The Secret Culprit in the Theranos Mess Is the Tech Press | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Culprit in the Theranos Mess Is the Tech Press

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153 pointsforgotmyoldpw84 comments

It's worth noting that The New York Times, where Nick Bilton worked previously, did not write any articles about Theranos/Holmes. (I checked)

The discussion about the suspiciously positive press strongly resembles uBeam (http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/kill-the-cord/): the wunderkind founder, the game changing product. But no practical proof of concept and a weak defense when others point out it violates the laws of physics. (http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/07/wireless-power-charger/)

I wrote about UBeam here.[1] It's come up several times on YC, and most readers are skeptical. The megahertz ultrasound part can't work in air; attenuation goes up rapidly with frequency, which is why megahertz ultrasound isn't used much. Their patents talk about 75 KHz, which propagates OK in air.

But the sound levels they talk about are insane. Their numbers imply a few kilowatts of power going in. You do not want to be in a kilowatt sonar beam. Maybe you can't hear it, but that energy has to come out as heat,

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10420539

There's a whole lot of people who want there to be a successful female entrepreneur so badly that they're willing to give a rising star the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't help that most members of this cheerleading squad seem to have little more than a middle school level understanding of physics or biology, and no desire to dive into the science before heaping praise on the charlatan of the hour.

I really think the "woman issue" is tangential at best, and distracting at worst. The simple fact is that a good deal of tech "journalism" consists of rewriting PR pieces and very little more.

Investigative tech journalism is a very rare beast, and always seems to come from major media outlets taking an interest in tech, not tech media outlets taking an interest in actually investigating something.

I would imagine this is because its rather boring to most readers. Good investigative tech journalism often just looks like Tom's hardware or anandtech. Page after page of technical specifications and comparisons to similar products.

Meh. Same things would have happened if it was a stereotypical founder. I think being female is tangential.

Look, fraud and deception have been around for much longer than political correctness.

The female angle is definitely a cherry on top, but it's not the substance of the shit sundae served up by Theranos.

There already are successful female entrepreneurs. I don't see them as linked to the bad press so much as the absolutely massive amount of money sunk in the company.

I think w1ntermute's point is that ubeam, like theranos, if working as advertised has the potential to become an ultra successful company. It's not just about having another good company started by a woman...but more about a game changing technology company founded by a woman.

Yes, exactly.

I still don't see the tie to sex/gender. Yes, it's a compelling angle, but I don't see it dominating the offering as interesting. Theranos has been pitched as revolutionary without even mentioning the founder--I only learned about her long after the skepticism hit hard.

The attractive, charismatic female founder is what makes the story irresistible to the press. There still would have been Theranos stories in the business press if the founder had been a middle-aged guy, but the number of stories would have been smaller and the adulation would have been less.

Holmes is not attractive.

> Theranos has been pitched as revolutionary without even mentioning the founder

That is false. Almost every profile of Theranos doubles as a profile of Elizabeth, complete with photo shoots of her in her signature black turtleneck (after all, there is no actual technology to be shown) and the statement that she's the youngest self-made female billionaire.

The black turtleneck itself is no accident or coincidence. It's a carefully calculated wardrobe choice meant to invoke images of the late Steve Jobs.

I think you may have meant evoke: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/evoke.html

Yes, there was a time briefly where the topic of 'Diversity' was the only thing the media talked about. It seems that the media sometimes get caught up in their own hype.

The problem with this indiscriminate propping up of women is that it doesn't work, or else we'd be doing this for everyone. But we live in a mostly meritocratic society because that system is better than indiscriminate merit.

So while they indiscriminately endorse any women, the women who merit endorsement more will inevitably be disenfranchised more.

She was featured in this one: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/eli...

Which was followed by an admission of the conflict of interest in running a tech-hype story written by the wife of a wealthy VC.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/conflict-of...

