Comment by evrydayhustling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evrydayhustling | Hacker News Reader

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evrydayhustling

The core idea in this essay is that Theranos' decision to take big risks in order to scale disproportionately compared to product readiness can decoupled from their decision to trick others into sharing those risks. I'm left unconvinced.

For example, Reid suggests Theranos could have have started by offering traditional blood drawing services transparently, instead of taking the pin pricks. Why would CVS have permitted access to their stores for such an incremental test? Would investors have financed such a mundane trial?

Theranos' access to patients and capital seems to have depended explicitly on falsifying how close they were to a breakthrough. That's not a hustle that happens to be dishonest, it's a business model that can't progress without dishonesty.

Strip away the potential for dishonesty, and "blitzscaling" is just "grow as fast as you can by honestly engaging your market"... Duh?

Honestly, is empowering patients to have control over their testing really a mundane trial or incremental test? The magic I saw in Theranos was in their ability to move the power closer to the consumer. If they had pursued that in place of their fraudulent tests that could have been huge.

I honestly fear the day consumers can fully do that. I already have to listen to a bunch of night time calls from patients to my wife where they are obviously spending the day, post clinic visit for testing or diagnosis or post surgery, using google to either question her diagnosis /treatment or reinforce their own hypochondriac behavior.

I realize there are reasons for some people to question medical decisions, like if your family was victim to something like the Tuskegee Syphilis trialing, but people need to know their thirty minutes of online browsing doesn't replace a decade of medical education.

(note I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to do some of our own testing like blood sugar level, cholesterol, some others, but more like things where just because you had an elevated level of X doesn't mean you have Y and you should self treat immediately. And in probably jaded on this because she deals with a lot of people that think either vitamin C or the power of prayer will cure them or that she's lying about cancer because a chiropractor's thermagram doesn't show it)

The problem I see with this test is that it is purely business model, no tech or fixed investment required. If CVS found it interesting, they could trial it trivially themselves, right? Disclaimer: not an expert in this market, so tell me where Theranos could have brought an innovation that isn't easily replicated to the test.

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