thoroughly disappointed in the Shriver interview, didn't ask any hard questions, didn't redirect after her answers, didn't really seem like she was at all fully informed about Theranos
now if John Carreyrou had been conducting the interview, that would be another thing but I get the feeling that he would never be granted an interview simply because he is much more qualified in terms of competency in Theranos and its history and science relative to Shriver that they would see him as a threat
Shriver on the other hand probably came across as a 'safe' interview to the company, which it was
real journalism is so hard to find these days, sigh
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."
George Orwell
When the Chicago Tribune posted an article on how they started a lawsuit for Rahm's email/text records, I almost immediately called them to tell them about the lawsuit I'd filed for his phone records about a month prior after a year long battle with FOIA/IL's Attorney General.
You'd think the person writing the article would have cared about the subject. Nope. He was just doing his job. He forwarded me to the person who did the research/foia. Left a voicemail, sent him emails.. nothin'. No response.
I then called the journalist from the reader who did the red light camera work to see if they would be interested in it. The guy was completely turned off by the fact that the answer to his, "What's making you do this?" was more or less, "It's the principal of the entire matter." and ended the call about 20 seconds later. Bah humbug, I say.
Hey man, it's life. At least 80% of people are going through the motions, and that the default rate you should expect.
Thats not a humbug fact though, because finding someone who isn't going through the motions can be explosively good. It's like, a gold mine digs up a lot of dirt, but boy is it worth it when they hit a lode.
Nah, I totally get it. In a weird way, I'm glad there's been this much resistance, considering I'm too stubborn to back away. Every time someone or something pushes back, it's another thing that gives me a chance to say "This is why shit sucks." with an opportunity at an attempt to address it.
The things I've seen and heard, the people I've met and the ungodly amount of hand typed data I've had to go through... it's nuts out there and the rabbit holes always go deep.
It makes one suspicious, to the say the least, to see someone from a politically well-connected family like Shriver interview someone similarly well-connected like Holmes. The odds are high that they know each other and have reasons to scratch each others' backs.
my high expectations for journalism dropped significantly sometime right after i started my company, because i then realized how much money it took to even be mentioned in any press, good or bad.
I can't help but notice that Ms Holmes is now wearing a hair loose and a shirt. Having only ever seen her with hair tied and black turtle necks, I'm wondering if this is an attempt at softening her image in the midst of a deluge of bad publicity.
Not an ad hominem or personal attack, purely curiosity.
Very true, I guess the distinction I'm trying to draw though is between having articles talk about men's clothing vs. having comments on an article about a company with a female CEO quickly go to her physical appearance when the subject at hand is the company's performance. When Facebook makes missteps, I don't think discussion on them quickly jumps to Mark's hoodies.
what men wear at work is a frequent and unending topic of discussion, but you probably don't notice, because it doesn't fit your worldview.
... and if this hn thread were about that link, you'd probably be the person complaining that it focuses too much on men, and not enough on women. unfortunately, i don't have a quantum time machine, so we'll never really know.
"In most businesses if a man wears anything except a suit and tie it is a topic of serious consideration, and possibly a firing offense."
I don't know if that's as true as it used to be. Business casual has pretty much taken over most of corporate America by now. True, you might not be able to roll into work at a non-tech Fortune 500 company wearing a hoodie and jeans -- but you aren't expected to wear a suit, generally speaking, unless you're in the C-suite or in a high-profile, externally facing role (investor relations, BD/CD, etc.).
Suits are generally relegated to the professions these days: big law firms, banks, and what have you. I'm sure there's the occasional company (F500 or otherwise) that mandates suits for cultural or traditional reasons, but such a company is likelier to be the exception than the rule in 2016.
Chris Rock at the Oscars did a good job of this, women say a lot with their clothes and men generally don't. I'm not qualified to speculate on how that came about, but going to a formal event you seen all the men in very slight variations of a standard tuxedo and the women in a wide variety of evening gowns.
So when men, or women, change their appearance in dress, its generally considered a "communication" of some sort. Sometimes its obvious like the difference between dress uniforms and fatigues in the service, and sometimes less so.
It's pretty clear that Theranos is under fire and I agree with the GP that the change in garb and styling of the CEO was part of the message she was trying to communicate. Without specific guidance on that, we are left to speculate.
