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U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

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Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#231

Post by kwindla »

weiming wrote: post #145
atombender wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am assuming they had some of the best people in the field working on these. Makes me wonder how much the employees were aware of the company's situation, and the infeasibility of some of these goals.

Very aware, but information was strictly compartmentalized inside the company so individual employees had to figure out that things were badly wrong in different ways, depending on what their roles were and when in the lifecycle of the company they were there. Overall, though, the employee turnover was insane.

As someone who has spent a lot of time around startups, the amount of employee turnover was one of the craziest -- indicative in hindsight -- things in John Carreyrou's extremely well-reported book, "Bad Blood." Most startup boards would have looked at that level of employee turnover and realized that there was something much worse going on than a young founder without much management experience doing a poor job at hiring and retention. But the board apparently didn't get very much information about the actual operation of company, didn't push for more, and didn't question or dig into what they did get.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#232

Post by yourapostasy »

icelancer wrote: post #172
atombender wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ...they have false confidence about areas they have zero expertise in, purely because they feel they can figure it out.

The antidote to this effect: pick any object around you, and set out to make it yourself from scratch. Or just set out to make the precursors. An object as prosaic as say, a window. A lot of people who suffer from this effect dismissively wave away such a challenge, saying in more words that it's beneath them to attempt because it is so pedestrian, or of course they could do it, but they don't have the time to.

Those I know who are scary smart, are the ones who will more frequently pick up the challenge, and boy, are they fast at picking up what they need to know to meet the challenge.

Me, I just feel dumb every day, but have a heck of a lot of fun along the way. I also stick to far less lofty aims. A few months ago I had never owned a chainsaw before, and a few weeks ago I processed half a cord of firewood with a chainsaw, maul, wedge and sledgehammer into smaller chunks for my smoker. I respect the hell out of the woodsmen who walk into the mountain forest for a full day of work with nary but a milk crate of supplies and those machines, and the experience makes me appreciate just how vast an efficieny improvement they represent over hand sawing.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#233

Post by kwindla »

GW150914 wrote: post #204
atombender wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It probably helped that her mother was a congressional staffer and her father was a USAID exec.

According to the John Carreyrou book, not so much her parents, but an early and enthusiastic sponsorship from an influential Stanford professor, combined with a truly outlier ability to network with and impress powerful people. She accumulated an amazing amount of social proof, which she used to stockpile more social proof, ad infinitum.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#234

Post by abawany »

sincerely wrote: post #211
jjoonathan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>(it's a red ocean, not a blue ocean) What does this mean? Thanks :)

I understand this to mean that the blue ocean opportunity is one where competition is scarce while a red ocean opportunity is one where competition is fierce and margins are tight [1].

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested-Compe...

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#235

Post by lejrweoifhoie »

bookofjoe wrote: post #221
gamblor956 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a good idea of what they wanted to do (blood tests using very thin needles) but never successfully figured out how to accomplish that with the level of accuracy required. Most Medical professionals believe that what they wanted to do was simply impossible from a biological perspective due to the natural variations of blood content. It would have been like trying to determine traffic on a freeway by taking a…

Well stated. I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist who relied on accurate blood test results to manage major intracranial procedures. No way would I accept a finger-stick hemoglobin/hematocrit as the basis on which to decide on the need for blood transfusion. Why? Because as a medical intern I did them routinely, because I had to get a number to present at morning rounds and even our excellent STAT Lab (LAC-US…

Why is there such pressure to get a number to present at rounds if you know (and I assume the more senior staff would also know) that the finger-stick tests would likely yield inferior results?

Could you not have replied with something along the lines of "still waiting on lab tests, saw no reason to subject patient to unnecessary finger-stick test"?

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#236

Post by shostack »

mchannon wrote: post #43

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,…

Interesting timing as Preet just had part 3 of his Criminal Justice mini-series as part of his amazing Stay Tuned podcast [1]. This episode focuses on the experience of a defendant Preet's office convicted of insider trading in the Galleon Group case. He speaks to the entire process, how he felt throughout it, etc.

Highly recommended to everyone.

[1] https://player.fm/series/series-2249929/criminal-justice-par...

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#237

Post by yourapostasy »

majos wrote: post #180
trhway wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>determine traffic on a freeway by taking a brief glance through a tiny slit in a piece of paper. taking 10 such brief glances may allow for some good enough probabilistic estimate though. Upon hearing first time about Theranos in 2013 i thought that they would do something like it, i.e. statistical approach based on some data mining as they would collect large number of samples, etc. - a typical SV tech based approa…

What's so bad about the black turtleneck?

Because invariably whoever is mimicking Jobs' outerwear didn't go through the same process that Jobs did, nor develop the same philosophy that led to making that process even possible or an opportunity to spot, to arrive at that turtleneck. The turtleneck is a representation of Jobs' ideals and thinking around focus, quality, grace, craftsmanship, teamwork and many other attributes he admired. Even those people who go to the trouble to get the same kind of turtleneck from the same Japanese maker that Jobs did, I can practically guarantee they have only the vaguest clue why Jobs arrived at that turtleneck.

It is far more enlightening and satisfying for those people to develop their own sensibilities, find personal ways to express them, and through their force of will and drive, imbue their own meaning into their own habits.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#238

Post by mhneu »

Excellent news for American society.

“The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime.

Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game.

The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and budget for these numbers. So fines are not a completely effective deterrent. The book explains this and how the DOJ policy grew out of backlash to the Enron verdict.

Ps we talked about this in May, and @danso predicted criminal charges would come - and he was right. This is good news for the US DOJ. Too bad the US can’t retrospectively prosecute bankers for 2008 and claw back their size-subsidized, low risk premium profits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17123315

Edit: book review here. It’s a really good book. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/books/review/the-chick...

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#240

Post by SilasX »

nsp wrote: post #230
SilasX wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for everyone one of those I can find about a thousand HN comments telling you to push on even if you're unsure about whether you can deliver. Edit: For that reason, most of this "I told you so" sounds like hindsight bias if it comes from someone who would normally take the attitude of "fake it till you make it", "don't wait until you're sure you have a working product".

Generally that advice is not directed towards people starting medical device companies.

If you can find even one such comment that also offers a heuristic for when your self-doubt is justified and you should therefore quit, I will be surprised.
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