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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Someone needs to make an anthology of first-person stories about trying out Theranos. I actually thought the OP article was by John Carreyrou because I saw it in his tweets (and it makes sense that they'd pull the fire alarm upon seeing him), but it's by a reporter (Jenny Gold) from Kaiser Health News, who apparently visited there (Nov 2014) before Carreyrou's WSJ investigation was published in October 2015.

The only other stories I can think of are:

Eric Lakin (DeciBio Consulting), 10/2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/what-...

Jean-Louis Gassee (former Apple exec), 10/2015: https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-accou...

Melia Robinson (Business Insider), 10/2015: http://www.businessinsider.com/i-tried-theranos-2015-10

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I would also love to see a survey of the journalism on this. We see now that Theranos's stuff never worked. But tech press is famously uncritical. It seems like there's an opportunity for all of us to learn something here about how we were so easily misled.

Many people were skeptical, even right here on HN. Sometimes, their voices are drowned out by those that like to accuse the skeptical of being pessimistic. Optimism can be inherently unscientific--it can often be a manifestation of what we want rather than what is scientifically likely. To me, the battle has always been between optimism and realism.

The seems to be the oldest post on HN (Sept 8 2013, 211 upvotes, 113 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349

It doesn't feel that much more skeptical than typical HN threads about new companies. And skepticism/confusion was going to be more prevalent given how few HN users (relatively speaking) are in the health field.

Funny enough, if you scroll down far enough, you run into a comment that sounds like it came from a prophet. Or someone experienced in the field:

> The company is all hot air. They have a board full of retired military figure heads that have no experience in medical devices or retail services. Additionally, they do not have any products to show. Look at their patents. They are all very general and broad. There has been NO FDA CLEARANCE for anything they are doing, which raises legal questions. Speaking of legal, search for lawsuits they are involved in. Their core technology is not even theirs. They stole it from someone else.

That the board was heavy DC/military was well-known, or at least public. But I don't think it was well known that Theranos was heavily reliant on using other technology.

Sadly, that Theranos critique came from a one-use throwaway account. So likely an insider (or jealous competitor)?

Filing 'broad' patents is pretty typical. I see that they have 119 patents under the Theranos name. To think of all the work and cooperation that obtaining those patents required, is pretty mind-boggling if in fact it was all bogus. If this is the massive fraud that is being alleged by journalists (and the SEC), then it would require a massive conspiracy to effectuate it. To only hold the CEO accountable in a case like this seems to be lacking resolution. There are other bad actors here that need to be held accountable, much as in Enron. I'm sure many (guilty & innocent) employees are paying a financial price but it appears that more could be done on the consequences side of things.

I'm not there comment you referene, but for around three or four years I have been using theranos' board as a teaching tool in undergraduate entrepreneurship courses.

You mean teaching what not to do, I hope?

Its not about teaching what to do or not to do.

Its about teaching how to evaluate what your company needs and what your board can provide. It's about vision and evaluation rather than correctness.

Huh? The board was a major success, the only thing Theranos had going for it.

Typically we pragmatists consider guiding the company to avoid implosion as a criterion for a successful board.

Once you've got a company with no product and you're committing fraud to stay alive, what would the point be of staffing a board to tell you to kill yourself? What would you get out of that?

Do you think Theranos just didn't realize anything was wrong because the board didn't tell them?

The reason Theranos was always a fraud is it is well known (as in for decades) that you can’t get reliable sampling from a finger prick sample even with a perfect detector.

The reason why is that the blood from a finger prick is a random mixture of veinous and arterial blood with a variable amount of cell debris and contamination from what is on the skin. Not even Kissinger (sorry I mean Lucifer) could give you an accurate diagnosis based on finger prick.

Noble peace prize winner ;)

(I agree with your sentiment, just pointed out this to remind people that these prizes are not given by God)

I don't think it's primarily about optimism vs realism.

Those are attitudes, and I think the matter is more epistemological - about what valid conclusions we can draw based on the known details.

For example, if we have incomplete information and we can't draw clear conclusions from it, rather than thinking of what sort of attitude we should take towards it (or optimistic vs cynical) -- what we think is likely the case -- our first step should be to admit the incomplete information and be agnostic about what's actually the truth of the matter.

If there are particular reasons for thinking one option (eg fraud) is likely then you can list first reasons and the facts that support them. Doing so doesn't and shouldn't have to involve an attitude like realism or cynicism.

One of those techniques is on display here: make it absolutely clear that a journalist will have no access unless they relinquish editorial control and remain unswervingly positive. This is what should have been reported at the time, but wasn't.

Yes. The PR people were so casual about attempting to control the story that I have to think they normally got away with it.