This is some incredibly bizarre reasoning from the T editor:

> it was my mistake in not asking her if there were any potential conflicts. This was an oversight on my part. I say this not as an excuse, but she is, separately from her husband, a billionaire (making her through marriage a billionaire twice over) and for that reason I think I failed to consider any monetary conflict in her case.

She assumes that rich people have no 'monetary conflict' [of interest]? What?

I think what they are saying is that she is independently wealthy - as such they didn't check into her husband in the same way they would have if she depended on him for money.

I take it that you are not claiming it is not wrong ?

Regardless of whether she depends on her husband for money, or if she was independently rich, there can still be conflict of interest.

I'm not claiming anything. It's obviously wrong, and the editor admits as such - I was just paraphrasing their reasoning behind the mistake.

Although that article is (misleadingly) hosted on nytimes.com, it was not published in the New York Times, but in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Also, it was written by Silicon Valley socialite Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, and not an NYT reporter.

And the author was slammed by the NYTimes editor for not disclosing conflict of interest throughout that piece (Marc Andreesen invested heavily in AirBNB through A16Z / Laura Arrillaga-Andreesen is his wife)

http://recode.net/2015/10/29/nyt-public-editor-blasts-arrill...

By the New York Times Public Editor, who isn't part of the normal editorial process - she's meant to represent the readers and handle their complaints about things like undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Technically that's a guest post (by Marc Andreessen's wife, where the OP already discussed the Twitter-blockings by him) and was not at the peak of the Theranos hype when the referenced New Yorker article was written.

The New York Times have referenced Theranos and Holmes in three separate articles discussing the company - you're not looking hard enough.

> After two months of being stonewalled by the Theranos P.R. team, Carreyrou told me an entourage of lawyers arrived at the Journal’s Midtown Manhattan offices at one P.M. on June 23.

Interesting how Theranos tried to threaten the Wall Street Journal. Threatening journalists, even through legalistic means, sounds like a particularly dumb move: if nothing else it proved they were on the right track.

"Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel" - M.Twain

Newspapers struggle to pay the bills, though. If it looks like a lawsuit will cost a lot of money, many papers will just walk. It also increases the cost of fact checking the story.

> If it looks like a lawsuit will cost a lot of money, many papers will just walk.

What is this assertion based on? News organizations large and small carry insurance to protect them from lawsuits like this.

Will the general counsel grill the newsroom leadership to make sure they can back up what's being printed and that they're not violating the law? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean they will be cowed by threats of nuisance lawsuits.

I'm also skeptical. The journalists I know would love a fight like this. The marketing advantage to the paper could be huge. And the US legal protections for newspapers are so strong that suits like this are very, very hard to win.

And that's just the general case. The WSJ isn't an ordinary paper; they can charge $400 a year because their readers believe they can get a business advantage. The moment readers think that anybody with a few lawyers can get a negative story killed is the moment they stop relying on the paper.

And if somebody did end up taking them to the mat, they're owned by Rupert Murdoch, a famously combative media boss and son of a reporter whose net worth is north of $12 billion. The guy started Fox News, which might as well be called the Angry Shouty Channel. I cannot think of a worse person in the world to attempt to intimidate with a lawsuit.

Look at the fun that Gawker [0] has had. Granted they're not as highbrow as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. I haven't heard of recent stories of the NYT or WSJ backing down, but they are now very corporate, and make P&L decisions.

There was a time when newspapers took higher moral stands, but now it's more about P&L decisions.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/02/media/hulk-hogan-gawker-seco...

Seems like the type of suit that would be tossed before hitting trial--IANAL but the claims seem laughable.

it's ironic that a supposed evidence-based medtech company lawyer-ed up on evidence-based reporting, especially at wsj. their lawyers should know better it's nearly impossible to stop journalists once they smell sh*t. so one of the explanations is that they just want to find the sources and plug the leaks.

