Theranos has got to be my favorite tech story of the year, possibly of the decade. There's nothing quite as satisfying as the schadenfreude of watching an "elite" who got by for years on charm, connections, hot air and wealth finally get called on their BS and go down in flames so publicly!
There are plenty of hard working, talented tech people out there with grit and integrity and even actual products, held back by their lack of deep-pocketed Ivy-league connections. Yet borderline fraud gets funded and gushed over by the press. If there's justice in the world, the Theranos drama is a sliver of it.
>There are plenty of hard working, talented tech people out there with grit and integrity and even actual products, held back by their lack of deep-pocketed Ivy-league connections.
As someone who launched a side project in the pharmacy space and closed a 6 month pilot with the World's largest company and still can't get a YC interview or VC response...I can tell you there is no justice in what happened to Theranos because it doesn't make it any easier for those people with actual products, it's just business as usual.
Releasing a diagnostic or prognostic test shouldn't be easy. I've worked in biotech my entire career and it's just too easy to screw up. There are already far too many shortcuts taken in CLIA labs and the LDT space.
> too many shortcuts taken in CLIA labs and the LDT space.
jesus fuck, this is NOT what I need to hear as we push our salvage therapy companion biomarker into a 160 patient trial.
then again I work in pediatrics these days and nobody ever made any money in peds. So I guess there's that. People expect their 99-year-old grandpa to die of prostate cancer (or apnea, or constipation, or...). It's rather a more unpleasant shock when your 3-year-old does the dying.
Won't make anyone rich but maybe it'll relieve a little suffering in the world. I guess I'd best be OK with that.
Hey, that sounds really awesome. Curious - what did you make?
I worked on a similar side project and was thinking about doing more with it, but the first VC I talked to was like "you're too young and don't have a PhD", but as a youngster people look at you differently -- "holy smokes, hes 5 and built a self-driving vacuum cleaner" and will want to meet with you more often and give you advice.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, but are they total dicks or exceedingly reckless or something? Or just "disruptive"? Why do people have a bone to pick with the soylent folks?
There is a schism on this site between the entrepreneurs and the technologists. The entrepreneurs will tell you that what Soylent did was hard. They found a population that would enjoy a nutritional supplement, but didn't like the branding of current offerings. The created and popularized a brand to serve busy, health-conscious professionals.
The technologist will tell you that Soylent is essentially a direct marketing business that mixes commodities (poorly) and sells them at high markup.
A similar narrative has existed in business news for the past year, where readers bemusedly read about a pyramid scheme company that distributes protein shake called Herbalife to see whether it will implode or not.
Also, some of us remember the misleading claims from when Soylent was first in development. I because pretty negative on the product from those early posts fully of hype.
I don't doubt you at all but can you give some examples? I remember them saying "it should be a total replacement for food" but I hear they are backing off of that now.
Purely anecdotal but I suffer from Crohn's Disease and the only thing that really helped was Soylent. I can't eat solid food and since starting Soylent I have experienced much lower occurrences of symptoms.
Was Soylent the only liquid you tried that aspires to complete nutrition?
For example, have you tried Ensure?
Also, how long has it continued to help? I ask because it is fairly easy to find interventions that help a chronic illness, but then stop working or accumulate prohibitive adverse effects after a few months.
I have only tried Soylent. I have a very restrictive diet and Soylent is the only liquid that fits my requirements. It's worked for about 3 months so far.
there are times I think we are just anti-success. as in, its okay to get certain rewards, get to a certain size, and then suddenly the community turns on you.
I am guilty of this at times, there are certain companies I cheer on yet I have to sit back and wonder why others I vilify. Is it the personalities at top or the actions of the companies as a whole?
As a sidenote, Herbalife started as a pyramid scheme but has evolved its business model beyond it. This article on the fight between Bill Ackman and Herbalife (http://fortune.com/2015/09/09/the-siege-of-herbalife/) is a good summary of Herbalife's history and its current approach.
