Elizabeth Holmes urged employees to hide Theranos’ lab equipment from inspectors • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 5:35 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #48

MattGaiser wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SV “fake it ‘till you make it” culture. Right now Tesla is delivering “full self driving” cars that require a human driver at all times. Experts have said that it’s not possible using cameras alone, without LiDAR. Oversell and underdeliver. Fraud works great until it doesn’t.

I commented this in a different story, but I hate that the media (and now apparently HN) is conflating outright fraud with "fake it until you make it" culture. They are totally different, and the line between them is actually bright and clear, not some "gray, fuzzy" distinction some people propose.

That clear line is simply "are you telling a material lie about the present?" In Theranos' case, there were numerous instances when Holmes lied about the current capabilities of her company and its tech that she knew to be false. That is very different from making overly optimistic assessments about future capabilities.

Would love to hear any stories about a company that "faked it" when talking about their present day capabilities but we're able to "make it" before the fraud was discovered.

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

#252

Post by HWR_14 » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:12 AM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #214

mrkramer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeWork and Theranos were selling hype no real solution or service. They seem like companies from dot com bubble era, I thought tech investors got smarter but they are still as stupid as they were 30 years ago.

WeWork is different than Theroanos. People actually rented WeWork properties and got a valuable service. The problem was more or less shenanigans on the Exec. side, and unsustainable financial situation. In that case, the 'consumers' actually end up ahead, with a cheaper services than otherwise, then investors lost.

>WeWork is different than Theroanos.

From my understanding, WeWork was more of a working business that was overvalued and had a lot of self-dealing with the CEO (which I would characterize as embezzling, but may not legally have been.) Theranos invested their money in trying to make an impossible product, lying and failing at it the whole time.

But I could be wrong, sensationalist news headlines and such.

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

#253

Post by jollybean » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:15 AM UTC

HWR_14 wrote: post #252

jollybean wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeWork is different than Theroanos. People actually rented WeWork properties and got a valuable service. The problem was more or less shenanigans on the Exec. side, and unsustainable financial situation. In that case, the 'consumers' actually end up ahead, with a cheaper services than otherwise, then investors lost.

>WeWork is different than Theroanos. From my understanding, WeWork was more of a working business that was overvalued and had a lot of self-dealing with the CEO (which I would characterize as embezzling, but may not legally have been.) Theranos invested their money in trying to make an impossible product, lying and failing at it the whole time. But I could be wrong, sensationalist news headlines and such.

I believe this is correct.

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

#254

Post by kube-system » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 12:53 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #251

kube-system wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the SV “fake it ‘till you make it” culture. Right now Tesla is delivering “full self driving” cars that require a human driver at all times. Experts have said that it’s not possible using cameras alone, without LiDAR. Oversell and underdeliver. Fraud works great until it doesn’t.

I commented this in a different story, but I hate that the media (and now apparently HN) is conflating outright fraud with "fake it until you make it" culture. They are totally different, and the line between them is actually bright and clear, not some "gray, fuzzy" distinction some people propose. That clear line is simply "are you telling a material lie about the present?" In Theranos' case, there were numerous ins…

I agree that there is a difference. But, I do think that the line is not so clear in more than a few instances, and that the business culture in SV has normalized this.

The use of exaggeration, vague, misleading and/or conflicting statements, labels, or depictions can really blur that line.

Determining whether a statement is a lie is not always a straightforward and undisputed process.

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

#255

Post by shadilay » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

hart_russell wrote: post #23

encryptluks2 wrote: post #2

If anyone truly deserves a very long prison sentence it is Elizabeth Holmes. I think we're about to confirm what we've always known and that has been apparent since the start of this case. That rich white people, even if they got their money by taking advantage of others are pretty immune from harsh punishment in the criminal justice system.

I think you could have just stopped at rich. Money helps anyone going through the US Justice system, regardless of color.

R Kelly did some horrific things and it took 20 years to stop him. Money helps regardless of color. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40635526

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

#256

Post by rsynnott » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 8:07 PM UTC

jacinabox wrote: post #185

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…

Why did Theranos insist on using 'a single drop of blood.' Why not be able to run a normal blood sample through an unprecedentedly compact form factor testing unit. Wouldn't that be good enough?

(a) Holmes seemed to be obsessed with this due to a personal phobia of venous blood draws (personal quirks are a surprisingly common driver of weird decisions in Silicon Valley-ish companies; the fact that small low capacity vehicles are used in Boring Company tunnels seems to be down to Musk's phobia of public transport, for instance).

(b) The original idea was that a patient would have one of these things _in their house_; a patient can't reasonably do a venous blood draw on themselves, but they can do a finger prick. There are some real working tests that work this way for this reason; HIV self-tests are normally finger-prick tests, say.

But by the time they'd repositioned as "the machines are in a pharmacy, or maybe a central lab", yeah, it made no sense anymore.

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

#257

Post by usehackernews » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

supperburg wrote: post #201

junon wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that Uber is not profitable is a myth isn’t it? I worked on the long-term forecasting team while I was there. At least 5-6 years ago, Uber was very, very far from profitable. I can't imagine much has changed enough for it to make them profitable. Maybe with the new CEO things changed but I'm doubtful. That company had a slew of issues.

Right, but would they be profitable if you took out the advertising and expansion costs? From the document I saw, yes. Can you please explain where are these enormous costs that are necessary to run the business? Is it SV salaries? Are their servers costing too much money? It doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying that the concept of dispatching taxis with a computer is not capable of being profitable. It simply isn’t…

Uber pays drivers a substantial amount through bonuses which are categorized as marketing and advertising. Your claim that they could operate without marketing is saying Uber could operate without drivers. Without bonuses, they would lose a significant amount of driver supply, without driver supply, the rider experience is slow, when it’s slow - they lose customers.

Advertising is a core business expense for them needed to run the business.

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

#258

Post by AlbertCory » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #57

A free way [1] to track the trial, at least some of it. I'm hoping to go to at least one day of it. I'm sure the actual court reporter trial transcripts will be public at some point (does anyone know?), but they're not in [1]. If you are drawing comparisons between her and the rest of Silicon Valley, you are missing one rather important fact: hard sciences are hard. We have it easy in computers. There are government…

Thought you'd find this [1] interesting. Carreyrou is a journalist who is part of the story, in fact did heroic work breaking the story. At one time at a Theranos company meeting, they chanted "F** you, Carreyrou!"

I'd love to hear him testify about how they pulled out all the stops to try and suppress his WSJ stories.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.32...

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

#259

Post by elkos » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 9:39 AM UTC

michael1999 wrote: post #132

avalys wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Groupon.

I remember the company/service but I'm unfamiliar with the unfolding of the company.

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

#260

Post by elkos » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 10:01 AM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #166

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. What's interesting with Theranos is the composition of it's board... It's exclusively older men with little to no expertise on the subject matter (Channing Robertson might be an exception to the latter rule). Not a single rising female Silicon Valley executive or professor was…

> I mean, we all know how Marissa Mayer got the job...

Honestly, how? Charm is one thing but some people might consider other more physical means. I'm not familiar with any story but I never payed much attention to Marissa Mayer's carrier to be frank.