“If you look at most tech publications, they have major conferences as their revenue,” Jason Calacanis, the blogger and founder of Weblogs, told me. “If you hit too hard, you lose keynotes, ticket buyers, and support in the tech space.”

I find it bizarre to bio Calacanis as a "blogger and founder of Weblogs" in the context of this quote.

It makes him sound like an informed third party offering his two cents.

When in fact Calacanis is less a "blogger" than a major force / champion of startup news via his "this week in startups" podcast, founder of inside.com which reports on startups, and runs Launch Festival which is exactly the kind of major conference he is pointing the finger at.

And the author of the piece Nick Bilton has even appeared on Jason's start-up show http://muckrack.com/link/5Gn7/this-week-in-startups so can't be that he's unaware that the outdated biline doesn't' make sense.

I'm a bit puzzled by this article. Sure, the tech media didn't question it very much. But then again, I never really associated the tech media with any level of serious investigative journalism. I doubt they have the time, manpower or ability to really dig deep behind the PR barrier. Plus, as the article mentions, they make a lot of money from keeping companies happy.

If I want someone to give me the lowdown on what's really going on, then I'll turn to the NYT first, not TechCrunch. Surely I'm not alone in this?

The fact that the tech press is a glorified PR copy machine doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them to real standards.

Maybe some will rise to the challenge.

The tech media was, is and always will be a press release aggregator and paraphrasing service.

It's kind of funny seeing this on a day when three traditional news outlets are screwing the pooch on the whole Craig Wright/Satoshi debacle.

That is the first thing that came to mind when I read this headline. The BBC article this morning on Craig Wright was embarrassing.

The BBC's news coverage has gone down hill rapidly over the past few years unfortunately.

Their technology coverage has always been shockingly bad.

She worked as an undergraduate in a Stanford microfluidics laboratory and happened to know a venture capitalist who was the original angel investor in Theranos. She is not the wozniak she is the Jobs because she can play the media and use them to help the company raise capital. Moving microfludics from academia into business is a great thing. The culprit is that the journalists did not even bother doing the bare minimum of background reading on the technology Theranos is using.

I wish the media would ask how much of the market share the company will have and if they plan on expanding beyond Walgreens. Also there were rumors that small amounts of blood easily coagulate. If that is true then do they plan on using a blood thinner or fractionating the blood in a centrifuge and then testing it? How much uncertainty do they have in each of the tests they are performing on one drop of blood? Do they have enough capital to narrow the uncertainty? Are they having problems with the FDA approving their testing? What will happen to all the medical lab techs? Will they be let go or is blood testing only a small part of what lab techs do? Instead we get articles on gender, turtle necks and start up culture...

http://microfluidics.stanford.edu/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab-on-a-chip

Anybody care to run the numbers on j-school grads at 'traditional' publishers v techcrunch et al? I stopped reading techcrunch years ago when it became clear they largely copied & pasted PR. Rarely do they ask competitors/industry pundits to comment, a standard journalistic practice.

TechCrunch became just another blogspam outfit after Arrington left (or earlier, depending on who you ask). It still has some name recognition, which is why you sometimes see prominent VCs posting editorials there, but it's a shell of what it once was. It used to be a really good source of information but you were right to stop reading it years ago.

I wouldn't use J-School grads as a particular proxy for anything. I've known J-School grads who worked for various IT publications (though not for less conventional pubs like Techcrunch). But then I know a number of WSJ reporters and op-ed (as well as at least one person who moved from IT trades to general business) who don;t have J-School degrees. There are a lot of ways to learn standard journalistic practice without going to school for it.

Juts like CS schools, I think the quality could be dependent on the specific school they graduated from.

This is a bit different. There are some accomplished programmers, software architects, etc. who don't have CS degrees, I think it's fair to say that they are in the distinct minority. On the other hand, I suspect that, among the top tier of journalists (admittedly difficult to measure), the majority--perhaps the great majority--do not have J-School degrees. There are better (e.g. Columbia) and worse journalism schools, for sure. But it's not the sort of prerequisite that other professional degrees can be.