Food is a topic where people are intensely invested in their views, and shame-based thinking holds strong. Anyone who claims a shortcut to decent nutrition will draw the nay-sayers out of the woodwork. Proper nutrition ought to be hard.
For what it's worth, way back in the beginning (I was there), the Soylent guy solicited work from the community under the guise of contributing to an open source product. That the "source" was eventually closed up and the end product rented out for a subscription fee... That might be where some of the disdain is coming from. Plus also he is kind of insufferable to a lot of people, if you read any of his writing.
Anytime anyone says (practically) anything about food or nutrition some people are going to be enraged. Food is both extremely personal and very polarizing.
I can't speak for others, but I read about two paragraphs of his blog-diarrea and suffered instant hate of the guy. Truly sounds like he has his head firmly up his arse.
Dropping out doesn't add much charismatic value to your cause anymore. A few of my friends at decent schools left their respective schools and barely created something of value, even years later.
Holmes was a 2000s kid, where it was cool. Now VCs typically give you the "you wanna be zuck?" look.
There's nothing quite as satisfying as the schadenfreude of watching an "elite" who got by for years on charm, connections, hot air and wealth finally get called on their BS and go down in flames so publicly!
While another gets elected president of the United States.
I saw someone here lamenting the other day that they will never be "like Steve Jobs or Elizabeth Holmes". I can't believe anyone still considers her a success or worth emulating... well, I'll grant that she's an exceptional huckster.
I think it is very unfair to say that Elizabeth Holmes isn't worth emulating...
She may not be someone that you should emulate from an ethics perspective; but she did do a very good job amassing big names, capital, and fantastic media attention to Theranos[1]. Things that every startup needs to do well.
[1]You can attribute her ability to do all that to her family connections, but there are lots of people better connected than she is that haven't done what she has done.
Pulling in big names, capital and media attention to something that is complete snakeoil is hardly worth emulating.
Perhaps those better connected people didn't succeed because they were operating in real environments with real products, where the competition is also more real.
> ... but she did do a very good job amassing big names, capital, and fantastic media attention to Theranos[1]. Things that every startup needs to do well.
She did that largely because everyone wanted her a young, well educated smart white woman to succeed. Everyone wanted to be a part of an industry where she and other women like her could found billion dollar unicorns. They wanted her as a role model. They were willing to look past the signs that things weren't adding up until the very end when it all came crashing down.
So, no I don't think her story should be held up for emulation because it's unlikely to be repeated.
This industry still desperately wants a woman to make a billion dollar startup that isn't in fashion, or markets where women traditionally are greater consumers or have greater inside knowledge (fertility, ovulation, makeup, certain parts of the fitness industry, etc.)
I don't know if Elizabeth Holmes has hurt the image of women at the helm. She hasn't helped. I would like to think that I'm a part of an industry that doesn't think that every woman who wants to found a non-woman's industry startup is the next Elizabeth Holmes. I don't have data on that either way.
It's two different things. By definition liquidation preferences only happen in liquidation events and investors are generally "owners" not "creditors" so they only get what's left after creditors are paid. (I'm assuming this is ending in bankruptcy for Theranos - which may not be fair)
UBeam et al don't make a product, their product is the company. A16z is betting there's high demand for pie-in-the-sky, female-ceo, headline-making companies. So far, they've been right.
I really don't like your tone about female CEOs. UBeam and Theranos are terrible examples. Far more companies have been run into the ground by male leadership.
There's a present fad to seek out and support female contenders, and this makes those with good intentions meaty targets for those inclined to exploit good intentions.
It's not that women are less capable, it's that there's an angle where well meaning individuals may be exploited by predators.
In a way, it's flattery to claim that there may exist women who are aware of this opportunity and are exploiting it.
Guessing the tone right is hard on a pure-text medium. I was not referring to leadership abilities of various genders, but to the recent market trend where the gender (and age!) of the founder/ceo forms a major part of the pitch and media image.
that's not the point; there are many successful female founders; the point I'm raising is some VCs, even top tier, rush to be the investor in next big startup run by a female founder, without doing the proper research about the company or the technology.
