The Coverage of Theranos Is Utter Bullshit (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Coverage of Theranos Is Utter Bullshit (2015)

thehustle.co

134 pointsbcantrill93 comments

For whatever it's worth, I came across this incredible piece in going through some of the older HN stories on Theranos[0][1], which make for absolutely mesmerizing reading now -- and a vivid reminder that HN is an important historic record!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951019

Never forget Medman77 with the call of the century on that one in the comments.

Please link to the comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808

And notice how it was downvoted to near the bottom of the page. Not all of the best/well informed comments rise to the top.

I upvote now and send a tiny ripple into the fabric of the universe’s karma.

medman77 only ever posted that one comment and had karma of 81 as of just now (2022-01-02T04:53Z).

At the time, that comment could easily be read as angry and irrational, posted by someone who hates on success or simply enjoys trolling. In retrospect, it’s quite possible medman77 had inside knowledge of the company.

It’s interesting to compare that against a different comment [1] made the following summer from someone with inside knowledge of the field but not of the company.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951861

You really don't need insider knowledge to make an assessment like that. You just have to learn what you look for when it comes to BS and be prepared to get some negative karma points for calling out companies due to the multiple social media PR companies they employ that use various reputation defense techniques.

By "easily", you mean "lazily". It's one thing to assume the comment is irrational, it's another thing, and even lazier thing, to assume that the commenter hates on success or enjoys trolling.

It must be uncomfortable to see that our community was fooled. But blaming a whistleblower isn't the right coping strategy.

That time was possibly the peak for using baseless accusations of sexism to counter any criticism of women, at least in the online reddit/twitter/facebook/etc sphere. The old HN threads even have some. I feel people have been gradually getting slightly braver in standing up to this.

Just because you're angry and irrational, doesn't mean that you're wrong. In fact one could argue being the only one to see the scam might itself make a lot of people angry

Why does he have a green username? I was always under the impression that green usernames were for newly created accounts.

It was newly-created at the time the comment was posted.

and that is their only activity on the site too

That account was created the same day the comment was posted, most likely for the single purpose of posting the comment. Makes me think it's either an insider or someone with beef against the company.

> someone with beef against the company.

Someone who turned out to be dead right.

People create throwaway accounts to post comments all the time, so that conjecture is quite far fetched.

For now at least. I would use archive.org on that.

The adulation for the "big names" in Theranos's board of directors is absolutely cringey to read in retrospect. No wonder Holmes managed to fool the world, it's too easy to be mesmerized by undeserved clout.

It's amazing how quickly people get fooled when they are offered money and "kickbacks" in return.

re: FN1

Fortune uses a fake "paywall". View source to see the text. Reader mode on Firefox should work. Alternatively, use AMP for text-only page. No distracting photo of Holmes pretending to to finger-pricked, just the text.

For example,

   curl  https://web.archive.org/web/20211231035501/https://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/amp/|sed -n '/<meta charset/p;/<p>/p' > 1.htm
   chrome ./1.htm

Theranos refused to publish validation studies in peer-reviewed journals. Theranos refused to sell its analysers to existing labs.

Someone else can confirm the details, but if I am not mistaken Holmes is a named inventor on almost 20 of Theranos' US patent grants, always with co-inventor(s) who had unlike Holmes finished school and worked under others to gain work/life experience. Usually, Ian Gibbons was a named co-inventor. One can interpret the facts we are given in different ways, but certainly one interpretation is that Holmes' affinity for fraud drove this man to suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gibbons_(biochemist)

"Fake it till you make it^W^W get caught"

Hey! I’m the author.

I had a strong opinion. My prediction was wrong!

But I left the article up because I have a lot of opinions and hey, I’m wrong sometimes…no shame!

Also I think I was like 24 when I wrote that and I love seeing how my write has evolved.

For the record, I stand by the sentiment, which is the media vilify startup founders.

But my chosen example was very, very bad.

Kudos for leaving it up.

Thanks for leaving the post up and for responding here. I’m curious if and how your approach to writing has changed since you wrote the piece. What strikes me about the piece is the certainty and lack of caveats in it, especially given it’s about an area in which I assume you don’t have any particular expertise (blood testing — please correct me if I’m mistaken).

One takeaway from the Theranos saga for me was that the type of fraud perpetrated by Elizabeth Holmes can have very real consequences on people’s lives beyond some rich investors losing their money. The stories about people receiving incorrect test results, the irresponsibility with which Theranos ran their lab, not to mention Holmes using David Boies to attack the brave whistleblowers in my mind go far beyond the “fake it till you make it” / “mistakes were made” framing of the case.

