Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes | Hacker News Reader

Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

arstechnica.com

94 pointsaj782 comments

> “Why is [Theranos] worthless? It’s worthless because this writer was like a badger going after her, like a hyena going after her, and then it became a bigger and bigger thing,” he said. “She got bullied into submission,” Draper explained, adding that if it weren’t for Carreyrou and other opponents, Theranos “could have been one of these big, huge winners.”

And we would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling journalist!!! shakes fist in the air

Tim clearly has some screws loose. I just learned today that he has a fabulously wealthy father; that explains a lot.

His father was one of the earliest of the modern venture capitalists. And among the first in California, circa 1959 (just two years after the founding of Fairchild Semi).

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

> And among the first in California, circa 1959

His grandfather founded the venture capital firm in 1959. His father was an associate that joined at the time of the founding.

While it's clear that the vast majority of us do not agree with Draper's comments here, let's not attempt to discredit someone based on their (wealthy or otherwise) financial background.

I took this to mean something like "that explains how he has been able to become and continue to be a high-profile venture capitalist despite having a screw loose", rather than "that explains why he has a screw loose".

So what he's saying is that the two things he doesn't know anything about are business and badgers.

Not quite, "...two OF the things..."

It's worth keeping in mind that, by and large, this is how the oligarch class thinks. Their top priorities are protecting and justifying their wealth and power. A journalist who exposes a massive fraud and probably saved lives isn't someone performing a public service - he's an enemy. There is no mea culpa. The relationship between the oligarch's own interests and the public interest is purely predatory and adversarial.

These priorities are relatively easy to see when it comes to techno-weirdos like Tim Draper and Peter Thiel or cartoonish megalomaniacs like Bezos, but they govern the behavior of even otherwise staid and conventional oligarchs (see, for instance, Eric Schmidt strong-arming the New America Foundation to fire everyone involved in antitrust policy research).

I like the way you think. Are there any books you recommend on understanding how oligarchs think? What do you think is going through the mind of oligarchs with more geopolitical concerns, like Putin?

This is a useful academic introduction:

https://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-Winters/dp/05211829...

For a literary treatment once can read Ernst Jünger - the Mauretanier-Orden pops up every now and then in the course of his writings.

Wow—this guy really buys into the hype machine to fix all problems. There was a reason most top VCs turned this down—for most of the use cases proposed there is intrinsically too much natural heterogeneity in blood that you need to use a larger blood draw. Journalists were not going to change that fact that this machine was never going to work.

The Scooby Doo defense.

Remind me of my distant friend. He was constantly drink driving and eventually got caught and lost his drivers license. He couldnt get to work on time with buses constantly late, so they fired him. 5 years later he still blames the cop for being fired.

I'm also irritated by the condescending, misogynistic undercurrent of claim. It seems doubtful the same assertion would have been made if Theranos had been founded/chaired by a man.

This belief that women are without agency is stubbornly persistent and omnipresent.

Yes this is true, but you have to admit her story was helped on the up-ramp.

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/early-theranos-investor-tim-...

As the founder of a healthcare company, Tim's statement here is the one that I found the most dangerous

"If all she had to do was say this was a beta or whatever and all of us would be using it, would be loving it."

When it comes to people's health you must have concrete evidence that your product works and is robust. Blood testing is not a field where people accept mistakes. Anyone working in this field is used to scrutiny, it is your burden to prove that what you are working on is safe and useful.

There are a lot of quacks, hucksters, and fakes out there proceed with caution.

> Blood testing is not a field where people accept mistakes.

I don't think this is true. There are blood tests that don't always work. Lyme disease is one that is not accurately detected.

Most blood tests are imperfect by nature (specificity and sensitivity are almost never equal to one). No need to point out a specific and very questionable example.

To clarify, a mistake is an error which causes the tests to be invalidated. Theranos had to throw out all Edison test results for 2014 and 2015. Clinical decisions were made as a result of these tests and it is not unreasonable to believe that patients may have been harmed as a result of faulty information. This would be the equivalent of a plane crash for an airliner.