I don't know much about uBeam but I would just like to add that there are competing wireless charging startups that do have proven prototypes and real products on the market.
One example is Chargifi. They have wireless charging mats in coffee shops. (Their charging distance is much smaller than what's shown in sketches for uBeam.)
I'll grant you it gives you more and different press. I won't grant you that press coverage matters very much when it comes to fundraising and recruiting. It matters some, but the delta created by a founder's gender multiplied by the general small impact of press is really not moving the "get off the ground" needle.
If it did, you'd see wildly variable outcomes indexed by founder gender.
Not at all for the performance of the CEO. I suspect it might be an indicator of funding if the VCs feel that would be a positive signal for them. I would love for a study to be done, but I suspect secrecy is going to be problematic for anyone studying this time period in history.
It's amazing, I just visited their Twitter to confirm and it appears the virus is spreading, they now have two offices and 30 odd employees. Not a cent in revenue or a kWh "beam"ed, of course.
I looked into uBeam a while back. The technology is unproven and unlikely to work because of basic physics. (They are trying to transmit energy using ultrasonic sound and it usually has severe health consequences for any significant amount of power delivered.) The CEO, Meredith Perry, delivered a TED talk[1] which was nauseating. She was basically saying it doesn't matter what the experts say, if you're a plucky disruptor you should just follow your half-baked ideas.
Honest question: at what point does a company stop being called "[two] guys (...) at a battle to save their company", and starts being called a multinational enterprise with ~2000 employees?
i know this is a popular talking point in tech forums, the whole "when does a startup stop being a startup when they have more employees than etc etc"
personally, i think the point where a startup becomes a company is very clear: the point where the company's core business is able to provide sustainable positive cash flow. i believe that as long as a company is still in the "burn rate" phase where instead of trying to figure out where they can squeeze more profits, they're simply trying to figure out how long they can keep running with what money they have left, then they're firmly still in the startup phase.
Humble guys?? How about those ads where they basically bragged about how benevolent they were for finally being strong armed into paying their back taxes? And then the PR guy was completely unprofessional to the reporters who asked if it was really an actual ad campaign because it was so shockingly distasteful and absurd.
"We emailed Airbnb spokesman Christopher Nulty to ask whether the library ad was "real." He responded by email, "as opposed to a fake one :)"
A follow up email, explaining that we were in fact seeking confirmation as to whether the ads are actually from Airbnb received the following response: "Are you seriously writing on this?"
Nulty did not respond to another follow up email. "
He seems pretty ruthless; willing to do anything to make money. Running a spam operation is a questionable act. These same attitudes and acts of moral wrongdoing seem to perpetuate along the operations of his current company (Airbnb). What's to stop him except of course the risk of facing criminal legal charges?
I don't think ruthless because I don't know if he physically hurt anyone, but its a secret how he got off FBI top list with no consequences whatsoever.
Perhaps high connected friends - who knows? But there are people sending 1/1000th of spam volume he did and are doing 10 years in jail, so ultimately that's where I think Nathan belongs.
I know their lead JavaScript guy is not too humble at all. He's a real asshole on IRC and you'll see exactly what I mean if you have a disagreement with him.
I think you should re read your statement. In particular: "..constant battle to save their company". Is a person who raises 500 million in funding constantly at a battle to save their company?
That capital comes with an expectation of significant return. It's not an unstrung purse with guarantee of perpetual safety.
I think the comment more refers to hospitality industry litigiousness (and sometimes, competition). I think any feeling of invincibility would be curtailed by constant embattlement in their own headquarter city.
That or breaking zoning laws in cities and making the rest of us miserable while our "neighbor" profits.
You ever had a surprise AirBnB right above you? At 4AM on a Wednesday morning? Yeah, the tenant got dinged, eventually... maybe. I still had the joy of feeling someone's musical choices during time I had planned to be asleep with no real recourse from security or the police.
