The Emperor's New Clothes: the Emperor is wearing nothing at all. What a sham company.
What emperor? You mean that homeless dude with schizophrenia?
Yeah, that's VC funding for you.
Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
41–50 of 119 posts
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#42I 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…
Holmes ran that business in high school. She was born in 1984, so that would put the date around 2000. There were good reasons not to use G++ in 2000. When Alexandrescu's book was published, in 2001, it was somewhat notorious on my team (shipping code on G++) for how much of it didn't work well, or at all, in G++.
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#43I 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…
One reason they are so secretive is because they are trying to maintain many of their technical advances as trade secrets rather than patent them.
> maintain many of their technical advances as trade secrets rather than patent them.
That... is true about most companies. Patents are almost always strategic disclosures.
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#44This company is looking less and less like they're struggling to develop new technology, more and more like a deliberate sham. Given that so much of their support thus far has been due solely to the Cult of Disruption, I can't help but wonder if news like this might make at least a few investors consider a return to good old-fashioned due diligence before placing their bets.
My take on it is that Elizabeth Holmes set out to make this idea a reality, but has been unable to do so. Sadly, all signs point to her trying to buy time via smoke and mirrors. If she has misled investors in the same way she has misled the media, given that she has raised $400 million, she's looking at decades in federal prison. I see this whole thing ending in tragedy, whether that just means the loss of $400 milli…
Prosecution seems fabulously unlikely, given how infrequently founders have gotten in trouble with the law for misleading their investors. Holmes won't be close to the most lurid bad-faith founder claim (if that's how the story indeed ends).
This is why we have investor "accreditation".
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#45Since there's so much interest in unicorn valuations today, and Theranos is a prominent unicorn, anyone wondering about the potential implications of all this news on Theranos' valuation might find it useful to look at Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a publicly-traded company (ticker: VRX). It is facing a number of issues, a few of which have led some to speculate that it could become pharma's version of Enron[1]. In July,…
Accounting rules changed after Enron; it's a lot harder to do what they did. The biggest recent drop was after a very negative piece from someone who publishes negative pieces while short-selling. I don't have much information, but I'm not all that convinced Valeant has real fraud issues. Also, Theranos and Valeant seem like entirely different businesses.
> Theranos and Valeant seem like entirely different businesses.
I think you're missing the point I was making: Valeant is a timely and interesting example of what can happen to the valuation of a company under fire.
> I don't have much information, but I'm not all that convinced Valeant has real fraud issues.
If you don't have much information, how can you be convinced of anything one way or the other?
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first VC who backed Theranos is a pretty smart guy. Was first in his class at Stanford, has an otherwise pretty nice portfolio of companies he has funded
First in a Stanford class can still turn out to be an incompetent VC who doesn't do due diligence
The guy is still a winner though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jurvetson
He's made more good investments than bad at the end of the day.
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all VCs are equally (in)competent. I've always felt that one of the root causes of the ~2000 dot-com bubble was a proliferation of incompetent VCs chasing the glut of investment capital. Things seem roughly the same these days, or maybe even worse, since the eventual-rationality of the public markets can't come into play if there's no IPO.
The first VC who backed Theranos is a pretty smart guy. Was first in his class at Stanford, has an otherwise pretty nice portfolio of companies he has funded
My take on this is that theranos started out with good intentions, and just hasn't been able to make it happen so they are trying to buy time. The early stage investments were probably sound, but later rounds are a little questionable. Sometimes you have to know when to fail.
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#48If their tests work, why not just show the world? Invite the press. Invite doctors. Livestream it. Whoever it takes to validate what they say. What's the downside?
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#49I 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…
Holmes ran that business in high school. She was born in 1984, so that would put the date around 2000. There were good reasons not to use G++ in 2000. When Alexandrescu's book was published, in 2001, it was somewhat notorious on my team (shipping code on G++) for how much of it didn't work well, or at all, in G++.
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.
Re: Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from
#50[deleted]