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Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

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Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#111

Post by gone35 »

BiologyRules wrote: post #32

I interviewed at Theranos a year ago, and found the employees to be smart and dedicated. However, the company was the most secretive I've interviewed at and the employees complained about being overworked. The fact the founder sold C++ compilers to Chinese universities when g++ is open-source sounded odd. But I still had hope in them even after they passed on me -- a Silicon Valley company actually making a differenc…

[...] a Silicon Valley company actually making a difference in the people's health.

Except, in many ways, it isn't: 'disrupting' lab blood testing[1] is far from a public health priority --just because the founder is scared of blood and thinks phlebotomies are "barbaric" doesn't make it so.

[1] As opposed to point-of-care (viz, no-lab) testing, which is a genuine public health priority: i.e. portable glucose monitors, field tests for malaria, and so on.

Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#112

Post by toomuchtodo »

adharmad wrote: post #109
untilHellbanned wrote: post #102

Dead unicorn list 1. Homejoy 2. Theranos 3. ....

There should be a dying unicorn list too..

I'm working on rolling out fuckedunicorns.com (a nod to pud's fuckedcompany.com).

As someone who lived through the first boom bust, very interested to watch things play out again.

Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#113

Post by PhantomGremlin »

erobbins wrote: post #28
mmahemoff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Projections up and to the right.

"this graph looks like a hockey stick, how's $50 million?"

Some cliches never go out of style. I was at a startup in the mid 1980s and the words "hockey stick" came out of the CEO's mouth quite often.

Edit: BTW that mythical hockey stick quarter never did arrive.

Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#114

Post by PhantomGremlin »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #25

I feel like we've seen this before. Young startup, visionary founder, boat loads of money, then after lots of money burned, outright lies, false claims, or at the very least vaporware.

These things come and go in cycles. Back in 1980 there was a startup that raised $230 million. That was, as they say, "real money" back in the day.

Great pedigree. But, eventually, poof, gone. Nothing much to show for all the investment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_Systems

Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#115

Post by slr555 »

I seem to detect the familiar odor of negative PR wafting over this entire series of articles. The New Yorker has one of the most famously rigorous fact checking policies in journalism. Things rarely ever slip past them. Companies like Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp have immense amounts of revenue to lose to a new, more efficient entrant like Theranos. No surprise they would go negative to undermine a new competitor. As far as the company ferreting out journalistic mistakes and correcting them, the onus should be on the media to get the story right.

Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#116

Post by exegesis »

slr555 wrote: post #115

I seem to detect the familiar odor of negative PR wafting over this entire series of articles. The New Yorker has one of the most famously rigorous fact checking policies in journalism. Things rarely ever slip past them. Companies like Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp have immense amounts of revenue to lose to a new, more efficient entrant like Theranos. No surprise they would go negative to undermine a new competitor.…

Yes, agreed, except that micro-assay isn't new, and is actually used on newborns all the time. It isn't used in adults because it tends to be wildly inaccurate/variable, even under the best of circumstances.

Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#117

Post by saidajigumi »

tptacek wrote: post #52
saidajigumi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, virtually any C++ compiler was a big pile of sharp edges back then, by comparison to just a few years later. Especially if you dared to use it for embedded work, not so much due to the "embedded" part but just because the embedded suite compilers were just so much further behind the C++ curve.

Yep, but the commercial compilers generally had better STLs (particularly for debugging), debuggers that could properly mangle/demangle symbols, and precompiled headers --- in addition to different sets of C++ features that did or didn't work properly.

Largely true, but I recall actually isolating one chunk of code and compiling with g++ just to get halfway sane error messaging around a (IIRC) template-related error. I.e. you could do worse. The primary compiler for that code was the circa-2001 ARM tools suite. I wrote a few novels worth of feedback and bug reporting to them...

Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from

#119

Post by Overtonwindow »

learc83 wrote: post #66
Overtonwindow wrote: post #25

I feel like we've seen this before. Young startup, visionary founder, boat loads of money, then after lots of money burned, outright lies, false claims, or at the very least vaporware.

The funny thing is, this startup isn't that young. It's 12 years old. Someone basically gave a completely inexperienced founder tens of millions of dollars and over a decade to run an R&D lab.

Oh wow good point, that's never happened before... /sarcasm To your point, longevity does not equal success. Twelve would make it 2003.. Before Facebook. Before the huge boom. Twelve years is a long time to be a "startup".
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