111–113 of 113 posts
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Farming, landscaping, gardening.
People don't use dirt for that - they use compost, soil, earth, sand, gravel, things like that.
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He just had the wrong scam. Buy high grade dirt, return low grade dirt. Buy high purity reagents, ...
I mean you could actually do that. They sell bags of dirt with gold flakes in it for kids to practice panning for gold, so you could buy that and take the gold out and return it.
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There was always a chance that they make it. Every startup is just a nice wish, maybe a few good ideas, plus hopefully lucky and competent folks mixed with some money. The idea is great, everyone wants a lab on a chip. MEMS is coming, etc. Someone will eventually make it.
There was never a chance that Theranos would make it, because, per POSIWID, the purpose of Theranos was not to make it. Anybody who talked like you did was fooling themselves because they liked the paychecks. Just like the Amazon thief.
I'm not aware we have definitive evidence that Theranos was intended to be a scam all along. So if it wasn't then it was intended to make it, no? Naturally, you can say that there was a tipping point, when they started to do the scam more than anything else. But that's not exactly the fault of the investment model, nor the fact that there's a big push to get microscale labs, because currently there's no consensus about it's impossibility (quite the contrary, though it's obviously quite a big challenge), so it makes sens to invest into a company that tries to do it.
Now, being inside and compromising one's integrity for paychecks is a different matter. On the one hand there are people in hard situations that change their thinking - but it's unlikely that qualified people were stuck there against their better wishes. On the other hand trying to get investors to choose you when every other company is also doing their very best to convince the investors leads to the usual fucked up borderline-lies / overpromises / demos (see also ghettotesting, see also MagicLeap.
I'm not trying to advocate somehow "overlooking" Theranos' misdeeds. I'm simply stating the obvious, that there was a chance. (After all, they got the money, the people, the vision. I also don't condone how they got the money, even if, as I mentioned, it's hard to get money while honesty is not exactly rewarded.)