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PixelArmy
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Re: Theranos

Tue Apr 19, 2016 4:03 pm

Don't forget the media... Between all the woman tech CEO rah-rah-rah and disrupting the evil healthcare industry angles, I'm sure Holmes felt pressure to keep dog and pony show going.
 
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Re: Theranos

Tue Apr 19, 2016 4:07 pm

PixelArmy wrote:
Don't forget the media... Between all the woman tech CEO rah-rah-rah and disrupting the evil healthcare industry angles, I'm sure Holmes felt pressure to keep dog and pony show going.

It takes two to tango... she could've dialed the media circus back or shut it down at any time.
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Re: Theranos

Thu May 19, 2016 8:13 pm

They're toast. They've all but admitted that they don't know WTF they are doing:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-t ... story.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherp ... 9af433b0f7

The train has gone off the rails, and a couple of the tanker cars are on fire. It will be a miracle if the company (and Holmes' career) survive the explosions and flaming wreckage which are all but inevitable now.
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tanker27
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Re: Theranos

Fri May 20, 2016 8:43 am

Oh Geez...I smell a slew of lawsuits rolling in. If Doctors did indeed "[make] wrong decisions based on the faulty results" that ultimately cost a patients life, well...yeah.
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gbcrush
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Re: Theranos

Fri May 20, 2016 9:07 am

just brew it! wrote:
It takes two to tango... she could've dialed the media circus back or shut it down at any time.


This.

I can sympathize that there are extra pressures of being a first of your kind...or a media centerpiece...with even more expectations heaped upon you. And as a rather non-religious person, I have no trouble to say that's when the devil comes to make you an offer.

Not sure she could have completely shut down the media circus, but she certainly made a number of choices. Whether those choices were to pursue success over correct practices, to not really know how the technical side of things was being run, or perhaps to know about how it was being run and turn a faux-ignorant eye to it, she's going to reap the consequences of that choice either way. THAT IS HER JOB AS CEO (and really, doubly her job as founder).


...and also this:

Forbes wrote:
The independent scientists Theranos recently added to its scientific advisory board say that they have seen promise in the data.

But Holmes and Theranos have dashed every opportunity they have been given to build trust. Way back in September, the company acted like an approval from the Food and Drug Administration for a single test, for herpes, validated its entire technology, when it did not.


I don't think she's a cook or an idiot to try and do something impossible. In fact, I think in a founder's role, reaching for the impossible is admirable. And these comments say to me that not only was it possible (probably possible), it was desirable ...and the market as a whole desired a shakeup of the iron grip Lab Corp and company had on testing.

...but then she chose the company over the product, and when it comes to a product as personal and invasive and just plain serious as someone's PERSONAL HEALTH...or millions of someones' personal health, I've no qualms watching her go down in flames for that kind of fraud, however unintentional it may have started out as.
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tanker27
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Re: Theranos

Fri May 20, 2016 12:29 pm

gbcrush wrote:
Forbes wrote:
The independent scientists Theranos recently added to its scientific advisory board say that they have seen promise in the data.

But Holmes and Theranos have dashed every opportunity they have been given to build trust. Way back in September, the company acted like an approval from the Food and Drug Administration for a single test, for herpes, validated its entire technology, when it did not.


I don't think she's a cook or an idiot to try and do something impossible. In fact, I think in a founder's role, reaching for the impossible is admirable. And these comments say to me that not only was it possible (probably possible), it was desirable ...and the market as a whole desired a shakeup of the iron grip Lab Corp and company had on testing.

...but then she chose the company over the product, and when it comes to a product as personal and invasive and just plain serious as someone's PERSONAL HEALTH...or millions of someones' personal health, I've no qualms watching her go down in flames for that kind of fraud, however unintentional it may have started out as.



It's one thing to protect your intellectual property but when faced with numerous questions from various federal regulators you have got to offer up some sort of concrete proof or even open your doors to them.

I still think she has perpetuated a long con even if some say that there is "promise" in what she/Theranos is doing. (That is until She and Theranos lays out, in detail, all their cards on the table. I find it very hard to believe that she can do what Labcorp et al. are doing with just a finger prick and a single drop of blood. Dont you think that if there was a way to do this that Labcorp or some other company would have done it already?)
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Re: Theranos

Fri May 20, 2016 1:05 pm

I still think she believed in it herself, at least at first. If it was a con from the start, it should have been obvious that there was no plausible end game that didn't involve her career going down in flames. She may have a case of reality disconnect (or maybe she's just really bad at managing a startup), but I don't think she's that stupid.
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Re: Theranos

Fri May 20, 2016 1:48 pm

I've followed this story for a while (I live in the valley and one of my neighbors worked at Theranos before leaving) and I still don't understand how the FDA, normally the most of lethargic of organizations (run by the federal government, so that's saying something) ever green-lighted this product.