I'm not sure if this is the thread you were thinking about, but I don't see much about the appearance of the founder; rather it is all rightfully focused on his miserable failings and running his company into the ground: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327341
I believe him dressing up like Ziggy Stardust was discussed. I believe he'd also had a fashion gaff (cartoon character shirt or tie or something like that) in an IPO announcement for a different company that was discussed either in the comments or the article.
Unfortunately liberalism as a movement is not at all consistent. One would think that the liberals posters on HN would downvote that grandparent to hell and voice support for your post. But they don't, because Holmes is not supported by liberals for other reasons: she is White, blonde, comes from old White money, and tried to portray herself as workaholic nerd. So it's a free for all for sexism against her. But what do I know, I'm just an uniformed nerd who hasn't read up on intersectionality.
I've been calling this for ages since I saw Elizabeth Holmes speak at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar at Stanford 5 or 6 years ago. Huge vision, entitled dismissal of incumbents, and a story that is just a little bit too perfect. Following your dreams is cool, but only when they aren't delusions.
The first time I saw her interviewed, 2-3 years ago, I knew it also. The incredibly unclear, defensive and meandering answers to incredibly simple questions, the strange confrontational body posture, the paper-thin hints at more business partnerships and customers than they could actually talk about...once I started learning about the makeup of the board and some bio friends of mine explained the non-homogeneous chemistry of blood, I confirmed it in my mind.
I still don't know of a convincing explanation for all of it, but it reminds me of some first and second-hand experiences I've heard about other, much smaller startups, in deep deep states of denial while the company is literally falling down around the CEOs head.
Unfortunate that Theranos didn't live up to expectations. Bill Gurley writes that the expose on Theranos may have been the seminal moment causing reality to kick in for this tech cycle: http://abovethecrowd.com/2016/04/21/on-the-road-to-recap/
So in a way, it can be seen as a good and necessary thing that expectations are brought back to match reality.
One would think Walgreens would have done some due diligence when partnering with anyone. Wouldn't they put someone providing healthcare diagnostics services through rigorous testing to see if they could deliver on promises? I'm hoping they don't take providers' word when they partner with providers.
Or is Walgreens just trying to get from under the weight of theranos's bad publicity at this point?
Their CFO at the time has since gotten fired for among other things, getting Walgreens into this without doing a lick of due diligence. Evidently he bungled a number of other things, hence getting fired. That kind of laziness strangely exists even at large, deep-pocketed organizations where time and resources certainly aren't standing in the way of doing old fashioned work and analysis.
I don't think it was laziness. I think it was an environment of high-pressure short-term performance goals. It is said that a manager is someone who thinks that nine women can produce a baby in one month. I can only imagine how out of touch CEOs and CFOs are.
it's incredible that Walgreen, a public co., not doing DD for a non-proven, non-peer-reviewed medical diagnostic co, with a possibility of very bad PR. i would guess (simply speculation) there are some external factors, made Walgreen to skip that. that's probably the whole point for the politicians on Theranos' board, along with the DC connections (& Enron?) from EH's dad. and these 'external factors' also played same tricks for the other PE funding rounds. so here we go a criminal investigation is under going.
This device made some pretty extraordinary claims no one else was making. That alone should require some inquiries. It's as if Intel would tell Dell or Amazon or Google, hey, we've got s new processor using our secret new core and next gen x2 photolithography that we can deliver twice the flops at half the power of our current processors. Book your orders now minimum Oder is one million units. And Amazon Google and Dell pass on any testing. But instead of it being Intel it was some new outfit.
This article (by way of the WSJ) claims that Walgreens skipped their standard DD in partnering with Theranos, and that the deal overall was atypically structured.
Something seems a bit fishy. An uncorroborated source says WG skipped the due diligence part but in any event had they tried Theranos would have rebuffed their inquiries (because "secrecy") Could they not just compare and contrast results against known technologies, why rely on theranos's data at all?
Probably because they felt they didn't have the luxury of time on this one. They were probably worried that Rite Aid / CVS / other competitor would beat them to the punch, and figured that it was worth the risk to move quickly, at the time.
