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Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

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Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#261

A $100 million wire transfer. Is this literally how people invest in start-ups, just wiring huge sums of money to someone they do not know , on a promise/hope. that just seems so reckless on so many levels

I'm honestly very curious as to what better ways you have in mind for transferring large sums of money.

big difference between wiring $100 million to Vanguard vs. $100 million to fund a blood testing start-up

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#262
post #155

What always amazed me is they had nothing… nothing that could do the thing they claimed. To the point they used competitors machines to produce results. Pretty amazing.

And a lot of people believed it. Pouring billions into something into empty promises.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#263
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you check if something is authentic? I can have a hundred Theranos-branded t-shirts, mugs, pens, diaries, socks and whatever else you want made and shipped to me in like 2 weeks.

That's your job. Sellers are motivated to provide evidence. "I just have it lol" is not going to command much premium over your costs.

Yes that's hilarious but you're missing the interesting part. How does the seller provide convincing evidence that withstands scrutiny such that a diligent buyer would be satisfied that it is authentic then.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are having success with her ideas today Citation needed. The whole concept has a critical flaw, as pointed out by her engineering staff and medical advisors: blood tests require a certain minimum volume of blood to work, and that's inescapable because blood components are discrete, not continuous. For example, a drop of blood is about .05mL, or about 1/20th of a milliliter. A common testing sample size in a…

No need to poll 100 million. 20,000 is pretty accurate.

OK, sure, but that doesn't change my point. You could run all of someone's blood through a scanner and then back into them to get a complete view, but a lab only samples a few mL of it.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#265

This will sound weird but I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud. While we're a rare breed there are others like me out there. Still, even with this oddly specific marketplace being small, let me tell you, the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you're curious). Wish I had gone big on this one earlier, because I have a fe…

Great timing! Not sure if this qualifies, but I just listed a copy of the Oct 2015 Inc Magazine where she was touted as "The Next Steve Jobs". Was a subscriber back in the day. https://ebay.com/itm/255312572520

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#266

It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…

> It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results.

my thoughts exactly. i'm woefully underread on the whole situation but something is weird and different about it.

one thing that does jump to mind is that the investor list and board composition isn't what i'm used to seeing for stem ventures. i can imagine that perhaps they're less forgiving of failure and were operating with more blind trust in company leadership on stem/technology matters.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#267
post #140

Guilty of taking a billion+ dollars from rich and influential people who couldn't bother to do the bare minimum due diligence into their investments due to greed and FOMO. Not guilty of endangering thousands of lives by running fraudulent and inaccurate tests under sub-par lab conditions. Our justice system is such a farce.

As another comment said, patients' tests were apparently run on regular machines, so the patients weren't harmed.

They also were using samples much smaller than demanded by the specs on the regular machines resulting in inaccurate results.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#268
post #140

Guilty of taking a billion+ dollars from rich and influential people who couldn't bother to do the bare minimum due diligence into their investments due to greed and FOMO. Not guilty of endangering thousands of lives by running fraudulent and inaccurate tests under sub-par lab conditions. Our justice system is such a farce.

[deleted]

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our justice system works well. You are confusing your own emotional feelings for what you would have liked to see with the reality of what was able to be proven without reasonable doubt. The type of populist mob justice you allude* to is not just at all. *(Fixed grammar error specified below)

If “proven beyond a reasonable doubt” keeps leading to bad outcomes, maybe that’s not the right standard.

That is a dangerous precedent to remove. Certainly we don't want to replace judges and juries with Twitter polls.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are having success with her ideas today Citation needed. The whole concept has a critical flaw, as pointed out by her engineering staff and medical advisors: blood tests require a certain minimum volume of blood to work, and that's inescapable because blood components are discrete, not continuous. For example, a drop of blood is about .05mL, or about 1/20th of a milliliter. A common testing sample size in a…

No need to poll 100 million. 20,000 is pretty accurate.

Usually your sample size would be a good indicator of the accuracy of your poll/test/experiment.

Of course, like everything it could be biased by the used methodology.

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