False positives and false negatives will occur with all testing and there are protocols in place to detect false readings. While most tests are accurate, an inaccurate result is not considered a mistake since the tests themselves are not perfect. (Given that you followed proper procedure)

Ridiculous - you're not allowed to release a "beta" in medicine. (I don't use "healthcare" because it doesn't carry any connotation of standards or responsibility.) I guess this guy is from a universe where everything is software, and a dead human being can be rebooted?

"If all she had to do was say this was a beta or whatever and all of us would be using it, would be loving it."

This argument doesn't make any sense. It wasn't a beta, nor an alpha, nor anything.

It was just a marketing gag without any substance or technology. As part of an alpha or beta, you need an actual pathway to a full release.

There was literally nothing. If this were released as a beta after having raised lots of money, people would call this a scam outright, because it didn't do anything new or more efficient.

Another thing, independent of personalities. Theranos was well-funded. It built prototypes. Its engineering case was, “You can get sufficiently good testing S/N ratio with much, much smaller blood samples.” They couldn’t. Period. It remains an unsolved problem, just like stick-free blood sugar testing, which has consumed more than $1B of funding, I believe.

The Drapers are weird. I guess the family has been rich for a long time and they've made a lot of investments, but I don't really see a clear track record of being particularly good at picking winners.

I was at a Bitcoin trade show a few years ago and his son was there pumping his Bitcoin specific venture fund. Quite honestly, he struck me as an enormous asshole. He was on a few panels with people who actually knew how that stuff works and he would just talk right over them again and again in an almost derogatory capacity. It was like zany high school shit.

Also these are the crazy people that want to split California up, well you know, just 'cause.

According to the BBC, Russia has been funding and promoting the California secessionists, among other similar movements.

See: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41853131

Edit: This is a direct explanation of why "just 'cause" is misleading or incomplete, based on public information from mainstream media.

Dunno why you're getting downvoted. It's true, and it only adds to the Drapers being enormous assholes; it doesn't contradict that. The leader of the #calexit campaign was an American who was living in Russia. Plus Russia's been funding far-right parties in Europe.

Dunno why you're getting downvoted

Because splitting up into multiple states is not the same as seceding.

This is true. On the other hand, just because it is well publicized the Russians are promoting one movement to disrupt California is not a definitive argument that they aren't involved in another. The pattern has been to promote multiple sides of any possible conflict. Draper was reportedly going to get some assistance[1] from Nigel Farage, of Brexit fame, and Farage has been denying[2] Russian connections recently.

[1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...

[2] http://www.newsweek.com/trump-russia-jewish-farage-brexit-69...

Oops, you are right, I misread that.

I don't know anything about this or about who the Draper family is or what they're involved in, but my reading of your parent's comment was that they were talking about splitting California into multiple states ("want to split California up"), not about California seceding from the union. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but these seem like very different things to me. One of them is about re-drawing very arbitrary lines, which are based on no clear principle I can suss out (maybe the strongest being that 50 is a nice round number?). The other violates a very clear principle ("Our Union shall not sever!") that the country's most widely respected leader fought a civil war to protect.

I personally have no strongly developed opinions on splitting states up; I'm interested in arguments in either direction. But the idea of splitting up a state with (at least) two portions that are quite far apart geographically and culturally doesn't seem ridiculous on its face. But I'm also not sure where that argument ends. I'm from another state - Illinois - that spans quite a few latitudes and has at least two quite different cultural zones. When I lived there, it always seemed to me that you could quite reasonably split the state into three: Chicagoland, the agricultural midlands, and the south. So if it makes sense to split up California, does it make sense for Illinois too? Are there other states that the same argument applies to? I dunno, I'm curious about it. But of course it is a non-starter politically, so it's just an intellectual exercise.

The notion of splitting California has been around for long time. Jerry Brown's father Pat Brown advocated it in a book written about fifty years ago. (Having been the governor, he lost to Ronald Reagan, then wrote the book.)

Tim Draper probably understands, privately, that Theranos is an unrecoverable loss. Privately, he has probably learned a lesson about doing better due diligence going forward. Publicly, he is doing what he thinks will benefit him the most: he is signalling to all prospective future investments, that, "If you take my money, I will stand by you through thick and thin." Some future founders might be turned off by this, but some will probably see it as invaluable.