Why are you mad with airbnb and not with your local police? It's not airbnb's job to handle noise complaints, but it is the job of your local police to enforce the law (whether it's the law against short term sublets or the law against noise).
IMO You really shouldn't want benign things such a med tech company to fail unless they were doing something really egregious. I normally never down vote but this comment is pretty negative. (Wishing others to fail)
I repeat for the downvoters the OP said he is rejoicing in the failure of a company. Screw people loosing their jobs.
I don't care if theranos is Exxon mobile or JP. I would rather they learn and adapt for the better. Stop doing what ever is bad. Btw this my first downvote ever of which I wrote a comment why.
Edit
I wish I could delete my comment as I guess I must have said something terrible to get so downvoted. I assumed I must have offended someone. I just don't like some one "hoping" for the down fall of others and I feel strongly about it.
I would consider selling faulty tests to be egregious for a med tech company. I'm happy they are going down in flames; this is a public health concern. Their tact was borderline fraud.
You are layering rationalization around the original negative comments blaming statements and speaking for others. It's not appropriate to raise dissonance and then wish for more failure of startups. The startups are not to blame, but their business models are.
> The startups are not to blame, but their business models are.
That's kind of like saying it's not the robber who killed, but the blade of his knife, therefore the robber should not be blamed.
Business models don't just appear out of thin air to strike at unsuspecting people. They're willingly created and perpetuated by people in the process of running their companies, and thus the people (and the companies) are ultimately responsible for the consequences.
Clearly there is a disconnect on this thread that I approve of theranos and that I don't accept companies failing as a possible good thing.
Of course theranos did bad things and of course I companies failing can be good for the market but I don't hope for it just because I don't think the company is "humble".
And even if I think the company is getting unfair privileges and lacks humility I'd rather the company pivot or adjust then complete failure. And that whoever is enabling them (company) change as well!
Complete failure aka bankruptcy (or analog) is very bad particularly if the company is bigger.
Changing where you work can be as life changing as moving. Not all employees of a massive company have easy to switch jobs like developers do.
> I'm actually pleased to hear that a tech company is going to perish. Too many of them think they are invincible (airbnb)
The OP said a tech and not theranos. Wishing failure on really any company is IMO a terrible attitude. What you want is the company to change and improve.
It appears the OP is glad that people will loose jobs and options in the company (i.e. regular employees).
I don't agree with North Korea or China but do I really want them to fail? No you want change and improvement.
There's nothing inherently "good" about the concept of an organized business.
I want North Korea to fail so the people in that country experience change. I don't care if the government itself survives, especially given the atrocities they've committed on their own people.
Companies shouldn't survive just for the sake of keeping people employed, either. They absolutely should be judged on their product. There's no ethical argument to make here.
No. I'm glad to see extremely privileged well connected individuals getting fair treatment and not special treatment like they may have gotten all their lives.
North Korea and china MUST be successes; people live there. Meanwhile, businesses can and should fail, regardless of my stake in them. This is just how the market preserves efficiency, which we all benefit from. I don't see your point.
The OP didn't say theranos specifically. The op said
> I'm actually pleased to hear that a tech company is going to perish.
How is this constructive?
This isn't some joy in evolution or plot/crop burning:
> Too many of them think they are invincible (airbnb)
The OP is upset ostensibly because I guess they are not humble. And apparently neither is airbnb in his opinion. I bet MS and apple were not humble either in their beginnings. Both MS and facebook were founded by not rags to riches but Harvard drop outs with wealthy families.
Crops have inherent positive value. Business do not. Who cares about humility? It has nothing to do with whether a business should succeed or fail. People who have an axe to grind don't belong in a discussion about, well, anything but their feelings.
those losing their jobs will be able to get new jobs, mostly, assuming they were skilled workers with good job experience. these aren't dislocated struggling steel mill workers with no place to go after the only factory in town closes down.
Theranos _should_ go out of business. it was based on a fraud.