I hate to say it, but I'm left to believe that the VC money applied political pressure to get this pushed through. In spite of all the warnings from experts in the core research areas involved, warnings that persisted through every phase of development from the first announcements through deployment, this fantasy of cheap, instant diagnosis persisted.

It was like a runaway train, with the wheel chocks happily removed by the insurers (no more expensive, annoying doctors to pay) and the track cleared by big pharma (who envisioned a faster/easier route to patient medication). Lobbyists for pharma and the insurance industry, working together, would be an unholy force in DC.
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MileageMayVary
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Re: Theranos

Fri May 20, 2016 2:04 pm

My feeling is she started this earnestly but she let it/helped it snowball well beyond reality. She needed to put the brakes on this a long long time ago.
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Re: Theranos

Thu May 26, 2016 1:10 pm

...and the bad news keeps coming. A class-action suit (for consumer fraud) is in the works:
http://fortune.com/2016/05/26/theranos- ... n-lawsuit/
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/ ... on-lawsuit

Also, WTF was Walgreens thinking? They apparently agreed to the partnership without any independent testing of Theranos' new "Edison" technology:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/craving-gro ... 1464207285
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11776 ... validation

It also seems very odd to me that Walgreens didn't back out sooner (and still hasn't backed out). The article says they were afraid of being sued by Theranos for breach of contract. Walgreens' legal team must've really dropped the ball, if there wasn't an "out" in the contract for Walgreens if the technology turned out to be vaporware.

IMO Walgreens is at least as culpable as Theranos, when it comes to subjecting consumers to the inaccurate blood tests. It would not surprise me to see them get hit with some sort of legal action too.
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tanker27
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 11:56 am

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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 12:28 pm

tanker27 wrote:

Dunno about that. Depending on how you look at it, the big boom could have already occurred, or is still yet to come. Popping the "Elizabeth Holmes, self-made billionaire" myth certainly has huge symbolic importance though.
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tanker27
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 12:31 pm

Vanityfair says this about the Forbes article:

Of course, the 32-year-old’s eye-popping net worth was always just on paper. She was never sitting on piles of cash or dispensing thousands of dollars from her turtleneck at her leisure. The estimates of Holmes’s fortune were based on the value of her private company, in which she holds a 50 percent stake. If Theranos liquidates—which is a still a big if—money is first paid back to her investors, because of the way shares in the company are structured. Holmes, then, would be left with little more than empty labs and the embers of a company that flew close to the sun on an empty jetpack.
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ThatStupidCat
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 12:47 pm

Hopefully she got Theranos to buy her a lifetime supply of black turtlenecks. Should have held off on the IPO.
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 12:50 pm

They have never been a publicly traded company. Which means the $9 billion the company was purported to be worth was a made-up number (also by Forbes, incidentally).
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ThatStupidCat
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 1:02 pm

Yes, they never traded but I thought there was talk of an IPO. I thought they got further than just talk and were within one month of an IPO but I guess not.

http://fortune.com/2015/10/31/theranos-timeline/
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 11:12 pm

A Theranos PR Person wrote:
As a privately held company, we declined to share confidential information with Forbes. As a result, the article was based exclusively on speculation and press reports.

Translation: "We're continuing our ongoing pattern of lack of transparency. You can't prove we're on the ropes, because (like our proprietary blood testing technology), there isn't enough publicly available information about the company's financials to prove anything!"

Never mind the fact that all external indications point to them imploding.
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DrCR
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 11:36 pm

What percentage did she start with? If she started at, say, 75%, then she's likely still talking away with a ton of green, even if that present 50% stake ultimately yields zero.

tanker27 wrote:
Vanityfair says this about the Forbes article:

Of course, the 32-year-old’s eye-popping net worth was always just on paper. She was never sitting on piles of cash or dispensing thousands of dollars from her turtleneck at her leisure. The estimates of Holmes’s fortune were based on the value of her private company, in which she holds a 50 percent stake. If Theranos liquidates—which is a still a big if—money is first paid back to her investors, because of the way shares in the company are structured. Holmes, then, would be left with little more than empty labs and the embers of a company that flew close to the sun on an empty jetpack.
 