Is it though? I've never run across an MIT grad so maybe the uniformly kickass grammers are hiding further up the curve, but there have certainly been grads of top 10 schools who I naively deferred to (as a junior, self-taught programmer) only to later regret that deference.

My point is I would expect to find a heck of a lot more "journalists" working for a traditional media outlet than in the tech press

Last week, I decided to look at the Glassdoor reviews. Lots of positive reviews that sounded eerily similar. Then ran across the first negative review that claimed that the positive reviews were written by PR. Then more negative reviews making the same claim. Then re-read the positive reviews. All the "cons" started to sound like "pros", if you were an investor or journalist.

The media is 100% to blame here... I think in large part because of how they treat female entrepreneurs, with well-meaning, but harmful attitudes.

IMO we live in a world where there are too few successful female entrepreneurs and at the same time people are very eager to see that world change. So as a result, if there is any inkling of a successful female entrepreneur, that story gets gobbled up by the press ad nauseam.

A couple of problems created by this that stick out in my mind are: there's a lot unfair pressure for said female entrepreneur to succeed. And a lot of female entrepreneurs who would otherwise be ignored, suddenly find themselves as celebrity icons despite having any real success deserving of such praise, which creates a disastrous over confidence and the "personality" being placed before the business.

Elizabeth Holes isn't the only one. Marissa Mayer was hailed a hero before crashing and burning. Less know is Sophia Amoruso, who despite only have a moderately popular online clothing shop (Nasty Gal), has written two books about her success and has an upcoming Netflix series about how "awesome" she is. And the press complete ignores the fact that Amoruso's company has gone through multiple lay-off rounds, has atrocious Glassdoor reviews, a declining relevancy, is being sued for firing pregnant women, and by all accounts is struggling to stay in business. All of this is true about Amoruso, but she still gets a Netflix series about how "wildly successful" she is...

Surprised by the downvotes. Promoting Holmes as the next Jobs gave the tech press a chance to show how it was trumpeting diversity and gender balance in its coverage of founders. To those that downvoted - would you completely disagree that this played a role here?

> The media is 100% to blame

implies that nothing happened here but the media overhyped someone. While clearly true, and I have no doubt having a young female entrepreneur was a good angle, that's not the story.

If anyone promised what Theranos promised it would be a big story. Could have been a 73 year old Doctor. No big needle draws? Tons of tests right at the doctors office? No more slow giant labs? A big breakthrough like that is NEWS.

Having a female founder was just one more bullet on the 'cool story' checklist. The hype would have been there without the female founder angle the OP focused on.

Saying the media is 100% to blame also absolves Theranos, its board, and its founder. Even when being overhyped they shouldn't have lied. They shouldn't have hidden things. They could have acted MUCH better.

They could have not sold their services while knowing they didn't work.

Absolute best case: they were wrong about how good their machines. But due to hype they kept trying and thought 'we can fix this before were caught'. And it just snowballed and snowballed.

I'll also point out the end of the comment tends to imply that women run companies into the ground or aren't qualified to succeed since all anecdotes are of failures.

For my anecdote: I've heard companies tend to elect women to be CEOs when there is basically nothing left to lose and saving the company is nearly impossible. Because by that point they figure it doesn't matter they don't have the 'best', some other proven CEO that happens to usually be a guy.

Thank you for explaining your point of view. Helpful.

> Marissa Mayer was hailed a hero before crashing and burning

Did she? Or was she handed the reins to the Titanic and then vilified when it still sank?

Could anyone have saved Yahoo? Would they have taken that job?

Marissa Mayer the executive definitely crashed a burned. She created no value for Yahoo. There isn't even one Yahoo success during her entire tenure that she is responsible. Marissa Mayer spent $2.3billion dollar on completely worthless startups.