Test accuracy aside, isn't finger prick blood draw painful? I've had blood drawn both ways, and finger prick is very unpleasant. I'll pick arm blood draw any day.
I tried a Theranos test once and it hurt like hell.
The problem want the finger prick itself. The problem was that the nanotainer isn't that small and that they had to squeeze REALLY FUCKING HARD for quite a while to extract enough blood. It hurt for a while afterwards, too. And it was slow.
funny, i never thought about it (and Theranos seems to has never too :) - the smaller the hole you prick the harder you have to squeeze.
Wrt. the interview - if it were a public co. which i had stock of and i saw that moment at 0:22 - Shriver: "Do you think your company will survive?" Holmes: "Absolutely!" - i'd immediately sold it all. The delay and smile on Shriver's face when she in turn responds to question whether she believes Holmes is also telling :)
Walgreens i can guess is feeling how trial lawyers are gearing up for a class action on behalf of the customers who have had the testing done there.
Time, skill required and volume are all in favor of the finger prick method. And some people absolutely freak out about needles but would be ok with a finger prick.
> Time, skill required and volume are all in favor of the finger prick method. And some people absolutely freak out about needles but would be ok with a finger prick.
Except the pain factor. Finger pricks are actually more painful, particularly when you have to draw more than a single drop of blood. Your fingers have more nerve endings than your upper arm. Also, you tend to use your fingers more than you apply pressure to your upper arm (e.g., typing, using your phone, playing the guitar - all of those require applying pressure to your fingertips, which will hurt).
Even diabetics oftentimes prefer to use the arm pricks, and they need to draw a lot less blood than more elaborate tests need. (Not all diabetics, but enough that there are literally blood glucose monitors that advertise this as a specific feature).
Not disagreeing with you, just saying the finger prick has a lot going for it. In particular the lower skill barrier to do it may make it cheaper or more convenient.
It certainly opens the possibility of self administration up a lot more than a needle.
The problem with self-administration though is misinterpretation. Not to mention that the logic of cheapness/convenience -> more data -> better health doesn't always hold. The more features you screen for the higher the chance of false positives, and most people don't know how to put correct readings into medical context.
All of what you say are true - phlebotomy requires actual skill (try getting blood drawn by a trainee!)
But... I grew up absolutely fearing and hating the finger prick thing the pediatrician would use. I remember getting all sorts of other scrapes and cuts that bled and wondering why they hurt so much less than that thing. From a practical perspective, if I knew a test involved that (rather than an arm draw), I'd delay and avoid it because of the pain.
Flip side of that is a friend of mine who we could make pass out by having a conversation about needles. I would go for the finger, personally, but the least painful/anxiety inducing method would probably be the best choice.
I don't know what they're screening for, exactly, but there are people who live remote without immediate access to medical care. If they could do this prior to an office visit that may help. It opens possibilities that aren't already, and that's just in the context of the US. Think aid workers around the world, that would have to be easier than maintaining needle hygiene.
My child has diabetes and pricks her finger multiple times a day to check her blood glucose. According to her, it hardly hurts. Then again, she only needs a tiny tiny drop of blood and the lancet used to do the finger prick is very thin.
Yes, but assuming the nurse/phlebotomist uses an alcohol wipe, that's a non-issue (or, no more an issue than back of hand or inside of elbow). But, with a typical blood draw, you have a larger puncture, with a relatively lengthy and deep penetration by needle (vs a prick which is smaller, less deep, and quickly in/out).
So the not-too-subtle suggestion in the article is that maybe Walgreens might not be struggling too hard to shake off Theranos, because W owns a piece of the unicorn. Which isn't worth much if it ends up in the meat freezer.
(I have no idea whether that suggestion is accurate.)
I have to wonder why the board of directors didn't, you know, direct. In an ideal world this would damage their reputation as directors with future companies. But not today.
It's almost as if they intentionally stacked it with senators, govenrnment, and military guys. This is not a typical board, especially for a medical company.
I read an incredibly thoughtful and insightful comment the other day arguing persuasively that the whole enterprise of Theranos was created with the singular mission of glomming onto government for fat contracts, and that's why the board looks the way it does. That they were riding the illusion of a working product hoping to become entrenched.