- was also bubbling throughout the company’s mustard-and-green Palo Alto headquarters, which was nearing the end of a $6.7 million renovation.
Not sure how many startups you guys have been apart of, but none of the ones I worked for were making 7 million dollar renovations to their offices.
- Holmes largely forbade her employees from communicating with one another about what they were working on—a culture that resulted in a rare form of executive omniscience.
This also keeps your employees in the dark when the ship starts sinking.
- Moreover, he was also struck by Holmes’s limited ability to explain how it all worked.
You're running a biotech company and you don't even know how the technology works? Another HUGE red flag.
- And, as a then dark-haired 19-year-old first-year at Stanford University’s School of Chemical Engineering
So somewhere she was able to charm people that she was some kind of biotech expert after only having ONE YEAR in a chemical engineering program? Unreal.
There's a bunch more, but I'm quite shocked frankly she got as far as she did. There should have been so many red flags on the investors part to stay away from this company and they all got suckered into it.
> So somewhere she was able to charm people that she was some kind of biotech expert after only having ONE YEAR in a chemical engineering program? Unreal.
It's also worth noting the context: the media/large segments of the population were (still are) clamouring for women in STEM. Holmes emerged as a woman in STEM, who was a college drop out, dressed like Steve Jobs, apparently had the work ethic of Elon Musk, came from a well connected family, all while also being some sort of science prodigy who found a way to defy the physical rules of biology.
They ate it up and anyone who asked any questions was immediately labeled a misandrist, so I think it's quite easy to understand how she got this far. Virtually everything was stacked her way and she was immune to criticism.
>> That's only because you don't know who she knew. With such deep connected friends when you bring powerful people to the board, money will follow.
This is the one thing that I always think about when people talk about the SV crowd. There were a fuck ton of red flags and everybody ignored them continually until you couldn't any more.
All I ever read about SV is that you have to have a solid idea, solid financial plan and make damn sure you know what you're doing before you even get a whiff of the big VC money. In her case, all of that somehow just evaporated and they jumped in without doing any due diligence. I guess to some degree, the investors have no one to blame but themselves. If you're not going to vett these companies before you throw a few million at them, then you get what you deserve and her investors are getting in spades right now.
On renovations - I consulted for Powa Technologies, in London for a while, who claimed to be a startup and who blew a couple of million pounds on outfitting their offices in the middle of London's financial centre.
Heard of them lately? Well only if you read about their bankrupcy and total shutdown earlier this year...
They'd almost have to be. "The thing that tells you whether you have cancer or not" is inherently going to need to stand up to regulatory scrutiny in a way that "the thing that lets you send people pictures of your lunch" never will.
medical research is much more heavily regulated (or at least it's supposed to be) with oversight from federal regulatory agencies poking around inside processes. And the needs of university funded "publish or perish" medical/biosciences. You can develop something like Magic Leap in near total secrecy, not so much advanced medical technology.
To be pedantic, research isn't heavily regulated. Hell, even getting a CLIA license is a bit of a joke. Once you start selling to the general public however...
How well connected is Holmes that there are still no criminal charges or even a criminal investigation?
This is stark constrast to little people put in prison or harassed for any small transgression.
Seriously this is in healthcare with tons of rules and regulations covering every minutae as any well developed country would have. How can it be remotely possible Theranos has not run foul of any of these rules by deception, fraud and endangering the public?
What does this tell us about the american legal system and rule of law if the well connected are systematically spared or loopholes intentionally left like in the banking crisis and now.
This is not about retribution or seeing bankers or Holmes suffer, its about a civilised and not feudal justice system. Currently it does seem there is a completely different set of rules in operation for the rich and privileged.
Yes, top VCs did pass. There was a good article about how Google Ventures was initially interested but passed when they didn't see any evidence of functioning product.
