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…
My suspicion: Holmes heard about microfluidics at school, misjudged its position in the hype cycle (it's a red ocean, not a blue ocean), sold herself as an expert, raised money from people who didn't know better, and let the success get to her head because at some point she would have hired actual experts and they would probably have tried to steer her away from the known-hard problem she was trying to tackle and tow…
> At least Holmes “victims” AFAIK were mostly rich folks why would that make it any better?
I think the argument is that stealing $1 million from a billionaire could be considered ethically less bad than stealing $10,000 from someone who is $50,000 in debt due to medical bills. The second theft will have much more impact on the victim than the first.
> The second theft will have much more impact on the victim than the first.
That hardly makes it OK though, Are you saying that the first case doesn't deserve the same punishment as the second?
She certainly is not a good person but a lot of blame should be put on the VCs and board members. They could have figured things out if they had bothered to look.
That's true, but Elizabeth owned more than 90% of the voting shares in the company. The board was basically a formality because they had no power to make decisions whatsoever.
But that's also a big part of the board's fault here! They aided and abetted that. I'm reading through _Bad Blood_ (coincidentally, before the indictment was announced), and one of Carreyou's running themes is how Holmes acquired all those shares: she wasn't the Theranos founder, she was a co-founder, in essence. The other guy (Shaunak Roy) left early on. The board approved selling his stake to her at a heavily discounted price which made one of the directors unhappy and he tried to buy a fraction as he was contractually allowed to do, so they told to resign and threatened to sue him. She also tried to get a block of stock alloted to a nonprofit foundation (controlled by her, of course). Then, as employees turned over, they would regularly seek pretext to clawback all their options or shares in any way they could, like when they fired the financial officer for getting upset about faked demos, and discovered after firing him that he happened to have browsed some porn on his work laptop, which provided the necessary excuse. At one point in March 2008, the board actually decided to fire her, but she spent two hours talking them out of it. Some point after that, they passed the even horizon... That Holmes ended up with so much voting control was no accident.
This interview with John Carreyrou [1], the Wall Street Journal journalist who is largely responsible for exposing Theranos, goes into a lot of detail. It's long, so if you want a shorter answer, jump to the question "What technology did Theranos actually develop?": Basically there were three iterations of the technology. The first one used microfluidics, which are basically the repurposing of the micro-fabrication t…
>> The short answer is her Jobs-like "reality distortion field" -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked. This confuses a lot of people (not saying you are one of them), but this is really common in intelligent non-experts. People vastly overestimate how intelligent they are when they place value on their intelligence; in other words, they like thinking they are smart. When t…
That's why, when you read the memoirs of conmen, they always say educated, intelligent people are the easiest to rip off.
There’s a lot of research money in microfluidics. It has huge potential to revolutionise an awful lot of the tedious time consuming laboratory work in health care.
Instead of painstakingly pipetting samples into well plates all day, trains of thousands of droplets can be fed into the microfluidic conveyor belt and processed accurately and automatically.
It can work very well. I once worked in a startup that was able to achieve exactly this however it was enormously challenging. The core technology was developed in a university and eventually spun out. Then it grew into something much larger as fully functional systems were developed for customers. The cost was enormous and the reliability not particularly fantastic but the customer was thrilled with the potential. Eventually we were bought out and while I took another path colleagues formed another hugely successful startup.
There are many many similar stories just like this in this space.
Holmes it seems was a highly effective pretender wanting to leapfrog the research she would have glimpsed while at Stanford by promising something that could do it all. So the money rolled in and she no doubt hired good technical people but instead of building something, anything worthwhile she doubled down on the lie.
> At least Holmes “victims” AFAIK were mostly rich folks why would that make it any better?
I think the argument is that stealing $1 million from a billionaire could be considered ethically less bad than stealing $10,000 from someone who is $50,000 in debt due to medical bills. The second theft will have much more impact on the victim than the first.
But it's still irrelevant because his crimes were also against rich investors, and not at all related to raising the price of medication (which is 100% legal).
> The short answer is her Jobs-like "reality distortion field" -- she was exceedingly good at convincing ... Considering this and the lack of substance behind her claims, I would personally bet money that she is a clinical psychopath. The most disturbing thing I have ever observed about human beings is our tendency to follow psychopaths. Psychopaths seem to have this gravity around them and people just fall into line…
Psychopaths are parasites - one could make the argument that most of human culture, including our marriage traditions, religions, moral codes of conduct, sense of humor, and even fashion, are evolutionary attempts to thwart them.
How would that argument go? Is it just that setting up social rules makes it easy to spot when people don’t follow them?
Because many people smoke weed, but only some are jailed for it. THAT'S why whataboutism is important. Enforcement bias.
Because not everyone who smokes is caught, and some plead guilty to get an easy sentence, laws differ based on location, and case circumstance is not always the same? This is how the system works.