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Re: Theranos

Wed Jun 01, 2016 11:41 pm

DrCR wrote:
What percentage did she start with? If she started at, say, 75%, then she's likely still talking away with a ton of green, even if that present 50% stake ultimately yields zero.

Assuming she hasn't spent it.
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Re: Theranos

Fri Jun 03, 2016 8:44 pm

About a week ago, just brew it! wrote:
... IMO Walgreens is at least as culpable as Theranos, when it comes to subjecting consumers to the inaccurate blood tests. It would not surprise me to see them get hit with some sort of legal action too.

That shoe just dropped: http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francis ... greens-too
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NovusBogus
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Re: Theranos

Sat Jun 04, 2016 10:59 am

It's a classic example of collective stupidity. Holmes, her board members, Walgreens, media, regulators, etc. couldn't fail very big individually with their meager quantities of stupid, but by pooling the stupid they were able to accomplish something truly magnificent. Happens all the time.
 
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Re: Theranos

Sat Jun 04, 2016 11:39 am

NovusBogus wrote:
It's a classic example of collective stupidity. Holmes, her board members, Walgreens, media, regulators, etc. couldn't fail very big individually with their meager quantities of stupid, but by pooling the stupid they were able to accomplish something truly magnificent. Happens all the time.

A couple of apropos demotivational posters:
http://despair.com/collections/demotiva ... s/meetings
http://despair.com/collections/demotiva ... cts/idiocy

And one for Holmes in particular:
http://despair.com/collections/demotiva ... imitations
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strangerguy
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Re: Theranos

Sat Jun 04, 2016 9:44 pm

NovusBogus wrote:
It's a classic example of collective stupidity. Holmes, her board members, Walgreens, media, regulators, etc. couldn't fail very big individually with their meager quantities of stupid, but by pooling the stupid they were able to accomplish something truly magnificent. Happens all the time.


It's not stupid but a maliciously intelligent scheme that grew out of the corporate mindset of "Never admit any wrongdoing no matter what, even if was blatantly intentional"
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Re: Theranos

Sat Jun 04, 2016 10:12 pm

strangerguy wrote:
NovusBogus wrote:
It's a classic example of collective stupidity. Holmes, her board members, Walgreens, media, regulators, etc. couldn't fail very big individually with their meager quantities of stupid, but by pooling the stupid they were able to accomplish something truly magnificent. Happens all the time.

It's not stupid but a maliciously intelligent scheme that grew out of the corporate mindset of "Never admit any wrongdoing no matter what, even if was blatantly intentional"

I think some of the stuff they've done was pretty blatantly stupid, and goes beyond just refusing to admit they screwed up.
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Re: Theranos

Mon Jun 13, 2016 3:08 pm

And Walgreens bails...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... y-theranos

That thumping sound you hear is one more nail being driven into Theranos' coffin.
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MarkG509
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Re: Theranos

Mon Jun 13, 2016 3:24 pm

just brew it! wrote:
That thumping sound you hear
I still wanna know if she "knew", or was just the "booth babe". Either way, she should go back to complete her degree.
 
ludi
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Re: Theranos

Mon Jun 13, 2016 3:54 pm

Seems like more of a "believing your own hype" problem.
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MarkG509
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Re: Theranos

Mon Jun 13, 2016 4:07 pm

ludi wrote:
Seems like more of a "believing your own hype" problem.
Uh, not smart enough to know the difference?
 
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Re: Theranos

Mon Jun 13, 2016 5:46 pm

MarkG509 wrote:
ludi wrote:
Seems like more of a "believing your own hype" problem.
Uh, not smart enough to know the difference?

Nah, more like really, really wanting the concept to work and having a lot of promising early data suggesting that it does, then building on that promise to the point that your advisers are reduced to a cadre of yes-men and any negative news items that filter through are just setbacks, not fatalities. Especially when you've got major financial backers and a national retail pharmacy leaning on you to keep delivering the good news. After all, who wouldn't want to overthrow a bloated, bureaucratic testing machine like LabCorp with a fast, inexpensive, disruptive technology? Yes, please; where do I sign up? *

(*) He said, recalling from some years past an extended exchange of correspondence with LabCorp, escalating to Certified Mail with CCs to the LabCorp CEO's office and the state's healthcare regulator, attempting to direct LabCorp's billing department to a nationally recognized insurance company. Amusingly, after the escalation, they figured it out immediately -- and the claim was denied in full because the allowable submission time had lapsed.
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MarkG509
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Re: Theranos

Mon Jun 13, 2016 5:55 pm

ludi wrote:
a cadre of yes-men
Since learning why, the hard way, I've tended to avoid women that have their own "harems".
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