If I had played a role in supporting that type of behavior, however small, I would probably have a different takeaway than “got this specific example wrong! but my core point was correct”.

I was very outspoken about Theranos, and particularly Holmes, early on.

(2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10765996

(2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800002

(2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10799261

(2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10983747

(2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12053721

The problem, for me, was not terribly hard to see, having accidentally put some time into a similarly run startup (not in healthcare thankfully) and run away screaming.

I can see people falling into the story and charisma of Holmes. But at some point, people start wrapping their identities too much into these stories and when things are really going off the rails lose their minds trying to make believe that things are a-ok.

I have no idea if Holmes will see significant prison time. I believe she should because she did wrong, but compassionately also believe she needs significant mental health resources. Looking back at the context around some of the old discussions here I was reminded of just how bizarre her behavior was, and how harmful that behavior became at the helm of a healthcare company.

Agree with all your comments linked but they were hardly “early on” - the first post you put up was around 3 months after the WSJ article which signalled the start of the end (and in some tellings was the thing that brought the company down earlier than it would have otherwise failed).

Let’s remember they were founded in 2003, and by March 2016 Holmes was barred from running any labs.

That video of her prancing around to MC Hammer was certainly bizarre.

in all honestly, the WSJ article was like when the first time a negative article was published about Enron in 2001. Few believed it, until suddenly and all at once it became obvious that something was wrong.

In hindsight it is easy to say that he was wrong, but major media publications write negative stories about start-ups all the time. The NYTs published a negative story about Tesla in 2013 about how its electric cars did not work well in cold weather, in which the test driver pretended that his tesla ran out of electricity by revving the engine a long time--8 years and 1000s of points higher in share price, so much for that. Look at all the negative stories about Facebook in 2007-2011 for example. Or about Instagram or Uber.

For everything there are naysayers, you’re right in that it isn’t helpful to point in hindsight and say “see we should have listened!” when you can find people saying things like that about literally everything.

I don't recall that being a hit piece, although I guess it had the function of one. What I remember being really shocking was, this was apparently a science journalist who was advised by Tesla support to do something that violated the second law of thermodynamics (“you need to do as much regenerative braking as possible!” or similar)... and then apparently didn't know enough physics to realize that was an awful idea. I came away from it thinking the reporter was incompetent, not malicious.

Yes, as much as the mainstream media went to shit, WSJ is still above the level of NYT, which basically is a tabloid targeting people who consider themselves educated.

Both have decent reporting and batshit opinion sections.

Ironic, considering Holme's father was VP at Enron...

I mean, it’s absolutely unfair to judge someone because of who their parents are. At the same time, it’s a bit amazing that people unquestioningly trusted the daughter of someone connected to a major fraud, and then she committed a major fraud.

Is that irony? I think irony would be if he was at the FEC (or perhaps not given some decisions by them).

This seems more like fraud runs in the family, which doesn't seem that uncommon (although maybe that's a variation of survivor bias in reporting?)

That said I wasn't aware of the ENRON link. It's so nice to see that the VPs from Enron were still able to afford Stanford, living costs while in a startup, etc. I'm sure that similar was true for regular people as well right? /s

"Ironic" is often used to mean "coincidental" these days. It seems few know what irony truly is.

I blame Alannis Morisette (or however it’s spelled)

Thankfully for Theranos, in a few weeks this incident will look like nothing more than a minor setback

Foot -> mouth. [0]

Holmes will still be on the cover of tech magazines.

Pretty much true

[0] somewhat understandable before more info came out, but the support was a bit breathless and over the top verging on blind faith.

Written with such conviction and yet so, so wrong.

"Theranos won’t go bankrupt, their investors are still going to get rich, and Holmes will still be on the cover of tech magazines. In fact, in the next few years Theranos will only become stronger."

The author appears to be still at it, seemingly unrepentant and followed by a hundred thousand people: https://twitter.com/theSamParr/status/1476732367805067272

Sometimes it seems as though cognitive dissonance and word-count go hand in hand.

Wow,Latest Tweet:

" I don’t care what they say:

2021 was fucking awesome.

2022 will be even better. "

That’s just the tweet that the parent linked to.

I think this is a perfectly valid opinion, far more defensible than his take on Theranos' coverage.

peter schiff has 600k followers despite being wrong about everything

being right and having a successful personal brand are not the same skillset.

No doubt he's got 600k followers due to his personal brand. But "wrong about everything" is a a bit unfair. He's been telling people to keep a few % of their wealth in gold and that has been advice that is ageing really well. Ditto his commentary that the money printing will continue to get more extreme until the damage is beyond question even to the average US voter (it might take a while to get that bad!).

