Theranos devices ran “null protocol” to skip actual demo for investors

What about showcasing devices that pretended to work but then shipping the tests to be run in normal labs?

Doesn't mean I'm against demos - but normally you can come up with a slice (or two if you're lucky) through it that genuinely works and shows for a representative scenario (and if your arm's twisted you just say that with more money, you can support more scenarios).

They pricked investors fingers and implied that a Theranos machine would process the sample, but then they secretly ran the sample on a competitor's machine in another room:

> In demos of the company’s technology, investors would have their fingers pricked for testing alongside one of Theranos’ proprietary devices, but the actual test would be run in a lab away from prying eyes.

This would be the equivalent of a SaaS company setting up an API that just passed the calls through to a competitor's API, but then telling investors that their own platform was operational. You can run the pass-through API long enough to fake demos and raise money, but it's still fraud if you mislead investors to believe that you have the platform operational.

They weren't just hiding error messages or smoothing over rough edges. They were architecting fraudulent claims to investors.

Nonsense. I've worked in startups my entire 20+ year career, and while we've certainly spun or promoted things to the extreme, the line of "outright lying" was never gray.

Take for example the initial iPhone demo by Steve Jobs. It's been mentioned many times before that the demo had to be run in a specific, exact order, or else the OS would crash. That's fine, but nothing in those demos were faked. It all did exactly what he demoed, live. It would have been a much different story, if, for example, Jobs just demoed a video with surreptitious pause and play buttons. That would have been fraud, and that's much less than what Theranos faked here.

From what I have read Theranos had nothing. They had no idea how they could make their machines work. There was no new technology or new insight. They just lied blatantly.

That’s on a different level from the usual cheating people do at demos.

did you see the part where they ran fraudulent tests on actual cancer patients?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-patients-hurt-by-theranos-1...

Don't try to handwave that away as "the sum of promotional practices". That's abject fraud, not "faking it til you make it".

Thus, dishonesty means you're skating on thin ice because a prosecutor only needs to show intent to gain (or for another to lose) and you're done. Much better to be honest and eliminate this whole thrust altogether. Intent to gain without dishonesty isn't a crime and would be generally seen as admirable.

If they did a bunch of unethical stuff that adds up to fraud, as you agree, what does it matter if some individual actions, if you completely take them out of context, look at them through the right lens, and create a distinction between “unethical” and “bad,” aren’t necessarily bad? Maybe the reason no one is saying that is because no one is doing that, because it’s not relevant.

The individual actions are certainly sketchy, IMO. And red flags. Is there a definite semantic difference? It seems like splitting hairs. No single action by itself implies fraud, though significant acts of lying make a case.

Theranos’s level of deception is not the norm. Nor is it legal or ok.

You conclude by sort of saying you just aren’t going to focus on the misconduct aspect of things. But it is still there.

I think there's a world of difference between a) simulating a technology that a company really can provide just to ensure that things run smoothly for the test and b) pretending to offer a technology that, in fact, the company couldn't provide at all.

Note the article said the demo mode "would not analyze the sample." The article goes on to say that real blood samples were used in these demos. Not the same thing at all.

Steve Jobs' demo for the original macintosh was actually done with a bit of cheating:

"Once we integrated all the pieces together, the demo didn't come close to be able to run on a standard Macintosh. Fortunately, we had a prototype of a 512K Mac in the lab, so we decided to cheat a little (there were only two in existence at the time) and use that for the demo, which made things fit."

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

It depends on what they told the investors: 'This is the real thing', or 'this is a simulation of how it will seem to customers'.

Truth is simple to communicate.

It is well-established from the history of hardware and software engineering that crashing bugs and glitches can be removed from a system through basic engineering. No one looks at a device that has some error messages and occasional crashes and says "Those crashes and errors are probably impossible to fix".

Theranos claimed to be doing a thing which everyone else in the field said was physically impossible (or at least physically impractical without an enormous nanotech breakthrough). Pretending that you're doing that thing, without actually having ever really done it, is indeed fraud.

If you want to really admire someone's balls, look at Bill Gates taking a BSoD to the face showing off Win95.

It's because Apple was forced to add this because people complained that their visuals were misleading in ads.

I think there is a pretty clear difference between non-performance due to bankruptcy (which is essentially "we haven't been able to make the tech work profitably and have run out of money") and bankruptcy due to non-performance ("we've run out of money because we haven't been able to make the tech work").

cant imagine whose gonna be sympathetic here unless the jury is all karens