This is what happens when you recruit your board based on who they know, instead of what they know. There are very few people on her board who could giver her valid advice about how to run a medical device company, they are all bureaucrats and politicians.
Probably because that would accomplish nothing. From the initial refusal to publish details for review, and then the repeated delays, I'm guessing the "Edison Machine" is just snake oil.
There's been a lot of speculation about this being bad for other health related startups, etc. But I don't think so. To be a valid comparison, your startup would have to be perceived to have a confluence of factors shielding it from accountability: A combination of long tenure (Theranos is 13 years old) + huge amount of funding (this co. has $750M+) + a very politically influential board appear to be shielding Theranos from typical consequences of non-verified innovation (contrary to standard scientific process) and resistance to directly address specific allegations of misconduct (in tech process, company operations, among personnel etc).
I would predict that it depends on where the money is coming from.
For VC firms that are experienced in the biomedical space, Theranos changes nothing because they were already suspicious of Theranos.
For firms that are inexperienced in the biomedical space, they have hopefully learned that growth cannot compensate for flaws in science or technology. If they continue to invest in biomedical, they will be much more careful in their DD; or perhaps they lose their appetite for biomedical and leave entirely.
I don't think things have changed for biomedical startups that are based on good science and technology and have an experienced team.
What would be wonderful is if the media learned a lesson from this mess. As I see it, they were a passenger in the Theranos hype machine.
"For firms that are inexperienced in the biomedical space, they have hopefully learned that growth cannot compensate for flaws in science or technology. If they continue to invest in biomedical, they will be much more careful in their DD; or perhaps they lose their appetite for biomedical and leave entirely."
Exactly, which will result in essentially a return to the status quo. The investors who understand the complexities and models of the various biomedical industries will continue to invest as they always have. The carpetbaggers will fold up their tents and move on. The result is less likely to be systemic taint or damage to biotech startups as a whole -- though this may happen in the short term -- and more likely to be a reduction in fly-by-night or sketchy biotech startups for lack of funding.
"I don't think things have changed for biomedical startups that are based on good science and technology and have an experienced team."
Yes. To paraphrase Buffett, the tide will go out, and we'll see who's been swimming naked -- but the people who've been wearing swimsuits will be just fine.
"What would be wonderful is if the media learned a lesson from this mess. As I see it, they were a passenger in the Theranos hype machine."
The media hype surrounding Theranos was truly spectacular to behold. One day, nobody's ever heard of this company that's been stealthily chugging along for nearly a decade and raising heroic amounts of capital. The next day, Holmes is on the cover of every business magazine, in full Steve Jobs attire and disposition. (I'm pretty sure one or two breathless headlines actually called her "The next Steve Jobs.") Soon she's headlining the lecture circuit and racking up more puff pieces and cover stories.
It's as if nobody took a critical eye to any of this hype, other than the WSJ. No doubt a confluence of factors was at play here: A desire to fill the "Great Tech Visionary" vibe left vacant by Steve Jobs's death. A desire to find the next great female role model. A desire to cover "hard tech," and not just the Nth food-delivery app of the week. And then there's just good old-fashioned me-tooism, which routinely plagues the business press: "Everyone else is covering this, so it must be a Thing, and now that it's a Thing, we have to cover it!"
I'd say that Theranos is so much of an outlier that it's failure won't really have a huge effect.
They weren't patenting nor licensing any exciting technology. They had no groundbreaking presentations of their technology. They had no experts in the field working at the company or on the board....
I mean, it's amazing they raised money to begin with
I'm surprised by your latter statement, especially in light of your former statement. Being blinded by passion, and having "no ill intentions", even if we liberally grant that much, is not the same as being properly considerate of the risks and responsibilities of as critical a technology as healthcare diagnostics. I assign a CEO direct responsibility for being aware of the efficacy of their product, and being honest about this, or at the VERY LEAST taking a proactive, candid, and reconciliatory response when the former is found to be untrue, and none of these preconditions seems to have been met from the news I've read.
We live in a society where CEOs are lionized for success, but often seem to escape responsibility for failure. Frankly, I don't care either way if we consider them to be the true guiding hand or not, I just want us to be consistent one way or the other.