Marissa Mayer got lucky at Google and will never get lucky again. She will never do anything important in tech again.

Could anyone save Yahoo? I don't know, but there are certainly people that could have done a better job than Marissa Mayer.

100%? So Elizabeth Holmes is blameless now? These CEO's and the press engage in what they believe to be a mutually beneficial endeavor. I think we can split the blame.

I'm not the parent commenter. However, I think he/she might mean that the media is 100% culpable, not necessarily that the media is to blame for 100% of the problem.

Good chance you are right about that.

The culture is 'to blame' if anything. The butt-kicking female entrepreneur / superhero is a standard trope now in Hollywood and TV. Being a young women, especially a blonde one, is catnip in "celebrity business". It's 'empowering'. It sells papers. It's also bullshit, but to think such a thing is a thought crime.

The funniest thing is all these 90 year old crinkly men being conned into investing. What could they possibly know about hi tech products ... they barely remember how to go to the toilet, or if they are even alive. It reminds me of old Cold War diplomats rapidly losing their mental faculties after a couple of smiles from an Eastern Bloc Anastasia. A pretty woman in a room of powerful men can rapidly turn them into fools.

Another instructive story comes from down under

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Gibson

She was paraded as a brave and celebrated App developer who overcame serious health issues by the Australian press.

and then it came crashing down.

The question is: does anyone actually believe Theranos is the only one? They may be the "worst", but I firmly believe there are a few tech darlings that get exposed.

Bingo.

What is different is that most of the future frauds will be explicitly financial in nature, whereas Theranos was a scientific fraud. Material misrepresentation of revenues and costs structure, overinflated usage stats - that sort of thing.

it's hard to believe people still clock in at theranos these days, no?

I don't think that the press can be blamed for the Theranos meltdown. All that's happened is that a bunch of investors are about to lose a bunch of money, and Walgreens got screwed. The investors and the guy at Walgreens were all people from Holmes' class (and people with personal connections to her and her family.) The tech press are also from that same class (or worshippers of that same class), and so they followed along in inflating the virtues of someone who neither they or the investors bothered to vet because white rich Stanford, fancy parents. Just because the tech press is terrible doesn't mean that its awful input had a meaningful effect on anything. If anything, the traditional business press at the WSJ registered the only significant effect; a positive one.

But it isn't like the tech press coverage drew in the suckers - it wasn't a public company. Of course, I haven't heard anything about institutional investors. Maybe the public ended up getting screwed in the end anyway.

The public is nominally screwed through their pension funds investing in VC funds investing in Theranos, fwiw.

My hunch is that Holmes, clearly a highly intelligent woman, has a personality infused with high levels of narcissism and sociopathy. Her intelligent, curious side was probably overwhelmed by her negative traits after she had some initial success with Theranos.

Two points worth making:

1. The original Theranos scientist who started the project - Ian Gibbons - committed suicide after saying that "nothing was working" in 2013. After Gibbons wife spoke to the press, Theranos threatened to sue her.

2. The idea of a needle pricking the end of my finger, just to get one drop (not enough for analysis anyway) is horrible. Far better to get it from an area with less nerve endings which will get more blood - like the usual place in the crook of the arm. The whole idea was stupid to begin with.

If done correctly, getting a drop of blood with a finger prick hurts much less than getting it from a vein in the crook of the arm. I say this from experience, as a diabetic having done both many times.

Non-tech press outlet: "Uhh, it wasn't us, it was them."

This is Nick Bilton, occasionally of the NYTimes. Definitely an insider, even if not preaching from the usual pulpit. He's legit and worth reading.

Formerly of the NYTimes, he's now full time at Vanity Fair. This is the guy who wrote the book (literally) on Twitter. Quite legit.

I do not understand why a rebranded geocities website to give everyone their own personal webpage, a 140 maximum character length bulletin board website, and glorified touchscreen bookmarks for websites are still considered to be examples of innovation. Facebook, twitter and apps have been around in some form since the beginning of the internet.