Biotech/medical venture capital is a completely different and only slightly smaller industry than software VC but yes the top late stage firms, like Sequoia Capital, generally invest in both. It's hard to find companies to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into (each) and biotech companies can easily require that much in an industry with proven exit strategies (and greater annualized returns than software according to some studies). Since pharma largely outsources R&D to the startup world, there are many exit paths including technology or talent acquisition (people, techniques, and equipment), patent acquisition (before and after approval), and even pre-revenue IPOs which are surprisingly common in the life sciences to this day.
This is just not true. When a VC invests, they are betting this company will aggressively grow in value. All do some amount of due diligence. Clearly in some cases, not enough.
Can somebody please objectively fill me in on what caused the failure of Theranos? Is it a scam from the get go? I had high hopes after reading the profile of their CEO.
The existing industry has rigorous standards that have been established over decades of tragedies.
Theranos announced that it had a technological breakthrough that took less time/money/blood for the same results.
Walgreens, seeing a potential competitive advantage, partnered with Theranos to start administering the tests with a promise from Theranos that everything was good & on the up-and-up.
When the FDA started looking at the quality of the tests Theranos was administering they felt that they were not good & not on the up-and-up. The tests failed the criteria that made them valid.
In the mean time Walgreens customers potentially received treatments for illnesses they didn't have (or worse, missed illnesses they did) because Theranos misrepresented, implicitly or explicitly, the quality of their tests.
The part that makes it hard to disentangle the internet hates from the actual problems with the company is it's founder: Elizabeth Holmes. Questions have been raised around whether Elizabeth Holmes did anything meaningful or if she simply curried some personal connections into a company that then became a shell game of smoke and mirrors. She spent a lot of time currying press attention, bilking herself as the next Steve Jobs while her company was being ran by ???
Thanks. Just re-read the original WSJ article that started it all. Here are some things that caught my attention:
- No Research to prove this methodology worked
- Influential parents with connections in D.C helped create a powerful board with members such as Henry Kissinger
- Theranos knew their results were flawed but did not report
- According to FDA, labs were deficient and their quality control methods themselves were deficient
- They claimed to run 70 tests from a tiny sample of blood from your finger tip when they had permission to do only one test from FDA.
This stuff is crazy. Kudos to the folks who did the investigative journalism to uncover these things. It looks like people's lives were put at risk with this company.
Not defending theranos, but I'm surprised that something so ineffective could even make it into production. Do you happen to know if their tests were absolutely bogus, or were they just not accurate enough to be clinically valid ? I mean, round up ~25 HSV+ test patients, and ~1000 HSV- samples, and hand them over randomly to a statistician and you should know, right ?
It seems like if they were just not accurate enough, they could have tried to save face and call it a "screening", while acknowledging that it's not as conclusive as a test. If it's easy and convenient, you could weed out type 1 errors (false positives) in subsequent standard testing, while acknowledging that the test isn't 100% accurate (has type 2 errors).
Just my opinion, but Theranos looked like it wanted to combine (1) new technology to perform tests with less blood, and using pin pricks instead of blood from the vein and (2) business process improvements to streamline collection of blood and returning the results to the patient/doctor.
Whatever mix of these they were originally planning, they put a lot of emphasis in the press on the new technology. When this didn't pan out like they had hoped, they were not able to focus more on business process improvements, and in fact continued to emphasize their new tech and downplay the issues it faced (not really sure what these were, but overall there seemed to be a lack of hard evidence for the accuracy of the tests).
It also seemed that they did not have any approval from FDA on their claim of running 70 tests from a tiny sample from your finger print. Overall Shady stuff and really unfortunate that people's lives were put at risk.
This feels to me like "let's blame this on diversity" kind of spin, men and women do know how to treat each other with dignity and respect at workplace. Not sure I buy this argument or opinion.
I think people are pointing out that the founder was someone that people wanted to see, a brilliant young woman; proof that the Steve Jobs of the world don't have to only be men.
The real story turns out that the whole thing was smoke and mirrors and it was obscured by both her secrecy, her powerful connection and the point that some are making here in part the image of a woman wasn't one that they wanted to look at critically.
It isn't the entire problem but, it contributed.