I think what's happening to the company is what should have happened from my understanding of the situation. At the time time I can sympathise with the CEO because she has been working on that since she was 19 years old and it would appear that she is behind this with a passion. That by no means implies that she is not responsible for this.
In my mind it's just a sad development from that perspective. Something I would not have wished on anyone.
Working on end result properly is not the same as "wishing" or "dreaming".
My commentary is this,
The quantification of the relationship between her leadership role and the direct effectiveness of the product is quite different than many other successful founder/CEOs. It is that which blinded her from either pivoting or acknowledging the reality of low effectiveness. A circumstance which to others would be justification to shutdown.
Unless this was all well understood and then that would enter into discussions of willful negligence. A characteristic that has consequences as people's livelihood were expected to be affected.
The spectacle is negatively impact ing startup partnerships. The result is either more due diligence with all parties, which either translates to more funding and a longer IPO journey, or cutting off these less mature startups at the knees early from funding until "results" are evident.
Another question is will this situation coupled with general lack luster equity market enthusiasm be incorrect fodder for "bubble" talk (barring this a straw on camel back scenario - doubt it).
> I just want us to be consistent one way or the other
That does not really make sense, a priori prescribing how we want things to be. Assume a model of the world where the CEO always did something special to make their companies succeed, and where the failure of companies is always not due to the CEO, but due to the mediocrity of the other employees. That model makes about as much sense as each of the two other models you are proposing.
Respectfully, I don't think that's what he's saying.
If we want to look at this formally, we see he is stating three things:
1. That we seem to apply inconsistent standards of responsibility to CEOs. Are they ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the companies they lead, for good or for bad? In current practice, we seem to selectively apply praise and eschew blame. He wants to point this out.
2. He personally believes the CEO is ultimately responsible; however...
3. At the end of the day, he just wants society to apply a consistent standard, one way or the other: either the CEO is the ultimate point of accountability for all things, or she's not. He almost "doesn't care" which one we choose, so long as we choose one.
Now, you're free to criticize the dichotomy he raises in those points. Maybe you find it overly reductive or absolutist. If so, fair.
(Personally speaking, I believe the buck should stop at the CEO, insofar as she is the chief executive of the company, tasked with understanding and directing all of its actions. If she took deliberate part in any alleged deceptions, that's certainly worse than if she negligently allowed the deceptions to take place. But in either case, she bears some responsibility. Not the same degree of blame, but the same mantle of responsibility. It's her company, and whether she deliberately misguided it or was simply asleep at the wheel, those are both derelictions of the CEO's responsibilities. Sure, the BOD outranks the CEO, but the CEO has a much closer relationship with the day-to-day operations of the company.)
There are a few reasons I take the stance I do. (as a slight edit, sister post Jonnathanson summarized my broader point far better than I could have, whereas my below is more a "more on why the current system isn't great")
1. We are currently living in a world without the constraint I propose, in which CEO comp is often a pro-factum given and attribution of blame almost unheard of. I do not pretend that the system I propose will _always be correct_, but I do believe it would motivate better behavior, as tighter accountability often does in other systems even if it doesn't necessarily "make sense".
2. Given the innate ambiguity of most of these situations, who gets to make that call anyway? (fault of failure). Is it even possible to make? My bet would be in many situations, difficult at best; but there is a massive power discrepancy currently at play, where executives have significantly more control over message/direction/response than those they can saddle with blame, so I suggest structuring systems in ways that help offset that imbalance. Does this put more duress on CEOs to take responsibility for their employees? Yes, and despite what I conceded above re: "making sense" not being necessary, I truly do think that sort of responsibility does "make sense" especially in a world where as CEO you take a massive percent share of those employees value. To coopt an old turn of phrase, "No free lunches."
Perhaps it's just a lesson to have your science locked down and proven before you make all kinds of promises to investors. And if your science is broken, don't snow people over with a board of directors that Fortune-50 companies can't even muster.
As I understand it, that's how it works with the VCs who specialize in biomedicine. They'll provide limited funding to scientists with a credible theory to see if it pans out, with further funding to ideally follow.
Theranos got way too far without having to prove their science.
Experienced investors aren't going to invest much if the science isn't on a good foundation. Even if they would, that's a pretty expensive way to fund research: it's cheaper to fund it by grants or through revenue.