Lab-on-a-chip technology has the potential to be the science fiction equivalent of a medical tricorder. Every doctor could have one and give instant patient feedback. Yet the expectation for this start up is to get it perfect from the beginning. They may lose all their VC's money but I bet that DARPA would still bankroll them.

I do actually feel bad for Holmes. Her later interviews sounded extremely like someone who had gotten in massively over their head and had no idea how to get out.

She'll be stained forever by this, her name and Theranos are practically interchangeable at this point.

When will this absurd apologism end? Many people have gone to federal prison for FAR lesser frauds than Theranos is.

Whether she goes to prison or not, I don't understand how people have such sympathy for a CEO who drove her top researcher to suicide. If that happened in a movie critics would complain about the unbelievable mustache-twirling caricature.

Wait what? Seriously, can I get a link on that one?

Of course no one is going to come out and admit that Ian Gibbons's suicide was caused by anything other than the "health and other problems" insinuated by Theranos's PR flack. Also we have to treat every suicide as a tragic failure of mental healthcare availability, rather than (occasionally) a rational reaction to intolerable circumstances.

Gibbons was a top biochemist, hired away from academia with the copious combination of sunshine and VC cash that has long been Holmes's specialty. He staked a decade of his life and reputation on making the impossible real, because that's what she hired him to do. By his own words, he failed in that task. Then he committed suicide.

I don't know anything about Gibbons or his suicide. Going off of what you said though, just because he failed at the (impossible) job he was hired to do and committed suicide doesn't mean Holmes "drove him to commit suicide." He may have been working under immense pressure. At the same time, he most likely knew the difficulty of his task when he accepted the job. He was, after all, a top biochemist. Right?

Probably most people could justify a failed six-month project to themselves with, "you live, you learn". A decade of one's "most productive years" hurts quite a bit more. That decade looks a lot different in retrospect than it did when Holmes was selling it.

I'm not saying I would have done the same, in the same position. Then again, if I were the type to feel such a failure so keenly, I'd be more likely to be a top biochemist in the first place. Both parties were adults. The point of this thread is that Holmes ought to be treated as such.

I have a theory of suicide, don't know what actual psychiatry says about it. But it seems to me that some patterns in suicide that defy simple notions of privilege may be explained by impossible expectations.

White Americans kill themselves more often than Black Americans, but Native Americans more than whites again. Some very rich groups (e.g. Hollywood stars and their kids) kill themselves often, but also some extremely poor groups (Indian subsistence farmers - possibly in connection to microcredit).

If I'm correct, the sexism of lower expectations may be a contributing factor why women kill themselves less than men, and the racism of low expectations has a similar effect on blacks.

Native Americans, on the other hand, may be more or less as socially disadvantaged as blacks in the US (correct me if I am wrong), but grow up with romanticised notions of themselves from majority culture and (First-)nationalist idealization from their own, creating an image it's especially hard to live up to from social and economic deprivation.

Celebrities have a lot of economic and social opportunity, but also everyone knows they have it, and everyone's eyes are on them. Expectations are accordingly high.

And for the poor subsistence farmers, there's nothing like a debt letter to say "you should be doing this, why aren't you doing this?". Before, they might have starved, but at least it wouldn't be their fault. Now there's a formal legal document saying that it basically is, and the entire village is involved in pushing that lesson in (if I understand microcredit practices correctly).

You call suicide an occasionally rational reaction. I'm not sure if I agree, but it does remind me of a bug I had in a connect four program many years ago. It could look ahead four-five moves or so, but it had a poor evaluation function, so it would often find itself in situations where the opponent could force a win. When it did, it played randomly. I had forgotten to penalize an early loss over a late loss, so every move seemed equally bad to it. Maybe for some suicidal people, similarly all outcomes seem 100% unacceptable, and so suicide just becomes one random equally bad option out of many.

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