You mean not aging really well? Just compare rise in gold prices in last 10 years to equities or commodities or real estate or crypto.

Those are all meant to be investments; gold is for the part of a portfolio that needs to maintain its value in a market crash. Gold is proving to be a much better option than cash or bonds.

And with the exception of the unlucky souls who bought in 2011-2012, gold has been reasonably competitive with equities. Not as good, but much lower risk.

bonds pay a yield. gold does not. so you get income from bonds in addition to a hedge instrument.

Gold's returns are not competitive at all compare to S&P 500.

Over the last 20 years the gold price is going up at an average rate of ~9% per annum (nominal). If your bond yields are doing that well then you have an excellent ability to find bonds. An approximately 6% real yield is perfectly comparable to what someone might plan on out of the stock market on the theory that stock returns over the long run should roughly match GDP growth. Stocks are a bit overvalued at the moment what with very low interest rates.

Peter said >5 years ago that the dollar would collapse by now. 2021 was a very good year for the dollar.

The author should appear on Dancing with the Stars, because the article was some Fred Astaire level dancing, managing to avoid mentioning that the company handled nearly a million test results and a "significant number" of them were bullshit - and that Holmes spent years lying to regulators, investors, and reporters.

Think about how many people's medical care was affected by her. Even if 10% of the results were wrong, that's 100,000 results.

Nature does a decent job of summing up the mess: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05149-2

I see no evidence that the author read the WSJ article he tried to refute. Because he provided zero refutation to any of the specific facts reported. It's just sort of, that article said she was bad, but I don't think so.

I mean, he's right about that though, even if his opinion on Theranos was 100% wrong

Yes that’s me!!

My man

Say what you want but The Hustle newsletter is great, it is one of the most well known business newsletters in the startup world.

I'm still fascinated by this story. The reality distortion field is something to be studied and pondered. Sometimes it leads to great outcomes, when it motivates people to grow beyond their comfort zones. Sometimes it's fraud.

Is a hopeful statement about the future a lie?

---

To be clear about my own beliefs in this matter: Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes committed crimes and tried to bury them and the people who tried to bring those crimes to light.

If the fraud was not in the medical field, I would find some room for leeway. If the company did not persecute the whistle-blowers; If the lies weren't so blatant; If there was a feasible technology under development ...

---

An analogy - right now, very many people want self driving cars to be a reality. Are any (or how many) of those companies committing fraud? Business failure is not fraud, but fraud can be found at failing businesses.

Funny you mention this because I have a relative who works in the automobile industry who compared Holmes to Musk (Just sharing his point of view, don't shoot the messenger).

I will say though misrepresenting products or taking advantage of positive publicity certainly is something Musk and many Silicon Valley personalities do. Holmes is a bad person for endangering lives, but I can see the same huge critics who attack her now become the people that silence negative opinions about her, if only her story was slightly different.

> The reality distortion field is something to be studied and pondered.

It makes me wonder if there’s an alternate history where Steve Jobs stretched the truth, had no products pan out successfully, and ended up being tried and pilloried as a fraud.

But I don’t think that’s fair to Jobs? Ultimately he had enough reality behind his distortion field to stand the test of time.

Also he was distorting gadgets. Holmes was distorting medical results. One of these is much more criminal.

Sadly, there is almost never any meaningful discussion or analysis of the role her gender likely played in this mess. I made a stab at talking about it only very seldom and it generally didn't get well received nor taken seriously as any kind of valid point of view, even though my interest is as a woman trying to sort out how you actually find your path forward.

It's almost taboo to feel bad for her! I think she committed a crime - but compare to the coverage to, for example, Madoff, it certainly seems rather different.

I guess it cuts both ways - she certainly garnered more attention than your average unicorn startup CEO. Now those same forces are working against her.

I don't feel bad for her and I'm not talking about "Poor baby! Men are such meanie faces!"

Links to things I dared to open my mouth and say in the past:

Me commenting on how I think her gender impacted things:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450442

Me commenting on my frustration at the amount of press the debacle got:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14143057

Your first comment suggests that she merely wasn't getting good criticism because men were fawning over her, and that's why her technology didn't work. We'll see the verdict from the trial, but at this point it is pretty solidly documented that the technology and company she built around it were a deliberate fraud. It seems rather cut and dry.

Your second comment (double quoted here to emphasize that it's a quote you made up) says ""Yup, that's what happens when a woman is in charge of a business"" which I would also describe as a pretty extreme mischaracterization of the reaction to her behavior.

