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Comment by taneem | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we are going to see Theranos pivot to becoming a conventional medical technology company, probably focusing on lab tech for blood work analysis etc. They are likely to disappear from public consciousness until we hear about an acquisition by a Siemens type company.

They got here through hype, smoke and mirrors, but they now have the capital, social network and core organizational processes in place to do this and it is a rational path to recouping time and $ investments from everyone involved.

However it will be difficult/impossible for this to pivot to happen without Elizabeth Holmes' resignation.

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There is damaged and there is zombie state. I suspect Theranos is in the zombie state, too wealthy to fold but it is really no longer alive. Damage you can recover from Theranos as a brand is so tainted that no other company with a successful line of medical devices will ever want to be associated with them for fear of getting contaminated by proximity, and no customers will sign on for fear of being used as a stooge in the next round of fraud.

Any acquisition of Theranos will be after the book is closed and the assets are sold off. People working there will likely have a big hole in their resume's that they'd rather not talk about.

From John Carreyou on June 22:

https://twitter.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/877499269191782402

>Theranos burning $10 mln a month, will have less than $30 mln left after Walgreens settlement. You do the math...

Liquidating office equipment:

https://twitter.com/startuplqdtr/status/873385484860313600

Is @startuplqdtr a Twitter parody site?

>People working there will likely have a big hole in their resume's that they'd rather not talk about.

Where's the line on this? Is Enron a hole on the resume? How about Arthur Andersen? Do companies like Uber make the mix?

I live in Houston. My general impression is that for a good long while, Enron was indeed sort of a hole in the resume for a lot of folks. (I never worked there nor represented them.)

Enron definite yes, AA to the point where people pretend that they never worked there even if you knew them back then. Uber not yet, but maybe one day.

>now have the capital, social network and core organizational processes in place to do this and it is a rational path to recouping time and $ investments from everyone involved

There is no indication of this. Why would you suggest that a proven and humiliated scam company has these capabilities?

* Capital: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2016/10/07/why-thera...

Theranos raised $750 million, including $633 million last year.

* Social Network: Theranos raised money from a wide range of influential investors who can support the company's efforts to secure new customers and who stand to lose to varying degrees if instead Theranos completely folds, even if it returns the remaining balance of funds raised.

* Core organizational processes: the company still has hundreds of employees on the payroll, most of whom are qualified professionals in this field. It is not trivial to recruit and bring together an organization like that. It's unlikely that most of those hundreds of people were directly involved in the shenanigans of the company.

I think those are 3 assets the company would use towards a pivot like I described. But you can't do it without removing the leader who got them here.

:)))

The main website mentions something about the "minilab", here's video which shows the various components housed inside the Theranos minilab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc

A material handling robot, a camera, a centrifuge, a cytometer, etc etc.... it's like a really neat Swiss army toy that would probably be great in the hands of researchers, provided that this hardware has a somewhat open API. Presuming that it more or less works, it's kind of cool, and lots of labs (both proper medical and research labs) would probably be interested in buying such a thing and would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it.

It looks like a bunch of stuff put inside a box ... in a render. It doesn't look like any development beyond "we need to show a product idea" went into it.

Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should.

Really? Does it really seriously look like a render? As it happens _I_ sometimes create renders for my 9-5 of medical equipment (in solidworks and c4d), these Theranos minilab images look like photographs to me, not renders.

> Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should.

Oh, trust me, a lot of people will buy things like minilab if it's marketed well, there's a lot of money for these things. A common price for any medical research hardware of the serious kind is tens of thousands (my lab got a confocal microscope only recently for $200k; our sister lab bought a diamond turning machine for about 2 million to create glass lens).

I design custom instruments for startups and labs. No one will buy anything related to Theranos. No one wants a bunch of random parts in a custom box. Why the hell would anyone put a centrifuge or a thermocycler adjacent to an expensive precision instrument like a flow cytometer?

Wow. How can it possibly be worth $2M to make glass lenses? Is this for eyeglasses?

Making lens for optical experiment setups, with machines like these: http://www.nanotechsys.com/

> would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it.

A minilab will cost way more than that...just the centrifuge component cost is in the thousands. A lab already has this type of equipment...the expected use is for point of care...but which doctor's office will want to spend $50k++ (plus ongoing reagent costs etc.) for results that will be less accurate than from a regular lab? So maybe military usage? In any case, they have not released any update at all on it for a year.

I used to work selling and maintaining instruments primarily to physician's offices. They were all 50k+. It depends on the tests being run, and what type of insurances the patients have. If they have good insurance that doesn't require the blood sent out to Quest or other mega lab company, they can make decent money on specialty chemistry tests.

And yes, these doctors would order absolutely everything they can bill for as it was going in their pocket. Homocystine, and Vitamin D are 2 high reimbursement tests they liked a lot.

However as I always said about Theranos they have no technology that could possibly work for a wide variety of analytes, and this is already a very competitive market in both equipment and labs. They still don't have a chance. I have no idea how people were so fooled by this. A 40+ billion dollar long existing industry that relies on heavily regulated hard science is not going to be disrupted by a college dropout.

Do you know if any of their patents are valuable? I don't know enough about the field to tell.

But they've been at this since 2003 and have pages of patents, http://patents.justia.com/assignee/theranos-inc

It'd be surprising if there was nothing of value.

They are currently getting sued by their investors. They'll be bankrupt completely within a year.

Why not just pull your cash and invest in some other med tech company? What is their track record for successful product development?

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