Theranos To Close Shop (cbsnews.com)

Major Blud writes: Multiple news outlets are reporting that Theranos, the company that promised to revolutionize healthcare with new blood-testing devices, is closing shop. The company "was unable to sell itself and is now looking to pay unsecured creditors its remaining cash of about $5 million in the upcoming months," reports CBS News. The CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, and President/COO Ramesh Balwani recently settled a civil suit with the SEC, which charged them with massive fraud related to them seeking investment based on misleading information regarding the accuracy of their "Edison" diagnostic equipment. According to The Wall Street Journal, investors lost almost $1 billion in the company. At one point, it was valued at almost $10 billion.

Comments

Elizabeth Holmes should be in prison

[Anonymous Coward]

She knew she didn't have a viable product, and willingly defrauded investors. Whenever someone on her team approached her with concerns about their approach or strategy, she sidelined or fired them. She was not a leader, she was a charlatan and a crook.

Re:Elizabeth Holmes should be in prison

[ShanghaiBill]

She knew she didn't have a viable product, and willingly defrauded investors.

It isn't that simple. The basic idea of using modern tech to lower the price and speed of blood tests was a good one. Her initial intention was almost certainly benign. Then the schedules slipped, and the tech wasn't quite working right. So she fibbed a little to buy some time to fix the kinks ... but the kinks weren't so easy to fix ... so she fibbed a little more, and faked a little more. But more problems came up, the schedule was falling further and further behind, and it became clear that the tech just wasn't working.

At this point she faced two choices:

1. Come clean. Admit she committed fraud. Lose everything. Get sued. Give up her life as a billionaire wonder woman, unicorn role model, and business magazine cover-girl.

2. Double down on the lies.

What would you do?

Good luck with that

[rsilvergun]

here in America we don't spill the blood of kings, and she was very well connected with the American equivalent of royalty.

Re:Investors had very little knowledge of technolo

[N7DR]

The investors in Theranos were an example of people being extremely ignorant of technology.

I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.

One case in point (there are plenty of others I know of): a few years ago I watched a presentation of a cybersecurity company that had received a $40m investment from a VC firm. I happened to make a comment to a colleague after the presentation to the effect that the product was snake oil (which was the conclusion he had reached as well), and was immediately asked what I meant by someone who was listening... who was from the VC firm that had made the investment. A couple of weeks later, the VC firm flew me to talk to the company executives in their presence. The company shut down the next day. So the VC firm saved themselves from throwing away more money, but I never understood why they had given $40m to the company without bothering to get any independent input about the technology. It was hard to escape the conclusion that "cyber", "security" and a lot of waffling and some pretty slides were more important than getting answers to hard questions.

Re:Investors had very little knowledge of technolo

[Comrade Ogilvy]

A friend of mine has nearly three decades experience in this space and he said his company looked at investing in Theranos. Company policy absolutely disallowed writing big checks without seeing peer reviewed journal articles and/or data in lab notebooks. They were told: no way -- our data is awesome and too secret to show. So the conversation was over.

He found it very "interesting" to see which companies failed to follow reasonable and common best practices for the industry.