Thank you for engaging me.

My first comment was carefully worded to try to avoid drama and isn't a full expression of my thinking.

A more accurate statement would be that I think you likely wouldn't have seen a company that was nothing but hot air reach a valuation of $10 billion with a man in charge. Someone would have gone "Hold up. Where is the evidence?" a lot sooner.

My second comment was me expressing my concerns about public opinion and how it gets shaped. It wasn't characterizing how she ran the company at all.

A lot of stuff gets understood as subtext or due to context. I expressed my feelings and fears and there was strong pushback against that which seems also rather rooted in bias to me. A woman feeling like "God, this looks really bad and I fear how it will impact general perception of women in business." really shouldn't be any kind of drama at all. Yet it was.

Edit: Excerpt from a blog post I wrote at the time expanding on my thoughts on my first comment:

I feel this is a very widespread issue and a very serious issue. For most women, like me, it holds us back and we struggle to get anywhere. The lack of constructive friction means we just cannot get traction at all. For Ms. Holmes, a confluence of events caused that lack of friction to grow a pipe dream, a fantasy, to incredible proportions due to a lack of brakes in the system. There was a lack of genuine checks and balances. Now, reality is finally intruding and it is a debacle.

It is too late to help Ms. Holmes. She just has to pay the piper now. She may never be taken seriously. But I wish this disaster would foster more constructive discussion about the very real problems female founders face.

Madoff's "investment" firm, I think, is a good comparison for Holmes's Theranos. They're both conartists that peddled their image and influence to run fake businesses and steal money from investors.

My pre-edit post had a sentence that was poorly written, and it still might be unclear. My point was meant to be that the coverage of Holmes has very much not described the situation as what happens when a woman is in charge. I also think you're not accurately portraying what she has done. She is not some misguided founder who came up with an idea that failed but then just continued to fail up because men were too enamored with her to tell her the truth. She deliberately and repeatedly committed fraud - a crime. She knew her product didn't work, and she went through great efforts to lie about it. The greater context is even more damning when you consider the influence peddling, Jobs costume, fake deep voice, etc.

I think the pushback you saw is because your point is ignoring the reality of Holmes's actions to make a separate point. In no way is Holmes a victim of a lack of constructive feedback. I can also understand how it could be concerning that all women leaders will get painted with the same brush as her, but I think virtually all serious coverage of Theranos has described her as an exceptional criminal, not a portrait of women in leadership.

I think there are interesting ways in which gender affects this particular case, though I wouldn't say it dominates. Which is to say, I can see a man doing the same thing, although they would obviously have to adapt a different strategy. Regardless I think a lot of people are afraid to converse in this territory at all lest they get caught up in a wave of anti or pro women downvoters. Additionally I think a lot of people on HN tend to avoid polemic social discussions, because they don't want to risk saying something bad about something they are in agreement with.

My observation is that she is a pretty blonde white woman, and I wonder how much harder it would be for a large black woman or a short Indian woman with an accent to accomplish the same thing. It wouldn't surprise most people to hear there may have been some favoritism involved, especially now that she's been revealed as a fraud. The truth is some people are just favored in society and others aren't. I wish it weren't so, I'm certainly not in the favored group, but I can't help but run into that observation in different realms of life. Attractive people tend to get better jobs, more romantic interest, and even babies prefer looking at attractive faces more.

But to say everything she accomplished is because she was a woman is.. well a gross oversimplification. She must have been talented just by virtue of the fact that she was able to create as large a fraud as she did. In trying to avoid sounding like they're simplifying her down to just her looks,I think a lot of people may just avoid conversion instead of trying to create a carefully crafted argument one way or the other. I wonder if even what I wrote won't come off the wrong way. But to me, she employed both her intelligence and her looks in order to get her objective(the latter specifically at least in her affair).

> It's almost taboo to feel bad for her! I think she committed a crime - but compare to the coverage to, for example, Madoff, it certainly seems rather different.

Yes, she's gotten massively more sympathetic coverage than Madoff.

She was parading around as a lean forward messiah after the allegations came out and the media was lapping it all up without question. A pretty clear example of the women are wonderful effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect

I think the charitable interpretation is she's seriously deluded. She also "launched" a Twitter hashtag if I recall correctly of #IronSisters which had me rolling my eyes. She was trying to evoke Iron Lady a la Margaret Thatcher but it sounds skeevily like iron maiden instead.

Edit: I don't mean the band.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden

If you read Bad Blood, there are some segments that cover the role her gender played.

