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Vanity Fair Blames The Failure of Theranos On Silicon Valley (vanityfair.com)
"I was only a day or two behind FBI agents who were trying to put together a time line of what Elizabeh Holmes knew and when she knew it," writes Vanity Fair, in what Slashdot reader PvtVoid describes as "a compelling story of hubris, glamour and secrecy about the unicorn Silicon Valley company that turned out to be founded on bullshit." Another anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Holmes raised $700 million "on the condition that she would not divulge to investors how her technology actually worked," according to an article detailing how Silicon Valley can "replicate one big confidence game in which entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the tech media pretend to vet one another while, in reality, functioning as cogs in a machine that is designed to not question anything -- and buoy one another all along the way... In the end, it isn't in anyone's interest to call bullshit."
Theranos employed "hundreds of marketers, salespeople, communications specialists, and even the Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris," as well as a chief scientist who eventually became suicidal. But then the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "discovered that some of the tests Theranos was performing were so inaccurate that they could leave patients at risk of internal bleeding, or of stroke among those prone to blood clots." A reporter at the Wall Street Journal says "It's O.K. if you've got a smartphone app or a social network, and you go live with it before it's ready; people aren't going to die. But with medicine, it's different."
He became suspicious after reading the answer that the company's CEO, a Stanford dropout, supplied for a question about their technology. "A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel."
Theranos employed "hundreds of marketers, salespeople, communications specialists, and even the Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris," as well as a chief scientist who eventually became suicidal. But then the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "discovered that some of the tests Theranos was performing were so inaccurate that they could leave patients at risk of internal bleeding, or of stroke among those prone to blood clots." A reporter at the Wall Street Journal says "It's O.K. if you've got a smartphone app or a social network, and you go live with it before it's ready; people aren't going to die. But with medicine, it's different."
He became suspicious after reading the answer that the company's CEO, a Stanford dropout, supplied for a question about their technology. "A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel."
Scott Adams (of Dilbert) sent two samples for testing and they came back with different results. It seems the scam was very very easy to detect.
Venture capitalists are mostly scammers. They buy into a *plausible* startup, regardless of the reality. One of the other sister companies they invested in, then buys a stake in this new one. Usually a tiny stake at a hugely inflated price. This gives the new startup a super ridiculous valuation based on that tiny sliver of stock. They head for an IPO based on this fake valuation and the crap stock is dumped on the stock markets and sold to unsuspecting investors. VC exit at a big profit.
The company isn't the thing they're investing in, it's the scam IPO, and that has more to do with the designer clothes the CEO wears than technology it makes.
Do you remember Groupon? Or Zygna?
The title of this post has nothing to do with the article or even the summary. From the Slashdot summary She built a corporation based on secrecy in the hope that she could still pull it off. Then, it all fell apart. The company did not fail because of Silicon valley secrecy, it succeeded because of it. I'm used to Slashdot summaries not matching the article but the title not matching the summary? That's an amazing new low.