Under Fire, Theranos CEO Stifled Bad News
wsj.com
wsj.com
This is her priority right now?? For a while it has been clear she is more interested in self aggrandizement than ensuring her technology actually works.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/9/11896534/jennifer-lawrence-...
The board will be very happy to find a scape-goat and get out with their own hides in one piece, and they're all past masters at playing that game.
You cannot make this shit up. How full of herself can she possibly get? The Adam McKay movie is going to be particularly fantastic if there are more examples like this.
Steve Jobs drove himself to work. According to Fortune, in 2013 HP spent $1700 on security for Meg Whitman and Amazon spent $1.6M on Jeff Bezos [1]. It's really all over the map. And presumably the costs go up if the company is exposed in scandal and investors are unhappy with the CEO or they begin to receive threats.
He had at least one armed guard at his house driveway entrance 24/7. I suspect he had at least one other somewhere. But he drove himself to work in a pretty regular car and didn't have guards anywhere but his home that I can tell. We worked in a big building that had cops on the first floor during business hours, so I guess that was covered too.
This guy is very private though, and you wouldn't know he was a billionaire unless you worked with him. There's barely any information on him if you Google him.
I'd say that a big security detail is the most defensible decision she's made so far...
I half-wonder if there's some government angle to Theranos that hasn't been quite uncovered yet.
> Holmes worked in the field with USAID missions in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Egypt, Yemen, Ghana, Haiti, Liberia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
> Holmes served in the U.S. Army, Second Lieutenant, Civil Affairs, receiving the U.S. Army Soldier’s Medal for Heroism.
thinking as a Russian, i can see how that can be a channeling of [investors'] money to the CIA friends [of the father, of the board members, etc...]. You know a typical cost+ [a lot of '+'s] contract or something like it...
Which one of those things is better for her career, do you think?
"In addition to making frequent media and conference appearances, she hired Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris to film videos of herself and others for Theranos’s website."
It's interesting that she contacted a producer of 'The Jinx', given that the series was ultimately a vehicle for Robert Durst, a wealthy individual long suspected of multiple murders, to publicly confess to his crimes. I wonder if she's perhaps planning a similar confessional documentary, in the hopes of salvaging some of her reputation.
Obviously this saga has thus far been negative for many of those involved - but I'm selfishly enjoying following the story. I'm curious to see how this ends. Theranos has hired some very good attorneys and I assume Walgreens and the consumer class actions will be interesting cases.
One question: If Theranos needs to protect itself from a criminal / civil SEC investigation, do the Theranos executives get to use investor funds to defend themselves? If so, who does that help?
Is this investor money being used to defend against a suit about defrauding investors?
> Ms. Holmes has told employees that she plans on rehearsing her AACC presentation with them several times before the conference. When asked by an employee if the June presentation was the first of these rehearsals, she said no.
> Since most of the data from the new studies wasn’t in yet, the preliminary slide deck she showed focused instead on a timeline of the company’s 13-year history, according to the attendee.
> As employees listened in silence, she showed slides about the several generations of blood-reading devices Theranos has developed and past partnerships it has had with pharmaceutical companies, the person said.
> One slide featured the NASA logo, which struck some employees as odd because no relationship they knew of had developed following a demonstration Theranos had made of its device to representatives of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration several years ago. A spokesman for NASA said he didn’t know what relationship, if any, the agency has with Theranos.
I had to look this up:
He made her eyes looks like a weirdo on cocaine and steroids.... surprisingly it brought memories of this dude:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-wea...
>Ms. Holmes maintains a heavy security detail. Men with earpieces escort her wherever she goes outside the Palo Alto headquarters. Their code name for her is “Eagle 1,” current and former employees say.
I'd also like to point out that the WSJ is being quite honorable here in going after Theranos so hard. A ton of the board members are from the Hoover Institution, which has close ties with the Journal. They're making a lot of their own people look bad. And it honestly is pitiful that they sat on this board of a company that they clearly knew absolutely nothing about, beyond Ms. Holme's deceptive pitches.
While it all looks ridiculous from the outside (and media makes it easy to see Theranos as a bunch of idiots), maybe some smart people inside think that they still can pull it off? That maybe the odds of success are large enough, even still low in absolute terms, to take the risk to hit the jackpot?
Or maybe simply it's not that easy to find a new job in such a niche area.
How come when I systematically violate federal law regulators seem less willing to work with me to address these failures? Companies are not that big and mystifying. They are just made up of people and should be held accountable. Elizabeth committed felonies and some people almost certainly died as a result.
Corrupted capitalism at its best!
Absolutely you won't see her in jail, ever.
Come to live in America for few years.. watch some politics you will learn how they do it.
