How a $9B startup deceived Silicon Valley

I want to know what was wrong with the prototype. Why didn't it deliver as promised and if the technology can be salvaged.

I think the way I feel about this story depends completely on whether or not they knew they were going to be able to deliver on their promise soon.

One thing that this article gets wrong is the fact that they say it's not a software company. Do they think these machines are built mechanically or something? Of course it is a software company.

The kind of AI that would be required to analyze a couple of drops of blood and be able to tell what is wrong with people would have to be extremely sophisticated.

Not only that but they would probably need to start gathering a lot of blood from people to be able to build up the AI's intelligence when it comes to discerning the properties of healthy blood samples when compared to diseased blood.

These are the kind of questions that are worth asking. But instead we just have the media who wants to get the jump on a juicy story.

What Elizabeth Holmes did was fraud in that she was dishonest. But how dishonest and was that dishonesty necessary?

Like I said there is a lot more here than meets the eye. Otherwise she wouldn't be trying to get share holders to take more shares to not sue.

From what I gather, she either expects to get acquired (which means the technology and patents are very valuable but for whatever reason there is something getting in the way) or she expects that she will actually be able to deliver on her promises.

I personally think that she is an unsettling and creepy woman, but I do think that having a machine that you can go into a walgreens, get your finger pricked and run a quick blood lab, with "better than most doctor" diagnostics printing/sending out results right there in front of you, has crazy life saving possibilities.

I really don't think Silicon Valley was duped. I am thinking that they saw the crazy potential something like this could bring to the world if it actually existed.

So like I said before, I really want to know what is wrong with the prototype and can it be fixed?

Also the notion in the article that these things tend to be developed in open forums is nonsense. Big Pharm doesn't spill the beans on drugs they are developing until they have to when filing for Patents/FDA Approval. And Doctors don't spill the beans on procedures/tools they are developing until they have to when filing for patents/FDA approval.

You have to be very skeptical when dealing with these kind of disruptive "job killing" innovations. Who needs to go to their local doctor when medicine is become more and more electronically driven?

Some day people will be able to go to a CVS or Walgreens and step into a photo booth like machine, get a finger prick, EKG, MRI, blood pressure taken, answer a quick survey and have their prescriptions printed out in less than 15 minutes.

And it will actually work better at making people healthy than doctors do today.

All these doctors who spent $320k going to an ivy league med school and have 3 million dollar 30 year mortgages don't like the idea of being replaced by HAL. So why should we believe they wouldn't try to curtail any innovation that makes them more and more redundant?

Nobody likes having to have a person stick a finger up your ass to tell you whether your baby maker is still good to go.