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The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

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Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#81

Post by saiya-jin »

fwgwgwgch wrote: post #69
danieltillett wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason Theranos was always a fraud is it is well known (as in for decades) that you can’t get reliable sampling from a finger prick sample even with a perfect detector. The reason why is that the blood from a finger prick is a random mixture of veinous and arterial blood with a variable amount of cell debris and contamination from what is on the skin. Not even Kissinger (sorry I mean Lucifer) could give you an ac…

Noble peace prize winner ;) (I agree with your sentiment, just pointed out this to remind people that these prizes are not given by God)

They are not even given by same committee as 'real' nobels, and are used as a political statement at current time, often end up being a huge embarrassment after some time.

I mean, Yasser Arafat (+-terrorist), Al Gore (for a environmental powerpoint), Obama (happy continuing supporting Guantanamo and 2 horrible unjust wars), Aung San Suu Kyi (happy with recent Rohinga genocide), Kissinger and so on.

There are often candidates for it which would actually deserve it, but since it's a vessel for political statements, they usually don't get it.

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#82

Post by mannykannot »

wpietri wrote: post #7
danso wrote: post #4

Someone needs to make an anthology of first-person stories about trying out Theranos. I actually thought the OP article was by John Carreyrou because I saw it in his tweets (and it makes sense that they'd pull the fire alarm upon seeing him), but it's by a reporter (Jenny Gold) from Kaiser Health News, who apparently visited there (Nov 2014) before Carreyrou's WSJ investigation was published in October 2015. The only…

I would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we were so easily misled.

One of those techniques is on display here: make it absolutely clear that a journalist will have no access unless they relinquish editorial control and remain unswervingly positive. This is what should have been reported at the time, but wasn't.

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#83

Post by blueprint »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #80
mkesper wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean teaching what not to do, I hope?

Huh? The board was a major success, the only thing Theranos had going for it.

Typically we pragmatists consider guiding the company to avoid implosion as a criterion for a successful board.

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#84

Post by ballenf »

misiti3780 wrote: post #32

I have an honest question, what is the end game for Theranos employees. My understanding is the company is a complete fraud but yet if I go on linkedin they still have 200+ employees working there: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent... are all of these people going to be fired in the coming months or do investors think this is still a good idea but Holmes isnt going to be apart of it ?

There are huge margins in the lab business using traditional techniques after high upfront capital expenses. Maybe they're just fulfilling contracts using traditional testing methods?

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#85

Post by markoman »

danso wrote: post #27
nathanaldensr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people were skeptical, even right here on HN. Sometimes, their voices are drowned out by those that like to accuse the skeptical of being pessimistic. Optimism can be inherently unscientific--it can often be a manifestation of what we want rather than what is scientifically likely . To me, the battle has always been between optimism and realism.

The seems to be the oldest post on HN (Sept 8 2013, 211 upvotes, 113 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 It doesn't feel that much more skeptical than typical HN threads about new companies. And skepticism/confusion was going to be more prevalent given how few HN users (relatively speaking) are in the health field. Funny enough, if you scroll down far enough, you run into a comment that sounds like…

Filing 'broad' patents is pretty typical. I see that they have 119 patents under the Theranos name. To think of all the work and cooperation that obtaining those patents required, is pretty mind-boggling if in fact it was all bogus. If this is the massive fraud that is being alleged by journalists (and the SEC), then it would require a massive conspiracy to effectuate it. To only hold the CEO accountable in a case like this seems to be lacking resolution. There are other bad actors here that need to be held accountable, much as in Enron. I'm sure many (guilty & innocent) employees are paying a financial price but it appears that more could be done on the consequences side of things.

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#86

Post by avs733 »

mkesper wrote: post #78
avs733 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not there comment you referene, but for around three or four years I have been using theranos' board as a teaching tool in undergraduate entrepreneurship courses.

You mean teaching what not to do, I hope?

Its not about teaching what to do or not to do.

Its about teaching how to evaluate what your company needs and what your board can provide. It's about vision and evaluation rather than correctness.

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#87

Post by chillwaves »

jonathanyc wrote: post #50

Is there an industry of “black hat PR” people that handle this sort of thing? Would be really interested if there were any autobiographical novels from that sort of person, though I suppose, like bank robbers, their success insists they remain unknown. EDIT: Just remembered the movie Wag the Dog the Wikipedia article calls the black hat PR people portrayed therein “spin doctors”. But that seems more like just PR to m…

Read the news lately?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17141428/c...

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#88

Post by wpietri »

mannykannot wrote: post #82
wpietri wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we were so easily misled.

One of those techniques is on display here: make it absolutely clear that a journalist will have no access unless they relinquish editorial control and remain unswervingly positive. This is what should have been reported at the time, but wasn't.

Yes. The PR people were so casual about attempting to control the story that I have to think they normally got away with it.

In some ways, the "let a thousand flowers bloom" effect that the Internet has on journalism has made this worse. The more options a PR person has for getting stories out, the less power any individual reporter has.

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#89

Post by wpietri »

danso wrote: post #17
wpietri wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we were so easily misled.

Theranos is an interesting case. Benedict Evans tweeted something interesting the other week [0], how Theranos, unlike virtually every other Silicon Valley startups, was very East Coast in style. Particularly with its board full of old, famous politicians and DC figures like Kissinger and General Mattis. I didn't really hear much about it until the WSJ blowup, but my perception was that Theranos wasn't in whatever sc…

I take it with a grain of salt when VCs find reasons to no-true-Scotsman failures like this. It's true that Theranos didn't follow the traditional path. But I think it's also true that Silicon Valley energetically built up the myths that made Theranos possible, from the grand scale (Technology is a fountain of miracles! Hard questioning of visionary founders is crass!) down to the small details (like Holmes's Jobsian outfits).

Brushing this off as "East Coast" lets us avoid examining our complicity. And our vulnerability. We could look at uBeam, for example, which is backed by a number of West Coast luminaries, including Evans's own A16Z. An engineer has an extensive set of posts on how dubious it is: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/

Theranos is different in terms of scale and visibility, for sure. And I do agree that they found a richer class of sucker elsewhere. But I don't think they're culturally any different than a bunch of other overfunded, never-could-have-worked, charismatic-founder failures around here.

Re: The Tale of Theranos and the Mysterious Fire Alarm

#90

Post by thaumasiotes »

blueprint wrote: post #83
thaumasiotes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? The board was a major success, the only thing Theranos had going for it.

Typically we pragmatists consider guiding the company to avoid implosion as a criterion for a successful board.

Once you've got a company with no product and you're committing fraud to stay alive, what would the point be of staffing a board to tell you to kill yourself? What would you get out of that?

Do you think Theranos just didn't realize anything was wrong because the board didn't tell them?

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