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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

For reference, here's the very first HN submission about Theranos in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349

Interesting. Skinming through the comments, very little criticism, everyone in awe. Only way down there is someone stating how hard it is to get regulatory approval.

I guess that‘s HN still in full fanboy mode, before all those startups started to display their dark sides.

I don't see any fanboyism; I see interest, and surprise at the composition of the board. A bit down, I see strong criticism by medman77, who hasn't been downvoted.

medman77 created his/her account that day and only ever posted that one comment.

I wonder if he/she was from Nanomix (nano.com, another company working on similar technology since 2000)

An interesting observation is that medman77 would seem to be particular about FDA clearance vs approval, which is one sign of someone who does know what they’re talking about.

medman77, who hasn't been downvoted.

We don't know that. You can only downvote comments for a day(?).. but you can upvote forever. Considering it's been 5 years, and people keep linking to his comment... it's hard to say if he gained those points that day or years later after theranos was found to be a fraud.

Check out the top comment to April 2015: Scientists skeptical about Theranos blood test (businessinsider.com): [1]

> What stops the skeptics from doing their own tests by walking into a service center and having their blood analyzed for all tests possible and doing the same with their blood for conventional tests? Or an even large scale test?

> If their concern is genuine (rather than a way to get a look under the hood of a competitor for the current sellers of such services) there are multiple ways in which they could get their verification without inside information on how Theranos does its thing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440595

And for everyone one of those I can find about a thousand HN comments telling you to push on even if you're unsure about whether you can deliver.

Edit: For that reason, most of this "I told you so" sounds like hindsight bias if it comes from someone who would normally take the attitude of "fake it till you make it", "don't wait until you're sure you have a working product".

Look at my comments on the April thread.

I was incredibly sceptical about a 19 year old with no experience starting a biotech company. All of my comments had a large number of upvotes (for 2015), while many of the people disagreeing with me were downvoted into the negatives.

Yes, being skeptical about a 19 year old is easy.

The hard part is to do it in a way consistent with the rhetoric about “fake it till you make it”/“it’ll all work out”/“all self doubt is impostor syndrome”.

It's not hard if you just don't tell people to fake it till they make it in the first place.

There's a sizeable contingent on HN that is sceptical of that mindset in general, which was my point.

No. There's a sizeable contingent of people who will call out specific ideas as being "obviously BS", but who lack the insight to realize the dissonance with their mentality of "fake it till you make it". People who actually have a general answer for "when not to fake it, and give up instead" are the extreme exception.

Generally that advice is not directed towards people starting medical device companies.

If you can find even one such comment that also offers a heuristic for when your self-doubt is justified and you should therefore quit, I will be surprised.

Theranos was tight lipped on the tech. An alternative interpretation is that there was insufficient information on the tech at that moment for knowledgeable people to weigh in on, other than to observe that this is a difficult problem and a “red ocean” in a regulated industry, and it is hardly worth stating something so obvious.

It’s probably also a reflection of the fact that the flaw in Theranos’ goal was a medical issue, namely uniformity of sampled blood, and this isn’t a site of mostly MD’s. Part of it may well have been fanboyism, but it may just have been that most here lacked the requisite background to see the flaw.

I find the self-driving, or near-future Mars colony fanboyism here a little harder to take, because a much larger segment of the user base should know better.

If you read the book, it’s very apparent it was a case of fanboyism from a very specific demographic: older males in positions of power (WalGreens CEO, Safeway CEO, mulplitude of investors like Murdoch, Larry Ellison, politicians like Schultz and Mathis.) Many of these individuals had very educated voices on their team that constantly sounded the alarm bells only to be ignored and chastised because those in power were completely smitten and couldn’t fathom re-evaluating their positions. In one instance, Safeway staffers even half-joked that Safeway CEO saw in Holmes the daughter he never had.

I suspect you're right, but that also highlights a broad problem that we have in tech. In the face of missing expertise, most people assumed, or at least were willing to believe, that it was more likely that a tech company would be able to completely disrupt the way blood tests have been done, rather than question why something as simple as "use less blood" hadn't been done already if it were feasible.

You don't see criticism because critical posts get deleted.

Fascinating to read, thank you.

“There are more soldiers in that board there than doctors” is one of the original comments!

"It's odd how little information is provided about the actual new technologies behind this." - @aheilbut

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