I was just looking at the Wikipedia article about her to find out the current status of the criminal charges (nothing new mentioned in the article) and was amused to see that her father was a vice president at Enron. Perhaps it’s true that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?
You mean Jon Favreau, but it’s an understandable slip.
Are you sure about that? This string of tweets from Jon Lovett talks about meeting her at a party.
Don’t get me started on the Walgreens/CVS thing. When THAT comes to light, it will make this story look like small potatoes.
The Theranos thing, and a reference to the book, were aired on “60 Minutes.”
I also read somewhere (sorry, no link handy) that when they were picking jurors for the Shkreli trial, they were having trouble finding them because even people who had never heard of him said there was no way they could be an impartial juror once they saw a picture of him - that he just plain old LOOKED guilty.
Nope, as Dewey Finn points out, it was Lovett. Favreau is a much more optimistic fellow, generally.
What “Walgreens/CVS thing”? Upthread someone mentioned the contract that Theranos had with Walgreens to put its machines in Walgreens stores, and that Walgreens agreed to this, obviously far too quickly, because it didn’t want to get beaten by CVS. Is that the “Walgreens/CVS thing” you’re hinting about? Or is it something else?
I read the book “Bad Blood” last year or so. The most interesting part to me about the Walgreen’s debacle is that they hired an outside consultant to help them vet the technology. He repeatedly requested that they be able to test their claims, Theranos dodged repeatedly, and Walgreen’s ignored the issue. The guy requested that Theranos test their group of people for something simple, vitamin D. Since the Theranos offices where they would be meeting was near Stanford, he arranged to have the same group tested at the Stanford hospital the same day. Theranos refused to perform the tests, and the Walgreen’s execs saw no potential issues with that.
Theranos had previously tried to get their machines into a couple pharma companies to take measurements during clinical trials. The pharma companies did an actual evaluation of their machines and refused to go with them. Since they couldn’t pass the rigorous standards of a legit pharma company, they went with the shoddy standards of a drug store chain.
There is a new documentary film: The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, that is screening at the Sundance Film Festival this year about Holmes and Theranos. I plan to see it next week when I’m there.
Well, I saw the documentary at Sundance, last week. It was very good. It will air on HBO in March. Definitely recommend watching it when it comes out. The only thing that I learned from the documentary that I didn’t already know was that Holmes and Sunny Balwani, the COO have had a romantic relationship since she was 18, when he was 37.
It seems like she studied the “tech guru path” down pat and then leaned strongly into it.
She probably spent a lot of time practicing her brilliant humanitarian inventor shtick in front of the mirror like an actor preparing for a role. If you watch a bunch of Ted talks, you start to perceive that particular way of talking.
She saw that people in the tech field often make promises that reflect what they aspire to do rather than what they know they can do. Bill Gates did that in the early days of Microsoft and Musk is famous for over-promising on timelines. It’s the opposite of Noah’s story: They will come and then I will build it with the resources that they’ll bring me.
She saw the momentum that hype, greed and the fear of missing the next big thing and being left behind can cause people to join in without asking questions which then increases the momentum. You can see this in the choice of board members; The board of a company often has less to do with ensuring the proper development of the company and more to do with incestual backscratching.
Bumped.
On Friday, ABC broadcast a two-hour news program based on the podcast.
And that documentary premieres on HBO tomorrow night.
Thank you for the info about the documentary on 20/20. I was struck by how charismatic yet secretive she was. And how dare anyone question the Kool-Aid.
At the end it said she’s still in Palo Alto, trying to raise funds for a new venture. On the one hand I can’t see how she has any credibility going forward. On the other she’s a smooth talker and I wouldn’t doubt if she can bamboozle more people for her flying car or tractor beam or whatever she dreams up next.
I feel sorry for the people who worked at Theranos. I would imagine it’s difficult for them to find new employment with that on their resume.
Long thread already but this sums it up. It’s not a 3 card Monte game where someone lost 10 bucks. It’s fraud on a massive scale, including putting peoples lives at risk with faulty testing. It’s certainly a crime, and it deserves jail time.
This is old, but are you insinuating that she fucked them? Because I don’t think anyone has reported that, and it’s really shitty to imply that the only way “c-level” can be fooled is through sex.
What I didn’t realize until I saw that special on ABC was that in public she always spoke in a low baritone, but this was an affectation, and her real voice was higher than that. Add that to the whole Steve Jobs black turtleneck outfits and she seemed to have carefully cultivated her image.
The other thing that occurred to me was how complex what she proposed to do was. I have no idea what the biochemistry is but performing all of those blood tests has to require really specialized knowledge. If it really were possible to do all that using a simple pinprick, why wouldn’t Siemens or one of the other existing companies with products in this area be developing it? And if you look at the size of a Siemens blood analyzer, it’s an enormous thing. And yet she claimed all those tests could be done on a tabletop machine. It seems laughable that anyone bought into it. (Especially as if they really had something, there would have been clinical trials and evidence provided to the FDA and I don’t think any of that happened.)
Theranos took advantage of a regulatory loophole for “laboratory developed tests.” If a company develops a test and uses it themselves in their own lab (versus selling the test to other labs), it doesn’t need FDA approval. It was created to support research hospitals, who would typically publish their results for peer verification. But Theranos and several other startups took advantage of this under the guise of protecting trade secrets.
OK, that explains something mentioned in the ABC news story. They were talking about how Walgreens stores in Southern California had Theranos blood draw stations but instead of the tests being processed right there in the store, the samples were Fedexed to Palo Alto.
It was more of a joke, but please, I am not saying she fucked anyone. But, a charismatic and easy-on-the-eyes female was able to get a number of supposedly smart business people to invest large amounts of money and got others to not do as thorough a job as they were supposed to do, in order to further the prospects for her shady business. What do you think went on here?
The guys she went to can pay for better sex than she could deliver. They’re horny for money, that’s the promise she dangled in front of them. I’m sure some of them were a little flattered by attention from a young woman, but they didn’t get rich like that acting like old fools.
it’s possible to do a blood test with a drop of blood, diabetics like me do it all the time at home for blood sugar . And the device that does it is 2 inches long and the results are back in 5 seconds. That technology has been around for decades. It’s a bigger problem to do many tests like she was claiming