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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.
I wish the investors lost the full $10B...
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.
here in America we don't spill the blood of kings, and she was very well connected with the American equivalent of royalty.
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The investors in Theranos were an example of people being extremely ignorant of technology. Someone who understood would ask a few questions and immediately determine something was wrong.
An example of someone who asked a few questions in 2013: Bill Maris: Here's why Google Ventures didn't invest in Theranos (Oct. 20, 2015 article)
Quote:
"We looked at it a couple times, but there was so much hand-waving -- like, Look over here! -- that we couldn't figure it out," Maris tells Business Insider. "So, we just had someone from our life-science investment team go into Walgreens and take the test. And it wasn't that difficult for anyone to determine that things may not be what they seem here."
Her trial is scheduled to start later this year.
https://www.justice.gov/file/1072521/download
There were a lot of people whose blood work went through this scam and may have had all sorts of false negatives that caused them harm or death.
While I sympathize with the investors, its the patients that I feel far more sorry for. You can work another day to make another dollar. You can't undo the type of harm that false blood tests can create.
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.
It was basically clear to me when the media heralded her as the the superior female mind the world had obviously waiting for, when her actual education and work history showed that she was way lacking in experience and education to get a complicated real-world product done.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Yes, I am implying all that. Plus I am calling out Musk for being an asshole calling a rescuer a "child rapist". If you have any more questions please let me know.
if rich investors lost money. If it was your everyday peon investor, nothing will happen to her. Rich people only go to jail if they rip off other rich people.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
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.
They understand money.
The techies are (allegedly) doing cutting-edge tech, so it's not unreasonable for them to claim that only a handful of people, including them but not including the VCs, understand this hot new tech thing.
If a non-specialist DID understand it, so many specialists in the field would also understand it that, if it had suddenly become practical, it would be a many-horse race for the window that no more than three can get through before it closes. The VCs want to be in a one-horse or only-a-couple-horses race, so they have a good chance of getting a profit on their investment.
Or at least that's what the techies want the VCs to think. B-)
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 how much did they pay you for the consult that let them salvage some of their $40M from the wreckage rather than throw more millions at it?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Nice try, Elon. The rescuer spent nearly all the time in the caves, actually doing the hard and heroic work of saving all those boys lives. He's a world expert on cave diving with decades of experience. His Thai girlfriend is 40, and there's zero evidence of paedophilia. He called out Elon for what he was doing, interfering with a complex rescue operation with a useless and impractical (at this point) toy, and he got all the boys out. Offending a billionaire is no reason to be baselessly accused of paedophilia. Musk should be utterly ashamed of his terrible conduct.
Always good to hear the feminist take on things.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it