Wow I like the way you think! Hit me in a blind spot I never knew I had.

that people have public and private opinions and they know when and where to express both?

You've stumped me here, I've been wondering what I meant for a day now.

I think its more a combination of the fact that he was simultaneously saying things to both parties, and the fact that he was willing to look foolish in the process. I'm not expressing it well.

Remember this gem: https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-review-of-Draper-Universi...

I know people that did it, total joke/scam.

Amid his mind-boggling defense, the investor did admit that Theranos was now in the “loser column” of his investments list, a list that also includes Tesla and Bitcoin.

The Silk Road assets are likely up 10x or more:

https://www.coindesk.com/tim-draper-revealed-silk-road-bitco...

If Draper has lost on Bitcoin, it would mean he's done an abysmal job of investing in cryptocurrency since the government auction.

Since Tesla hasn't dipped or crashed recently, Im assuming that the "list" refers to his investment list, not the loser column. It's just a poorly written sentence.

Theranos' fraud endangered peoples' health. It's shameful that someone like Draper would defend that.

He's only defending his money. That it was Theranos is just a minor side effect to him.

Kind of a flyer here, but perhaps Draper has been advised to stake out this position as still being a "true believer" because it minimizes his litigation exposure in the case he sold some of shares before the SEC case/investigation became public knowledge.

From what I understand about biology (which is little), there was no real way this was ever going to work. Am I missing something?

What they promised is theoretically possible, but they ran afoul of the huge practical problems that made people with actual biology and engineering backgrounds (like myself) very, very skeptical.

(Oh, and massive financial shenanigans.)

I agree that analyzing small volumes of blood is theoretically possible , but afaik it's yet unclear that you can get good samples from blood drawn from fingers, because it's mixed with interstitial fluid.

it's not theoretically possible, due to the statistics of small numbers. You can resolve the nanotainer problem by collecting many of them, but by the time you can measure a statistical difference, you might as well have collected a large volume of blood in the first place.

There is no reason the underlying idea of nanotainers being used for blood analysis is fundamentally impossible but it is a hard problem because the volume of blood is so small there can easily be statistical fluctuations that affect the classifier. That said, it's strictly correct that, if engineered properly, it could have provided additional actionable medical data.

> There is no reason the underlying idea of nanotainers being used for blood analysis is fundamentally impossible but it is a hard problem because the volume of blood is so small there can easily be statistical fluctuations that affect the classifier.

Do you not see how the second half of this statement strictly contradicts the first?

Hey, um, I've got a PhD in Biophysics, I've worked with biology, and I've got 20+ years experience in the field. The VC I advise declined to fund theranos for this very reason. That said, everything I know about biophysics and building classifiers (something I do for a large company known for machine learning) says that it's still technically possible to provide actionable medical data from tiny volumes of blood.

It does not "strictly contradict".

Difficult doesn't mean impossible.

Even doomsday cults find ways to rationalize their mistakes when the apocalypse misses its schedule--why should an investor born into his money be any different?

I still believe in the Theranos vision of walking into a CVS Pharmacy (or 7Eleven) and letting a machine instantly tell me my iron is low and recommending certain supplements.

The approach to achieving this vision, unfortunately, used the Silicon Valley "fake it till you make it" playbook that clearly crossed both ethical and moral lines.

Man, every time I think I ran out of reasons to think poorly of Tim Draper he opens his mouth and gives me one more.

Just because someone has a lot of money or a fancy title doesn’t mean they’re smarter or more capable than anyone else. Time and chance happen to them all.

Tim Draper and the VCs of his generation were born on the technological equivalent of 3rd base.

John Carreyrou's book is coming out end of May. Already pre-ordered. Can't wait.

May 21st, already pre-ordered the audiobook too. I've never listened to an audiobook this long. 11 hr 36 minutes.

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Valley/dp/1...

"And I woulda gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"

There is so much I'll never understand about business, business people, and people who remain loyal to them. I wonder if I s/business/<different category>/g will I see the same thing?

So I haven’t really followed this, but were tests performed that directly compared Theranos blood testing vs existing blood testing? What were the results?

