Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however, why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted to dup investors to become rich, she could have done it real easy by stepping aside, let someone inherit the mess and then selling her stack. In fact her board asked her to do just that before WSJ found out and she refused it. I have seen her plenty of talks/interviews and its super hard to believe she was working with malicious plan all along. Part of me wants to feel that her desire was genuine to some extent and she just hoped things would work out if she pulled lies and deception long enough to keep raising funds. She had lots of top tier advisors who have done exactly that to establish their own companies. I'm not defending her by any measure, she was classic bad manager with Balwani topping even her. There was a very little chance she could have actually ran talented team longer term - but this is precisely the part book conveniently leaves out.

You start out with an idea you hope you can make work, you fudge a little and naively promise the moon, and soon enough (after a few big investments) you're in so deep there's no way out. Maybe you realize pretty quickly that the technology is a dud, but there's no exit without humiliation so you just keep digging.

I don't think she's a sympathetic figure in any way, but it's easy to see how someone could wind up in that situation without having started out as a scammer.

This makes sense to me, as I've asked myself was she bad or deluded? But perhaps instead she started out with the best intentions, only to be forced into gambling with ever greater stakes as each attempt at changing the world fell flat.

She probably believed in her project.

You can't know if you are going to succeed when you try to achieve a revolutionary feat. But you have to act like you are sure you will.

Imagine Jobs in an alternate universe, trying to get out the iPhone, but after years of failures and billions wasted, the world realize the product vision was unrealistic.

Basically him being the same asshole, but hitting a wall many predicted.

That would look the same as Theranos.

The difference is that Job didn't fail. But he couldn't know that before trying and commit many people and resource to it.

Imagine Elon failing as the Falcon X. Or worst, failing over and over until his company died because they lost control of one that went crashing into a school.

Imagine Zuckerberg called out about all the privacy issues on FB before it actually made benefit. I would have died.

When you try to achieve radical vision, you often either succeed as a hero or you fail as a vilain.

The difference is that Jobs wasn't putting people's life in danger as theranos did by releasing malfunctionning blood testing machines

Elon, with self driving car, high capacity batteries and powerful rockets had the ability to put people's life in danger.

has. And also people who are not his customers.

While there is some unknowable risk, Theranos was in a completely different realm in terms of the mismatch between her technological aspirations and the feasibility of current technology. From the interview, Holmes appears to lack the knowledge and even the curiosity to understand the existing technology, making her company essentially a blind bet. This is enormously more irresponsible than the technological bets that FB, Apple, Uber, etc make.

> lack the knowledge and even the curiosity to understand the existing technology

Honestly, this is what I understand least.

I can understand and even respect banking a company on "this isn't possible yet, but maybe we can develop new technology". That's a standard feature of legitimate biotech startups and drug research.

I can comprehend the snowballing risks, overstating a case because you think you're almost at something really impressive. I can't really understand the blatant, verifiable lies like "the DoD uses it", but it's not the first time we've seen those.

What feels new and totally baffling is to not even care what's being done and what's possible. There's no sign that Holmes or Balwani ever had any idea whether they were close to success. This wasn't just betting on horse races with borrowed money, it was betting on a dead horse because you hadn't bothered to check if it was still alive.

But in that alternate universe Apple would still have been a huge success, and the iPhone would have been another failed product like the Windows Phone. In addition to this pattern to success, Jobs was not a criminal. Theranos made VERY negligent statements such as the military using Theranos products(they did not).

> But in that alternate universe Apple would still have been a huge success

Replace iPhone with iPod and Apple never reaches this sky it's currently at. It the product that put it back on the map, open the itune cash valve and paved the road for the iphone flag ship product.

The situation is never _exactly_ the same. But you can see a pattern. And history is written by the victors.

> Theranos made VERY negligent statements such as the military using Theranos products(they did not).

Musk, Jobs and the rests lied as well, just on a different scale.

The scale does make it worse, but the mechanism is the same. If Theranos had delivered, nobody would recall this lie.

Your right about history written by victors, however if Theranos delivered would there be fraud? The issue at hand is that she said she delivered when she did not.

Of course, but failing show it as the fraud it is. Succeeding would have made it appear just like a "risky bet".

> Jobs was not a criminal

The options backdating scandal arguably involved criminal behavior, and the anti-poaching collusion between Apple and other companies was arguably illegal as well.

Not saying that Jobs was primarily a criminal, but he was involved in a fair amount of unethical behavior over the years.

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