For the record, I'm pretty sure Theranos is up to something very shady. Spend a couple hours watching just interviews with Holmes and reading the glassdoor reviews by current and former employees and you'll quickly start to piece together some pretty sketchy stuff.
Their glassdoor profile is full of some of the most obviously fake reviews I've ever seen, I wouldn't at all be surprised if about half of them were written by Holmes herself instead of running the company.
I've since spent some time looking into the company and asking some people I know in the industry about the company and the opinion seems to run from "scam" to "gross ineptitude".
Something smells really bad about Theranos and it's probably going to ruin a lot of people's careers while a select few are going to walk away with a nice percentage of the VC money in the end. The story on this will probably get caught up in post-Theranos litigation for many many years and I'll probably be retired long before the whole story is known.
The real problem is trying to ascertain motive. Money seems too easy for Holmes to have been working at it for so long. But it could be that simple.
I can't imagine what Liz's end game might be. What did she expect to happen in this situation? The healthcare industry is very tightly regulated. If you want to (temporarily?) mislead investors or customers, it's one of the worst options out there.
And after a decade in stealth mode, why did she make things public in 2013, before the technology was working? If she's as much of an attention-seeker as some say, how did she survive for the first decade without anyone caring?
> What did she expect to happen in this situation?
In my more charitable moments thinking about what they're up to the best I can come up with is "AirBnB/Uber". Just ignore the law and hope it goes away long enough to make money.
But both of those companies actually offer a working and viable service/product while Theranos doesn't seem to be even at that MVP point yet so that doesn't really even make sense either. At this point they're just taking VC money and lighting it on fire.
I'm not comparing Theranos to a ponzi scheme (e.g., Madoff) but the path may be the same -- they tell a small lie, then another lie to cover it up, then a bigger lie. Pretty soon there is great press, they are in too deep to backtrack and have to keep exaggerating just to keep up the baseline.
Holmes should havs finished college and got a Med Tech degree rather than becoming fluent in Mandarin. A bench level Med Tech would have done a better job.
But slaps forehead the Mandarin is for the money.... Duh
While it does sound like she's trying to sound like a man, I'm not sure if it's forced. Even if it's not her real voice, it's natural to have a different voice when speaking as a CEO in an interview (it may only be slightly off from her real voice). Her voice is consistent across interviews, so I don't think it's as fake as you might assume.
For the record, I'm pretty sure Theranos is up to something very shady. Spend a couple hours watching just interviews with Holmes and reading the glassdoor reviews by current and former employees and you'll quickly start to piece together some pretty sketchy stuff.
Their glassdoor profile is full of some of the most obviously fake reviews I've ever seen, I wouldn't at all be surprised if about half of them were written by Holmes herself instead of running the company.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Theranos-Reviews-E248889.h...
Here's what I wrote on this about a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10765996
I've since spent some time looking into the company and asking some people I know in the industry about the company and the opinion seems to run from "scam" to "gross ineptitude".
Holmes' answers to simple questions are about as mealy mouthed as I've ever heard outside of Congress. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs-oj7U-bo
Something smells really bad about Theranos and it's probably going to ruin a lot of people's careers while a select few are going to walk away with a nice percentage of the VC money in the end. The story on this will probably get caught up in post-Theranos litigation for many many years and I'll probably be retired long before the whole story is known.
The real problem is trying to ascertain motive. Money seems too easy for Holmes to have been working at it for so long. But it could be that simple.