" but didn't have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It's like me saying "An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration" and starting to collect mone…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For reference, here's the very first HN submission about Theranos in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349
Interesting. Skinming through the comments, very little criticism, everyone in awe. Only way down there is someone stating how hard it is to get regulatory approval. I guess that‘s HN still in full fanboy mode, before all those startups started to display their dark sides.