Sending people to prison for crimes they commit while being executives - imagine prison overcrowding if US do the same as Iceland - the country of 300K sent 29 bankers to prison as result of 2008 crisis. US is 1000 times bigger.
Why bother having a justice system in the first place? Hell, why bother having a society at all...
The sad answer is simply that prisons are a kind of security theatre. For that theatre to work, you have to appear to be imprisoning people that voters emotionally identify as threats,
Locking up street criminals, people of colour, and so forth fits in a world where the media and ruling politicians demonize them at every turn.
Locking up business executives doesn’t.
Oddly, repeating the sound-bites issued by "law and order" politicians does not magically persuade those of us who live outside of the conservative talk radio bubble.
What about the other employees/investors/board members? Are they hiding, or prefer to kill the sacrificial lamb instead?
Maybe the extreme, cult-like nature of Theranos is going to be the next story to drop. Or maybe their tech will actually work. Who knows.
- that an entire industry has been doing it wrong
- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup
- that once you have enough success you can just rewrite the laws that were slowing you down
- that no one knows what they're doing anyway, major projects are 100% guesswork, and you should just "fake it till you make it"
- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice
- that you can outsmart an industry before even passing or placing out of sophomore level classes
- that any self-doubt must be Impostor Syndrome, and so it's not worth your time to even check if that doubt has a factual basis
Well, I mean, of course, besides the HN comment section.
1. Google the title
2. Select the result directly from Google News
3. Right click on the article link, copies the link, put it in the browser. In the end, the link looks like this:
http://news.google.be/news/url?sr=1&sa=t&ct2=us%2F0_0_s_0_0_...
and if you really can't see it:
For WSJ I open a clean browser (empty cache, no cookies, no nothing) then hit the "web" link.
Perhaps Theranos hasn't published any research on the scientific foundations of their technology because they have nothing of value to show us.
Sure, startups are supposed to "fail fast" too, but whenever a startup actually voluntarily returns money to investors early it's the talk of the town. Nobody ever expected that from a startup with as much capital as Theranos got.
I wonder what kind of medical expert would risk their reputation to go work for Theranos at this point? From where I sit there's no amount they could pay me that would be worth risking my professional reputation.
Maybe replace the CEO or something. The core idea of the technology still seems like a good one. It just needs rigorous testing and consent.
It's an expensive to question to answer whether they are worth a second shot at this point.
My money is on no, the brand is tarnished, but some day the idea seems like it will resurface, and when it does whoever shows some more evidence of real technology will be quickly funded.
Holmes is, as I understand, not only CEO but also the majority shareholder and holds a class of stock with disproportional voting rights on top of that; so, but for a few layers of legal fiction, Theranos is Holmes.
can we stop and ask what the hell does that tell us about the nature of employment?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOanjl2g_14
"i was astonished by what they did there"
The labor force does not consist of perfectly-informed or perfectly-rational actors. The system is incentivized to keep it that way, and to make us think this isn't already an open-secret.
We already know about the nature of employment. The interesting question are: what should change? And which mechanisms that should be used to facilitate that change?
The answer seems obvious - the industry needs an unlimited Spotify model that has the vast majority of content providers, and then pays out to the content providers by total minutes read. Why this hasn't happened yet is very interesting to me.
The existing model for journalism seems to be similiar to if there was a Spotify type service for each record label - and you had to subscribe to 10 labels to listen to the music you wanted to listen to. This model made sense when there was a marginal cost (printing and delivering) - but that cost is basically gone for online readers.
I love good journalism from the WSJ, NYTimes, WashPost, and many others. But no way am I going to subscribe to all of them - even though I want all of the content. Micropayments seem like way too much friction, and a decision (is this article worth it?) that is such a pain for consumers. Why can't they switch to the Spotify model?
I used to subscribe back about 15 years ago when they first started charging. But I don't subscribe any more.
The problem is the bait-and-switch. The intro price eventually goes away. Right now a 1 yr subscription, digital only, is $174. But right next to it on the website there's a bubble that says "over 50% off". So the non-discounted price is $350/yr? More?
I get tired of shit like that. Charge me $50/yr and I'll pay. Keep jacking up my price and make me scrounge for discounts and I'll pass. Homie don't play dat!
Do you want fries with that?
Edit: for the future, you can just type "archive.is/" infront of the url.
I specifically avoided using a WSJ link on a story that made it to the front page last week because of the paywall, and it was changed to the WSJ link by HN admins because of the "original source" policy. I wasn't particularly thrilled with this because I don't want to encourage paywalls, but apparently they are going to be a part of HN for the foreseeable future. So get familiar with the "web" link - you'll be using it a lot.