111–120 of 264 posts
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I think you could have just stopped at rich. Money helps anyone going through the US Justice system, regardless of color.
The data backs it up [1]. Sentencing disparities based on race in the United States are undeniable. [1]: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr...
The problem is that none of this will work against her defense, that she was not of sane state of mind at the time.
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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 ju…
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> 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?
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…
You have confused gullibility with willful ignorance.
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.
The famous picture of her taking reporters into the machine shop is one example. “Touring the machine shop” is an old trick when you want to waste time and not show anyone anything. Technically naive people don’t realize that modern machines each have a computer attached to them, and there is little proprietary in most shops.
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> 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?
Depends on your definition of "no product at all" but it happens all the time in biotech.
Most biotech companies don't have a product until FDA approval because they can't legally sell anything (unless it's a product other biotech/pharma companies can use for their own R&D).
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> 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?
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The problem is that successful startups often start out claiming that which is impossible. Uber was impossible, because it was illegal. Amazon was impossible, as you couldn't pack and ship stuff that cheaply. Personal computers were at one point considered ludicrous.
This is the sort of pseudo-tech BS that she fed everyone. She had Jobs envy and thought his approach would work everywhere. All those examples (and all of yours) are from computers. Blood tests are different from computers. You cannot assume that, just because great things happened with computers, the same things can happen in all walks of life.
Jobs had follow-through, he had real products that often lived up to his pitching. His salesmanship was merely half the equation. Holmes only had a poor clone of that salesmanship, with none of the product. Had Theranos had real products, the approach she used in trying to quasi copy the Jobs image/presentation, would have served the promotional purpose effectively, as the media loved it.