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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

It's not like they do due diligence on any of the medication, supplements, or medical devices they sell, so why would you expect it for medical tests?

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.

W put $50,000,000.00 in EH's T without doing due diligence. Normal people would even take a second look at the bowl before flushing the toilet.

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.

Affinity fraud.

Yeah, It's not uncommon for execs who want some hip deal to happen to push super hard to shorten or eliminate diligence.

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