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Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

arstechnica.com

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Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#91

Post by spaceflunky »

munificent wrote: post #74
photochemsyn wrote: post #29

The crazy thing about Theranos is that so many people with experience in microfluidics (developed mainly for DNA sequencing although there are other uses) knew that their claims were impossible, technologically speaking. Working with such small volumes to obtain quantitive estimates of blood chemistry is so implausible, as you are introducing uncontrollable variability - micro-evaporation, even tissue localization is…

> What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird. The thing is, the primary goal of an investor is not to invest in companies that are honest and actually do what they claim. The goal is to invest in a company that reaches a valuation high enough to let them recoup their investment at a profit. If that valuation happens throug…

This sounds plausible, but as someone else said, has this ever been proven to be the case? What are some good examples?

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#92

Post by carabiner »

tushar-r wrote: post #62

I recommend the "Bad Blood: The Final Chapter" podcast by John Carreyrou. He's the journalist who broke the story and the podcast goes into some detail about the history and also talks about what is going on now.

I recommend the video of her dancing to "Can't Touch This": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrT0jKOhnD4

and the video of her using her real, non-deep, voice: https://youtu.be/PjnsYz-xdOI?t=55

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#93

Post by edot »

avalys wrote: post #83
munificent wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird. The thing is, the primary goal of an investor is not to invest in companies that are honest and actually do what they claim. The goal is to invest in a company that reaches a valuation high enough to let them recoup their investment at a profit. If that valuation happens throug…

Can you provide any examples of a high-profile company, ultimately shown to be dishonest, where the early investors were able to “cash out” before this dishonesty became known?

WeWork and Nikola come to mind. Robinhood depending on if you consider purporting yourself to be “stealing from the rich, giving to the poor - Robinhood”, but you actually take orders from Citadel to be fraud. I think a lot of recent IPOs will turn out to be fraud-lite, in which it is shown over the next decade that these companies were pump and dumps that never actually do anything. They look just good enough to garner investment at IPO for initial investors to cash out.

Most any company with ML or AI in their branding, running stupid amounts of CNBC ads and repeating their AI name 30 times during the ad.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#94

Post by olalonde »

munificent wrote: post #74
photochemsyn wrote: post #29

The crazy thing about Theranos is that so many people with experience in microfluidics (developed mainly for DNA sequencing although there are other uses) knew that their claims were impossible, technologically speaking. Working with such small volumes to obtain quantitive estimates of blood chemistry is so implausible, as you are introducing uncontrollable variability - micro-evaporation, even tissue localization is…

> What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird. The thing is, the primary goal of an investor is not to invest in companies that are honest and actually do what they claim. The goal is to invest in a company that reaches a valuation high enough to let them recoup their investment at a profit. If that valuation happens throug…

But in the end, it's such a gamble that I'm skeptical any of the investors knew or suspected fraud when they initially invested. I've heard of exits for companies without a business model or revenue, but how many companies have an exit event (e.g. get acquired or IPO) with no product at all?

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#95

Post by InitialLastName »

robertlagrant wrote: post #79
nitrogen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies (at least one anyway) that make rapid testing panels that include COVID, plus a dozen plus other respiratory diseases, in a single test that is profitable at $200 and costs $20 in consumables. I heard that they disabled all the other tests so they could get approved as a COVID test sooner, or something like that. The problem is you can't ask for such a test as a patient, hospital billing departmen…

If the regulators get out of the way it would be great to make these available direct to consumer with an app companion, and the consumer can share the results with their physician.

Something tells me that if the regulators got out of the way, we would have dozens of Covid tests available, half of which would work better than a coin toss.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#96

Post by gruez »

munificent wrote: post #74
photochemsyn wrote: post #29

The crazy thing about Theranos is that so many people with experience in microfluidics (developed mainly for DNA sequencing although there are other uses) knew that their claims were impossible, technologically speaking. Working with such small volumes to obtain quantitive estimates of blood chemistry is so implausible, as you are introducing uncontrollable variability - micro-evaporation, even tissue localization is…

> What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird. The thing is, the primary goal of an investor is not to invest in companies that are honest and actually do what they claim. The goal is to invest in a company that reaches a valuation high enough to let them recoup their investment at a profit. If that valuation happens throug…

>The goal is to invest in a company that reaches a valuation high enough to let them recoup their investment at a profit.

Alternatviely, they want to invest in insane companies/founders on the off chance that they actually make it.

>But another theory is: No, those investors really want to be lied to. Those investors are holding a competition of the form “who can sound the most excited and persuasive and crazy when they lie to us,” and they give their money to the winner. They wouldn’t put it quite that way. But what the investors want is a fantasist, a wild-eyed dreamer, a visionary who sees the world not as it is but as it could be. They want someone who looks at $1 million in revenue and sees $10 million. They want someone who looks at some blueprints for an electric truck and sees hundreds rolling off the production line. They want someone who looks at a finger-prick blood test that doesn’t work and sees one that does work. They want someone who believes in something that nobody else believes in, an out-of-consensus visionary who wants to change the world. Obviously obviously obviously they would prefer it if this person’s wild belief comes true, if she succeeds in changing the world. But the first step is to back founders with crazy ideas. And then if one of them works out, that pays for 10 that are just crazy.

>This theory is also well supported! Lots of venture capitalists will say it out loud! But also, like, man, look at the entire history of SoftBank Group Corp. Look at how SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son met WeWork’s Adam Neumann, and Neumann pitched him on some vision of office-space-rental changing the world, and Son gave Neumann $3.1 billion. And, famously, “Mr. Neumann has told others that Mr. Son appreciated how he was crazy—but thought that he needed to be crazier.” You don’t say that and then turn around and check every line of the financial projections for exaggerations and unjustified assumptions. If you invest in startups by (1) meeting crazy people and (2) telling them to be crazier, your main investment criterion is not scrupulous accuracy.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-31/theran...

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#97

Post by hijinks »

say what you want about her but if I knew nothing about this company and someone told me the CEO got charged with a crime and she got pregnant after charges were filed.

I'd almost think she is guilty and trying to get a lesser sentence because of having a kid.

As a sane person the last thing I want to do is bring a child into a world where a parent could be in jail for 20 years.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#98

Post by smart_creature »

misiti3780 wrote: post #44
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #3

The problem is that none of this will work against her defense, that she was not of sane state of mind at the time.

Any lawyers here - is the general consensus that she is going to jail for a long time?

Not a lawyer or legal expert. But American juries are generally unpredictable and overwhelming evidence doesn't always decide cases (look at the O.J Simpson trial or more recently Bill Cosby or the first Epstein case). I think the general consensus is that there's a lot of damning evidence against her and there's a good chance she'll be found guilty. But a lot depends on how effective her defense is in swaying the jury and a lot of technicalities. Plus there's the baby/new mother factor that might influence her sentencing if not the jury verdict

Re: Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors

#100

Post by foobarian »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #56
krageon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how they didn't do due diligence "due diligence" processes are in practice a lot less stringent or rigorous than an outsider would expect them to be given the amount of money involved. Companies get bought based on glorified sales pitches and nobody looks too hard at what they're buying is the unfortunate truth of the matter. Investors are no better.

I think it probably depends. When we sold our company they spent months digging into numbers. And they kept asking for new types of metrics that we had to figure out ways to derive from data that wasn't necessarily designed to measure those metrics.

If you had sat next to Bill Clinton on a TED talk stage and had a former Secretary of State and his friends on your board I bet things would have gone more smoothly for you.
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