Walgreens appears to have taken a cautious approach toward terminating the relationship, perhaps preferring to wait until federal regulators impose penalties or the criminal investigation yields formal charges, either of which would strengthen Walgreens’s hand.
Essentially, Walgreens is playing the wait-and-see game before making their decision.
I believe all prick exams need some level of squeezing ( did one a couple of weeks ago, giving a couple of samples from the same prick) it didn't hurt too much though
this story just isn't very interesting for the meme-and-reference-humor-loving HN crowd. I assure you, they are around, working hard to destroy what relevance we strive to maintain.
Exactly. I do memes, cultural references, academic references, and everything else here to liven up dry discussions. Yet, I had no intention of twisting those specific lines into something else because the thread would just get retarded. Like it does elsewhere.
We're here and reading but just like HN quality level to stay where it is. :)
A part of me feels sad for Theranos. I wanted them and Elizabeth to succeed; more the latter, actually. If she had succeeded (I still hold out hope), she would have been a terrific role model for young women everywhere.
She did make some progress for equality though - to show that not just men can be completely incompetent founders running an overhyped company that never had any connection with reality whatsoever.
Unfortunately, there's a segment of society that will extrapolate the high-profile failure of one woman to reaffirm their misguided belief that her gender was part of the reason for her failure.
Agreed, her and Marissa Mayer make for some very visible, very unfortunate anti role models recently. Certainly doesn't help for paving the way for more women to join the top ranks.
I think there's a huge difference between the two. Sure, Ms. Meyer floundered running a big (struggling) company, especially when so much was made about "Female CEO!" But really, her "failure" is pretty average when it comes to corporate executive misadventure; nothing she did makes her unworthy of being a role-model.
Ms. Holmes, on the other hand, may have overseen a massive fraud.
Yeah, Marissa Meyer was hired to save a dinosaur from the tarpit, and has done a mediocre job at it. She isn't even that bad - she's no Carly Fiorina - and I've never seen her ethics challenged.
I'd go as far as to say that if Meyer at least manages to unwind Yahoo gracefully, she may move on to greater success in the future in a similar position.
"Yeah, Marissa Meyer was hired to save a dinosaur from the tarpit, and has done a mediocre job at it. She isn't even that bad - she's no Carly Fiorina - and I've never seen her ethics challenged."
That's how I look at it. I'm still a fan of Meyer due to the great work she did at Google. That's where she showed her talents. Yahoo was a terrible situation... aimed at the ground calling for "Ludicrous Speed!"... and she failed on an attempt to turn it into a winner. Maybe wasn't greedy enough for shareholders or something. They'll make less money than they wanted to. (shrugs)
Honestly, of the various failures, that's the kind that bothers me the least. People tried to do something good for all parties but screwed up. Least they tried and didn't just suck wealth out of the company while setting it up to fail. Like recent IBM CEO did and similarly left mess in hands of a woman who will take fall if she can't 180 it. Actually, I haven't even looked at that story in a while so I don't know if she's even still there haha.
Anyway, I'll judge Meyer on her next play as Yahoo is an outlier.
We tend to judge many simply because they happen to find themselves on an uneven playing field. In Meyer's case, it was both the tailwind of the Google juggernaut, and the headwind of Yahoo. But what of the thousands who are on the level playing field that we never hear of?
That's a great point. It warrants a reply. Well, they're mostly screwed due to fate. You know that part. Far as Meyer, what I considered interesting about her success was that Google only tried to hire geniuses and such. So, the average person in management might be asked about some run of the mill problem or strategy. Whereas, she had to be the gatekeeper and/or internal sponsor of all kinds of crap Googlers came up with that was anywhere from out of touch to clever to on another level.
Just got her a boost in my mind. From another perspective, it might have been easy for her if she was a non-geek with the ability to drill through people's BS. They'd have a disadvantage against her that people at C-level or non-geek management might not have. That's another angle I thought about.
She is a great tech role model that built a thriving maker business from scratch. She didn't have the connections to drop out of school so she finished her BS and MS at MIT.
There are plenty of phenomenal female role models out there. I had three women on my committee in grad school. One co-directing a major research center. One a successful entrepreneur and one a new upcoming research associate.
