Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test • Hacker News Board

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#21

Post by paulcole » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

> I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one

The Hacker News commenters have always been quite kind and optimistic about Theranos and Ms. Holmes. Were your doubts downvoted?

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#22

Post by hprotagonist » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #21

hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

> I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one The Hacker News commenters have always been quite kind and optimistic about Theranos and Ms. Holmes. Were your doubts downvoted?

i only joined HN in 2016, so i missed much of it.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#23

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

I don’t think you had to be a biomedical engineer to have called this one, even years ago. Its attributes hit HN (and the gushing tech media) in all the soft spots: young, female founder, college dropout, wore black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs, disruptive tech, attacking a stodgy conservative industry, order(s) of magnitude claimed improvements. It was simply too good and aligned perfectly with the HN zeitgeist. Just like the poster: “I Want To Believe!” Everyone’s blinders were on, and nobody wanted to recognize the obvious signs of fakery.

This has been my favorite tech story of the decade. Watching a rich, well-connected phony get knocked down and called out on all the bullshit fills me with glee. It excites me in ways we don’t talk about in polite company. So many hard working smart people out there toiling away in obscurity while these “elite” fakers get all the recognition and money. The schadenfreude in watching one of them finally and spectacularly burn up is too good to bear.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#24

Post by headmelted » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

I would expect the truth exists somewhere in between. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that:

* Holmes started with the best of intentions

* Theranos raised capital from starry-eyed investors that didn't carry out proper due diligence

* Realization set in early on that it wasn't going to work out

* Theranos got scared as so much of their time and other people's money had been invested

* The questions mounted

* Stalling became outright deception

* The realization of the consequences after the WSJ article became starkly obvious

* Theranos got spooked and doubled-down on covering up out of fear

.. but this is all speculation, and we'll never really know.

It does seem though that this didn't turn into fraud (which by the end it's quite clear it was) until late on.

It's a bit tragic, really. It seems Holmes could have come clean early on and avoided the worst of the fallout (but for whatever reason that didn't happen).

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#25

Post by joezydeco » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

I honestly believe Holmes, as a sophomore at Stanford University, believed she had come across an idea that nobody had ever thought of before (low-volume microfluidic immunoassays).

The exception is that this science had already been explored, for decades, by the major companies that specialized in this technology. There simply was nothing to show that worked, yet, so there was nothing to commercialize. And the big players aren't going to publish their interim research, or Holmes wasn't motivated to actually do the homework.

She wasn't the first to think of it, but had enough traction (combined with a vaccuum of commercial products) to convince people she had, or had some mystery secret sauce that was going to make it work.

The fact that Theranos hired Cass Grandone, an Abbott Diagnostics exec that pioneered the previous generation of microparticle immunoassay/ELISA technology, and Grandone walked away after six months shows that he knew their science never worked, and was never going to work.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#26

Post by ggambetta » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #20

ukulele wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought of ambivalent as meaning no strong feelings either way, but I see that it can also mean mixed feelings (even strong ones). Is there a word that doesn't also include the first part, where it means solely having strong mixed feelings?

Torn? "I'm all out of faith / This is how I feel, I'm cold and I am shamed / Lying naked on the floor ..."

And appropriately for this story, "illusion never changed / into something real" :)

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#27

Post by DoreenMichele » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

I apologize for the formatting issues. It is one of the reasons I shut this blog down. But here are some of my thoughts from a few years ago:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/05/theranos-cul...

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#28

Post by wpietri » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

subpixel wrote: post #18

I haven't found an article or comment that gives me any insight into what Ms. Holmes might have been thinking. Did she earnestly believe she was on the cusp of some breakthrough, or that one was inevitable with enough brute-force application of investor money? Or was she shrewd and cunning to the core, calculating that she could siphon off enough money to make it worthwhile and spend enough money to spin the facts? I…

My (limited) understanding of people like this is that they're not really thinking.

Among startup founders, puffery is endemic. You have a vision and you try to talk it into being. Whatever you're doing probably won't work, but you can't say, "Well, there's a 90% chance we'll fail," because nobody gives you money or labor then. You have to develop this (unjustified) confidence, and a deep understanding of what people want to hear. Silicon Valley culture definitely encourages this.

To succeed, one also of course has to develop an equally deep understanding of the reality of the business domain. But as we see with Theranos or Hampton Creek or uBeam, you can get surprisingly far on vigorous self-promotion and creating the appearance of success.

The thing that really keeps me awake at night is that there are surely a lot of companies that faked it nearly as much but managed to find a real business before things caught on fire.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#29

Post by CptFribble » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:43 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #14

I have been a voice in the wilderness since about 2007 on this one, so this is shadenfraude on a level that makes me kind of embarrassed about myself. My background is biomedical engineering, and I just never, ever understood how the sampling rate could ever work. If you're looking for a low-energy signal and your sampling rate is really low, you're just going to miss it and this should've been screamingly obvious to…

I also have a background in biomedical engineering, and worked on actual diagnostic equipment for several years, and I would like to second this opinion. I only wish I had written down my rants about Theranos for future reference!

Theranos' claims fundentally misrepresented the state of medical diagnostics, and showed at best a failure to grasp the nature of the industry, and at worst a deliberate misrepresentation. Apparently it was the latter.

If any of the investors now saying "gosh who could have guessed" had taken 2 seconds to ask anyone who worked on or with real medlab tech about Theranos' claims, they wouldn't have touched that company with a 10 mile pole.

Re: Theranos Misled Investors and Consumers Who Used Its Blood Test

#30

Post by olivermarks » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

I'm sure there are all sorts of dark actors in the shadows on this one. Holmes is being hung drawn and quartered in public, but there were many other people involved in building up this chimera. The board of directors are an interesting bunch and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is a colorful character. Holmes may have been a patsy, who knows...

Bloomberg and most other media companies pumped Theranos up for all it was worth, then Murdoch's WSJ deflated the balloon, having previously blown it up to dekacorn dimensions.

It feels like the pump and dump plays so popular in the dot com era by the money.