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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

Funding and/or “serious investors” or even serious people on the board or as advisors means literally nothing. Theranos checked literally all of those boxes, and even got a visit from the Vice President and an award.

And they never even had a product that worked, and what devices they did have were fraudulent.

Having high profile people involved should never have been relevant to the quality of product coming from a company, but now that we are all aware of Theranos is should be absolutely clear to everyone that it is meaningless. It is likewise meaningless to make claims without backing it up with results from at least an independent third party if not making devices available to multiple technically competent reporters.

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Two important qualitative differences from Theranos:

- Spinoff from battery research program at a University, not a bachelor degree dropout

- Investors are technical

So no, Theranos did not have any "serious" investors if using the definition of "serious" as those that are technically competent/know how to evaluate the technology. It's possible of course that it's all still a scam like Theranos, but more likely if this doesn't pan out it's going to be some limitation with the underlying tech, market adoption, competence running the company rather than outright fraud.

Posts like this mean literally nothing as well.

Theranos is one example. But there are many examples of where funding and corporate investment is a sign the company has something serious and industry changing. The point is that without statistics both of us are just dealing in effectively anecdotes.

And the idea that independent third parties need to be involved is simply not true. (1) They already have car manufacturers willing to validate the technology (and they are often quite conservative) and (2) this company isn't at the point yet where their technology is being commercially sold.

Not accurate. Theranos's investors, board and outside stakeholders where by design people with no medical or related experience.

Also in the Theranos case there really was only one major customer i.e. Wallgreens who then failed to do proper due diligence. Here you have multiple car manufacturers involved who specialise in vetting new technology for mass production.

We're in a post-Theranos world. Companies are going to be getting a little extra scrutiny.

Also, as near as I can tell, Theranos got their later investment rounds by being willing to wildly lie. IIRC, they claimed something like $100e6 of revenues where the actual number was approx $100e3 [1]. That is probably going to (slowly) lead to criminal liability for some of the principals.

Here (as parent mentioned) you have battery companies investing in a battery company.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/14/theranos-president-exaggerat...

We're in a post-Theranos world.

Which was in turn in a post-Enron world. The one sure way to make sure that crap can keep happening is to pretend that something has really changed, so it can’t happen again. It can, stay vigilant.

Counterexamples do not imply the inverse of the original claim is true, just that the original claim may not be a universal truth. (And of course, the OP never claimed it was, your claim of "literally nothing" is more akin to making a universal claim.)

The only serious investor in Theranos was Tim Draper, who gave Holmes about $200k in initial seed funding, and largely because she was a friend of the family who Draper has known since she was a kid. Holmes went around to every major Silocon valley VC firm and every life sciences VC firm, but they did their due diligence and after consulting with experts every one of them said "I think I'll pass on this one."

Following that initial seed funding from DFJ, all of Theranos' early stage funding came from fly-by-night wannabe venture capitalists. A123 systems definitely does not fall into that category.

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