The Theranos folks discussed some results using the mini-lab vs Siemens equipment during a presentation to the AACC: [1]

My understanding is that their ability to perform some tests, and to do it accurately was real, such as their FDA approved herpes test. However the number of tests they could perform on a single sample (primarily due to volume?) was drastically lower than they claimed. They were also found to be diluting samples, and had poor lab practices in a number of instances: [2] [3] [4]

When dealing with people's health there is no room for inaccuracy as other's lives and well-fare potentially hang in the balance.

[1]: https://youtu.be/n6JRG733ReQ [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/28/study... [3]: http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-study-compares-blood... [4]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-devices-often-failed-a...

> "Theranos is now in the loser column of his investments, a list which includes Tesla"

What? WHY IS THAT SLIPPED IN THERE? Tesla hasn't crashed nor dropped substantially in value. I am just so confused by this statement.

Possibly, the writer meant that Tesla is one of his investments.

>>“Why is [Theranos] worthless? It’s worthless because this writer was like a badger going after her, like a hyena going after her, and then it became a bigger and bigger thing,”

He has a point: if it weren't for the press discovering her fraud, Theranos would still be going and still be valued billions. WSJ should have stood back. Yeah, maybe thousands would have died due to bad blood tests but hey, it's a great idea that decades from now might work. And Tim would have made even more money.

/sarcasm, if it's not obvious

Why is this an AMP link and not a direct link?

"And I would have gotten away with it if not for you meddling kids."

“Loser” doesn’t mean “lost money”. His shares were liquid and increased ~1000x in value. If he hadn’t sold already, he would have held a board seat at the end.

Tim Draper understands the hype machine better than anybody else. He knows how it works, and when it will stop working.

Can’t blame him for trying. It puts a seed of an alternate story into our minds. How do other streams of “alternative facts” get started? And many people want to believe that Big Medicine is keeping breakthroughs from us.

Can’t blame him for trying.

I can. I can definitely blame people for being amoral unless they have some brain damage/dysfunction whereby they don't know the difference.

You were probably just using a common phrase in some non-literal way, but I absolutely _can_ blame someone for lying in an attempt to make money, all the more so when it is around medical and legal issues.

Am I not the only one who feels like Tim Draper is like the Trump of the VC world?

I'm guessing this is basic psychology. It's easier to blame a reporter for something you invested in so heavily than to admit on national TV that you screwed up. None of these big shot investors want to admit that they got defrauded, it makes them look foolish.

They only got defrauded because they couldn't flip their stake to the next fool..

Ha! Why would you assume he didn’t?

> “Amid his mind-boggling defense, the investor did admit that Theranos was now in the “loser column” of his investments list, a list that also includes Tesla and Bitcoin.“

Interestingly, at Collision Conf this year, while on stage being interviewed, he was pumping up Bitcoin like it was going to the moon. Strange investor I guess.

Can't people stop beating this dead horse already. She screwed up, her company is dead, just let her be.

I think "screwing up" has an incorrect connotation that she didn't commit fraud deliberately. People who have never been anywhere near a coal mine express anger at Don Blankenship for contributing to the deaths of dozens of people via deceiving inspectors. So it doesn't seem strange that people would continue to be angry at Holmes, when everybody depends on medical services such as blood tests that they can trust. Ordinary people almost always die in circumstances that only amount to statistics and not a newsworthy outrage, but surely it is an injustice if casualties are deemed irrelevant in a situation like this.

I thought they didn't release products?

They were making blood tests on some Walgreen stores. I'm not exactly sure if those were using their (flawed) process or faking it by using existing processes.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/20/5952049...

There labs were in the market for years, using a "mix" of their own tests and also standard tests from other manufacturers. What they could not come out with was any FDA approved test of their own except for one (for herpes).

The basic issue is that drawing a pin prick of blood from the fingers results in a lot of "interstitial" fluid. The combination of a very small sample and poor quality made it hard to create reliable tests. In reality Theranos labs were mostly taking vials of blood from veins for standard tests, instead of the pin pricks they were touting. Once this became public the bottom fell out.

Edit: The worst part of what they did was that they would take smaller samples than normal and then run them diluted on standard machines . This is because the standard machines needed a larger volume. This gave patients less reliable results than they would have had a larger sample been taken in the first place. And i think this is really unforgivable, because it has real life consequences for people.

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