For a couple of the key initial investors, they were clearly willing to look the other way and give her a pass on certain behaviors because they wanted her to be successful. George Shultz also saw her as a certain sort of daughter figure and went out of his way to protect her against accusations of fraud.

She also emulated the mannerisms and speech patterns of male peers when presenting herself.

Personally, I don't much care for bringing it up too much. No one discusses the role gender played in Madoff's ponzi scheme because it wasn't really relevant to the case. It seems an unfair double standard to bring it up when a woman is accused of it.

She slept with a male investor. I don't think I dared voice my suspicions beforehand but was distinctly unsurprised when that detail came out.

Men being able to hype their bullshit (edit: I mean outright fraudulent business plans) because they garnered backers via the casting couch isn't typical as far as I know. So I think her gender is pertinent and as a woman I have spent a lot of time trying to sort out how one gets taken seriously for your work.

And people finding it rude or something for me to want to discuss that are people essentially telling me "We can't let you figure out how to succeed because your interest in figuring that out is excessively gauche. So just stay poor and continue to go hungry. It sucks to be you and you aren't allowed to aspire to having it not suck."

Not only did she sleep with them, but also said that he manipulated her to commit fraud playing the role of a victim of abuse. It was even made public that she formulated her victim defense strategy. It may work to an extent but imagine a male trying to say that they were victimized into commiting a crime.

When the verdict comes out I'm riding my bike to the court house to watch the reporters on the steps ask the questions. Theranos is a fascinating story that has almost become mythological.

The only reason I find it interesting is because she started that company when people were still thinking any new tech will change the world.

You guys were still drooling over Zuckerburg, and that movie. (Some claim different, but for many Zuck was John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever for a generation of nerds. Yes, it's embarrassing now, because they All sold out. Facebook, Google, etc. were going to make society better. The story is still unfolding, but greed rules when you get out of school? I guess?

She copied Steve Jobs with her rediculious attire, and we all were afaraid to ask the tough questions because of her gender. Everytime I questioned her company, someone would accuse me of misogyney in a subtle ways.

In the end, she blamed her actions on that little fat guy who followed her around like a hungry puppy dog.

In a way, I'm glad we had a Holmes. Getting that gold rush money was irritating for those that didn't have the inside friends, or the wealthy parents.

If people watched The Social Network and thought it was a heroic portrayal of a visionary making tech to change the world, they didn’t watch The Social Network.

I'm fascinated because I don't understand how a bunch of rich, powerful men (they were mostly men) fall for this? Was she the daughter they wished they had? Was she like an angel fallen from heaven with an odd hairstyle and deep voice that gave a subtle signal she was not used to inhabiting a human body, and she came here to save millions of lives with her device? The ability to hypnotize rich and powerful men and the angelic aspect of it is why I call it almost mythological, like Odysseus and the Sirens.

Article ends with:

> Thankfully for Theranos, in a few weeks this incident will look like nothing more than a minor setback. [...]

> Theranos won’t go bankrupt, their investors are still going to get rich, and Holmes will still be on the cover of tech magazines. In fact, in the next few years Theranos will only become stronger.

Which of course turned out to be hilariously wrong. A lesson in the value of the opinions of pundits (approximately zero).

The original author's reaction to this being on the front page of HN is almost certainly "All publicity is good publicity."

Didn't age well. To their credit, they've left the story up.

They had nothing, nobody saw them demonstrate anything because they had nothing, and yet folks ran to defend them.

Presumably over some sense of fairness or something?

How funny. Does anyone have any opinion of this hustle co? Sounds like content I might like, but I read an article and they (founders) repeatedly referred to themselves as ultra-cool, millennial, no-code founders, and seemed to call everyone else a douche. The article was insanely douchey. Worth keeping an eye on them though?

This has been my fave story of 2021 because it was clear to me very early on that she was a Fraud using psychological methods to manipulate older men.

If you haven't been following the trial, this series at business insider has been quite good.

The Elizabeth Holmes trial

Start with the Sep 9, 2021, 11:29 AM posting.

https://www.businessinsider.com/category/elizabeth-holmes-tr...

Well, this story aged poorly.

Makes me think about all the things being currently written has certain, that have the highest magnitude of uncertainty

This is amazing. In all the ways.

Interesting that this article itself is bullshit, according to the definition that bullshitters don’t even care what the truth is.

The author of the piece most definitely believes in crafting stories. What he did not sufficiently care about was facts.

Apparently he was just intuitively certain that spunky little Lizzy Holmes was no psychopath or crook. That was good enough for him and he wanted it to be good enough for us, too.

It could also be that the media is often just a form of PR for companies

Reply on news.ycombinator.com