Also, I don't think that the opposite would be true, that if she were a man, she would have gotten more scrutiny. I think it wouldn't have been a factor to be pointed out. People are ready and willing to see men as villains. There are plenty of companies founded by people with a deep powerful roster and that have pulled the wool over many peoples' eyes founded by men.
This is just far worse because this is a medical device issue and obscuring and ignoring standards is playing with people's lives. Martin Shkreli was tarred and pilloried in the press for merely increasing the price of a drug treatment that we knew to work. Theranos misguided people into believing that their treatment worked when it didn't. All the money in the world can't buy back the time to detect issues and diseases that could be caught early or caught at all with other higher standard tests.
Her gender isn't everything but, it did contribute and even now we treat her with kid gloves in public opinion despite the depth of what Theranos did and worse how it conspired to do it.
This is the central argument from the article you posted:
"I am a woman and my experiences have been that this is a serious handicap for getting effective constructive feedback. Men don't really want to have a serious conversation with me about what works, what doesn't, why that is true, etc. If they talk to me at all, many of them are either 1) trying to be charming, even if they have no explicit goal of trying to sleep with me or 2) trying to be encouraging, as if the deeply rooted problems of sexism boil down to "girls just lack confidence!"
I've had a PACER account for years and am definitely not looking in the wrong place. Since you've familiar with PACER, feel free to double check yourself.
Ms. Holmes maintains a heavy security detail. Men with earpieces escort her wherever she goes outside the Palo Alto headquarters. Their code name for her is “Eagle 1,” current and former employees say. Mr. Balwani, until he retired, was “Eagle 2,” they say.
Despite the meetings with attorneys, Ms. Holmes still finds time to work on her external messaging. Several weeks ago, she traveled to New York and met with the television host Charlie Rose, the person who recently interacted with her said. Mr. Rose didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
She has also been talking with Jason Blum, who was executive producer of HBO’s “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” about a potential documentary that would chronicle her life and career, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Blum’s production company didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
“I don’t think it was wise to have Elizabeth Holmes host a Clinton event,” Clinton donor Herbert Sandler wrote in an email to campaign chairman John Podesta a week before the fundraiser. “There are significant questions concerning Holmes and her company. She may come out alright, but it is certainly possible that everyone associated with her venture will be embarrassed.”[1]
Did they also fake the Record article reporting on the public fundraiser that Hillary held with the Theranos CEO? The email was just commenting on the actually controversial and interesting event, which was publicly available information.
Theranos is probably many things, but bringing criminal charges might be going to far. From 20,000 feet, it looks like an ambitious girl out of Stanford that got way ahead of herself and her abilities. This Company should be allowed to quietly recede into the sunset.
Theranos might have had the opportunity to quietly go away if the CEO were not apparently dead set on being dragged out of the picture kicking and screaming. Short of that, Holmes seems hell bent on proving she really completely deserves to be worth $10B and don't let the facts confuse you, her mind is made up.
Much of the sympathy I initially had for her has dissipated.
Too far? Everyone in a position to know the true state of Theranos should be publicly hanged for attempting to defraud the American Government, and by extension, the American people themselves.
The fact that the fraud was related to healthcare should earn them all short ropes.
You and my late father would have gotten along. His theory was that the death penalty should involve hanging people and re-using the same rope to keep it cheap. When it finally breaks, commute that individual's sentence and get a new rope to continue on with the next person.
There's an episode of "Murdoch's Mysteries" about the process of hanging a man. The rope was consistently reused, it was nearly as thick as your wrist. Too short and the man would strangle, too long and he would be decapitated.
We have forgotten tons -- like how the Romans made ice in the desert, Greek fire and how to bend mother of pearl to clad statues -- yet imagine ourselves superior in every way.
There are plenty of hard working, talented tech people out there with grit and integrity and even actual products, held back by their lack of deep-pocketed Ivy-league connections. Yet borderline fraud gets funded and gushed over by the press. If there's justice in the world, the Theranos drama is a sliver of it.