Anyone looking for strong female role models just needs to open their eyes.
This is a good point. Today's current tech role models, both male and female, are sending the unfortunate message: "Be born rich, have daddy pay for you to go to Stanford or Harvard, party a lot and make friends with rich future investors there, and you too can become a successful tech founder!"
Maybe it's just me seeing the past through rose-colored glasses, but it seems that the "Work hard and know technology" founders were more common in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, in contrast to today's "Party hard and know rich people" founders.
I think the "work hard and know technology founders" have always been around. But honestly, isn't this somewhat of a self-selection bias and something that remarks on the monotony of modern university?
If you're a highly driven and entrepreneurial individual, are you going to stick around for 4+ years of enforced pace higher education?
You might be more inclined to stick around and finish if you didn't have familial support to fall back on if your entrepreneurial plans failed and you didn't have the credentials to secure traditional employment. Dropping out lets you get started on entrepreneurial plans sooner, but could leave you in a risky spot later if they aren't a success.
Except, Bill Gates actually brought a revolutionary product to market. In contrast, Holmes has spent years claiming she was going to do that and reveling in being a media darling while doing a lot of really questionable things.
in what way would she have been a role model? some evidence that being a young woman from an ultra-privileged background where high level patronage by deep state power brokers is your path to success? yeah, sure, she really "beat the odds" on that one.
in fact I think that the current pending implosion of Theranos is making a good role model of her in a way she probably never intended or desired. she is a role model of what not to do: rely on insider connections to carry a fundamentally flawed (and possibly fraudulent) business plan.
She'll likely personally emerge mostly unscathed, still ultra-privileged, still a celebrity, and all ready to go deploy her insider connections on another endeavor, so not sure how much of a cautionary tale this would be.
I think that attitudes like this are part of what allowed Holmes to con so many people for so long. As well-intentioned as it is, your hope for the young women of tech to be inspired has nothing to do with the veracity of Theranos' claims. A lot of the breathless fluff pieces on Theranos focused on Holme's gender instead of the technology.
I think it's to blame more on her privileged, connected background than her gender. Her gender was just something to focus on due to her lack of any other accomplishments; there's no shortage of golden white boys being elevated in the tech/mainstream media on a cloud of nothing.
But she lacks both ethics and expertise. Aren't those the things that make a role model - or is it just a turtleneck, a presentable face, and a decent speaking voice?
Wouldn't a better role model be any ethical person on the planet?
>If she had succeeded (I still hold out hope), she would have been a terrific role model for young women everywhere.
What a bizarre comment.
Yeah, if only she had succeeded rather than running a company which may have fraudulently deceived investors and is now under criminal investigation. So, she's pretty much the opposite of a "terrific role model", no? If this wasn't a SV darling, I'm quite sure this community would be calling for her head.
I think she would be an absolutely terrible role model. She is a college dropout who built her company on marketing and unicorn farts without taking the time, or apparently even caring whether the science is right or wrong. We don't need role models like that. That's not something to aspire to. We already have lots of great role models in medicine and the biological sciences, including women with an entrepreneurial bent like Anne Wojcicki.
Why so much negative press about a diagnostic company? Most people would struggle to name 1 of these save for having to get a drug test or something. It just seems odd. Like some sort of vendeta to crush this company.
How many diagnostic companies have tried to make the same claims as Theranos without having a profitable business? Theranos punched far above its weight when it came to fundraising and garnering media hype. The downside of such an approach is that if you goof up, you are that much of a spectacle. Or to paraphrase Jesus, those to whom much is given, much is expected.
I dunno...diagnostic companies can determine whether or not you get a job, get insurance, are exonerated of a crime, determine what diseases you might be subject to. Seems like thing you might give a fuck about. And this is a company that claims it can manage that and a lot more, and has failed. Dunno...it gives me pause...
now if John Carreyrou had been conducting the interview, that would be another thing but I get the feeling that he would never be granted an interview simply because he is much more qualified in terms of competency in Theranos and its history and science relative to Shriver that they would see him as a threat
Shriver on the other hand probably came across as a 'safe' interview to the company, which it was
real journalism is so hard to find these days, sigh
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." George Orwell