In some ways, the "let a thousand flowers bloom" effect that the Internet has on journalism has made this worse. The more options a PR person has for getting stories out, the less power any individual reporter has.

Theranos is an interesting case. Benedict Evans tweeted something interesting the other week [0], how Theranos, unlike virtually every other Silicon Valley startups, was very East Coast in style. Particularly with its board full of old, famous politicians and DC figures like Kissinger and General Mattis.

I didn't really hear much about it until the WSJ blowup, but my perception was that Theranos wasn't in whatever scene that other startups are in when they get coverage from TechCrunch, etc. I know Tim Draper was an early VC backer (his daughter was childhood friends with Elizabeth Holmes), but did other Silicon VC know much about Theranos?

I know Theranos did end up getting TechCrunch-west-coast-style coverage (I mean, before WSJ blew it up). But I'm pretty sure that its very first press splashes were with the Wall Street Journal in Sept. 2013 [1] and then the New Yorker in Dec. 2014 [2].

The WSJ article was very interesting. Not just because it's ironic, given that a WSJ investigative reporter would be taking Theranos down. But because of the setup. It was weekend interview feature assigned to a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial board member. And, unlike the New Yorker piece, was almost entirely a puff piece. Interestingly enough, though, the author describes the experience of having blood drawn via the fingerstick/nanotainer setup (i.e. the tech Theranos was aiming for).

Having your first public splash in the WSJ Weekend Magazine seems like a very East Coast thing. Amusingly, when Theranos was burning down, it was revealed that Rupert Murdoch had a $125 million stake in Theranos [3]. Which probably explains the WSJ puff piece, since Murdoch owns the WSJ.

This is all to say that Theranos's early years as a startup seems to have been much different culturally than the usual Bay Area startup. I wonder how Theranos would've fared or been different if it had operated like a highly-funded SV startup (Color, Clinkle, or any other high-funded startup that didn't die out) with the same hype and attention.

[0] https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/972501945813381122

[1] http://archive.is/8dfJ7

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler

[3] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/03/24/rupert-m...

From what I understand theranos pitched a lot of the traditional life sci and even tech VCs, but these firms were very skeptical. Especially the biotech VCs do a ton of scientific / technical diligence before investing and theranos almost certainly wouldn't have made it through their diligence filter

I think a few notable VCs actually spoke out critically of theranos, can't recall which, but it is saying something if a VC goes on record publicly criticizing a high profile starrtup

That’s generally a bad signal, whenever in-industry VCs stay out of a business and outside-industry VCs go in. Bad signal

The suggestion someone here made is that it was not an attempt to make an actual product, but a scam to defraud the US military. The idea was to get the military to buy the technology for a multi-billion dollar price and later bury that it didn’t work. My memory is some lowly lieutenant refused to sign off on the deal ordered by a four star general and the whole thing fell apart.

This scam was the reason for the board structure and the rather interesting way Theranos went about developing their “technology”.

Theranos tried to get their tech bought by the military and used now SecDef, then Gen. Jim Mattis, then a Theranos board member, to shepherd the product through the military procurement process.

They were stopped because DoD regulations state that medical products used by the military have to be cleared/approved by FDA (or in the process of a clinical trial). And Theranos was not on FDA’s “good” list at the time, having only sent one product through the clearance process out of the dozens they were selling.

That betrays Ben’s lack of understanding of life science startups. The reason pretty much everyone I know from that world was skeptical was because of the composition of the board and the lack of a credible scientific advisory board. I have not seen too many companies in this space without a good SAB.

I take it with a grain of salt when VCs find reasons to no-true-Scotsman failures like this. It's true that Theranos didn't follow the traditional path. But I think it's also true that Silicon Valley energetically built up the myths that made Theranos possible, from the grand scale (Technology is a fountain of miracles! Hard questioning of visionary founders is crass!) down to the small details (like Holmes's Jobsian outfits).

Brushing this off as "East Coast" lets us avoid examining our complicity. And our vulnerability. We could look at uBeam, for example, which is backed by a number of West Coast luminaries, including Evans's own A16Z. An engineer has an extensive set of posts on how dubious it is: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/

Theranos is different in terms of scale and visibility, for sure. And I do agree that they found a richer class of sucker elsewhere. But I don't think they're culturally any different than a bunch of other overfunded, never-could-have-worked, charismatic-founder failures around here.

Perhaps they weren't trying to develop anything at all.

How many samples did they get before the lid got blew?

I note an interesting stubbornness in all three of your links, where each writer seems determined to carry on with their preordained mission of fellating Theranos in print, even after smelling something fishy. Depressing indictment of journalists and journalism. The NPR reporter at least had the nerve to cancel the feature. Though redoubling her efforts into an even fiercer and more thorough investigation would have been great.

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