Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Seeks Investors For New Company (vanityfair.com)

There's a new surprise from the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou (author of the Theranos expose Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup). An anonymous reader shares Vanity Fair's summary of their newest podcast interview: According to Carreyrou, Holmes is currently waltzing around Silicon Valley, meeting with investors, hoping to raise money for an entirely new start-up idea. (My mouth dropped when I heard that, too....) I'm sure she will somehow succeed in convincing someone to hand over millions of dollars, especially if venture capitalists like Tim Draper (an early Theranos investor) are still out there saying the stories by Carreyrou were wrong (they weren't), and that Holmes was on the precipice of saving the world (she wasn't) before the media came after her.

You would think that seeing Holmes's duplicity wrapped up in a neat bow in Carreyrou's book, and in the S.E.C. settlement -- which, incidentally, mentions the term "fraud" seven times -- would force Silicon Valley to perform its own due diligence, and question whether the way C.E.O.s, investors, and the media interact should be re-evaluated. But alas, the tech world doesn't see Theranos as a tech company, but rather a biotech outlier... Of course, there is still a major criminal investigation underway by the F.B.I., one that could end with Holmes behind bars.
Carreyou tells another interviewer that Theranos "is a cautionary tale about the hubris in the Valley... there's certainly a lot of innovation there, but there's also an unbelievable amount of arrogance and pretending."

Comments

Freudian Slip

[hyades1]

Why is it that every time I see "Theranos", I read it first as "Thanatos"?

Re:Freudian Slip

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is why the settlement mentions the term Freud seven times.

Some people...

[MiniMike]

The phrase "A fool and their money are soon parted" is supposed to be a warning, not a lifestyle goal.

Re:Some people...

[OzPeter]

The phrase "A fool and their money are soon parted" is supposed to be a warning, not a lifestyle goal.

But you have to also consider "There's a sucker born every minute"

Re: Some people...

[Anonymous Coward]

No she has an established MO. She patiently develops relationships with reputable older gentlemen she has access to because of her family connections; she gets them by playing the bubbly granddaughter card. Then she uses those relationships to convince investors. That's how people like George Shultz or Henry Kissinger gave her the credibility to get money from people like Rupert Murdoch. And so on.

Everything is fake about her, including her low pitch voice, but as she gets older the "bright young woman" aspect which opened countless doors for her is going away, so before long her wings will be clipped naturally.

Re: Some people...

[Darinbob]

But the thing is, she didn't have the "bright" part. She dropped out of Stanford as an undergraduate, so no degree beyond high school. Unlike Zuckerberg or Gates, you don't just become an expert on your own in advanced biochemistry and medicine. There was no one with degrees in medicine or biology or a related build on the Theranos board. The employee turnover rate at Theranos was extremely high, so there was no one senior at Theranos with the relevant background either.

Her relevant background was essentially that she worked in a lab at Stanford with a respected engineering professor (not medical), and she later worked in a lab where she filed for a patent (b.f.d., it's so easy to get a patent these days).

The entire thing appears to have been a sham from start to end. Investors used to working for the typical Silicon Valley startup whose brilliant idea is "it's a social media web site, but the feed is on the left instead of the right!" were duped into thinking that could shift to a medical startup without knowing anything about the field.

She should be in a cell next to Bernie Madoff

[schwit1]

What she did was fraud, pure and simple.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/t...

Re:She should be in a cell next to Bernie Madoff

[HornWumpus]

She wasn't just 'in business', she was in a business regulated by the FDA. That's where it turns bad for her.

Lying to investors, eh, call it optimism. Lying to the FDA, producing unreliable results for real patients, not optimism.

She will get off lighter than a man would. Female privilege.

Re:She should be in a cell next to Bernie Madoff

[Darinbob]

Well, there are likely upcoming criminal charges as I heard it. As of now, only the SEC has made a settlement, which forbids Holmes from being an executive at any company for several years. So I suspect she's not at all allowed to collect money for a new startup.

And who would work for one of her companies? As reported, Theranos was a terrible place to work, Holmes and her boyfriend were abusive, firings were sudden and often, and past employees were sued. This was done to maintain total secrecy in order to maintain the illusion that they were building a real product that actually worked.

Walgreens even hired someone as a point of contact with Theranos to make sure they were making progress and double check that the science and engineering was valid. Theranos hated the guy and eventually convinced Walgreens to not allow him to show up at meetings anymore, which oddly did not seem to cause red flags to be raised. Pharmaceutical companies on the other hand quietly backed away from deals with Theranos.

There's a group of people who naively think that what's good in America are people with ideas and vision, and like to had such people money. However what's better are people with ideas and vision plus the ability to carry through and do the hard work with integrity. Any idiot out there has ideas and vision, just talk to the drunk sleeping it off in the alley.

Why the hell not?

[PopeRatzo]

It's 2018 and there's no reason why someone who has committed fraud shouldn't believe they deserve to have more people give them money.

Crimes don't matter, fraud doesn't matter, lies don't matter. We're living in the post-truth age.

Re:Why the hell not?

[fluffernutter]

The sad thing is, the people she is going to 'get' this way of doing business, and probably do worse.

Re:Why the hell not?

[PopeRatzo]

Especially since Holmes was a big Clinton supporter

So was Donald Trump.

http://time.com/3962799/donald...

https://www.politico.com/story...

https://www.vanityfair.com/sty...

connection with politics

[ooloorie]

Interesting company she keeps.. It's not just the Clintons, but also other Washington power brokers, Republicans and Democrats alike. These politicians publicly denounce crony capitalism and nepotism, and privately are huge beneficiaries and promoters of it. And you can bet that every single one of her board members and political cronies made off like a bandit in her fraud. When these politicians tell you that the system is rigged, they are speaking the truth; what they don't tell you is that the very people who claim they want to fix it are the ones who are rigging it in the first place.

And pollsters wonder why voters reject both the Democratic and the Republican establishment.

Re: Taking more money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would but I like to talk big behind a computer safely pseudo anonymous. This encourages others to act on my behalf. Sort of like a worse version of Alex Jones

Re:Trump is also a traitor

[HornWumpus]

The most obvious where the Clintons.

The 'Clinton Global Fund' was openly taking bribes. Their defenders are in denial to this day.

Nobody can come up with an innocent explanation for why the bribe flow went to 0 after she lost. But they continue to defend it.

Tattoo that defense on their foreheads. Make them live the rest of their lives, embarrassed by their stupidity.

Ah the American Ruling Class

[rsilvergun]

it's so funny to see them throwing their weight around right out in the open. They used to at least be discrete about it. I can't blame them though. The working class seems to have given up all pretense of holding them accountable. At least so long as they don't look like those "coastal elites" (read: scientists).

Seriously, these guys were faking blood tests. People could have died. They should be in jail.

Re:Trump is also a traitor

[HornWumpus]

Get your tattoo. Be proud of your willful ignorance.