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Comment by ferdowsi | Hacker News Reader

I'm loving reading through all of the sickening puff pieces that business/tech journalists put out about her and Theranos.

It's funny to think back to 2015 and the hagiographical void still left in tech journo hearts after Steve Jobs died.

https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-i...

> How Elizabeth Holmes Became America's New Entrepreneurial Icon

> She represents the part of entrepreneurship that is long-term dedication, when nobody's watching

>... That kind of walk-before-you-talk behavior is refreshing and respectable in today's hype-strewn entrepreneurial landscape.

View on HN

> She only pauses in her work to run — seven miles a day.

-- Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, yes that Andreessen, writing in the New York Times Magazine about Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs with, um, no conflict of interest whatsoever I'm sure.

Turns out Palantir's Alex Karp was also "harnessing goodness through technology." No idea how she missed Adam Neumann.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/el...

[Edit: there is an implied conflict of interest in the spouse of a major venture capitalist hyping startups in a supposedly neutral publication, which is something I'm kind of surprised needs clarification, but there is also an explicit conflict of interest -- if we treat the author as a journalist anyway -- in that one of the five companies thus hyped in the linked article was an A16Z portfolio company. Sorry to anyone who thought I was implying that the Andreessens or A16Z were investors in Theranos, I assumed they were not and I didn't intend to imply that. Nor do I think it is in fact implied, but I obviously should have been clearer since people took it that way.]

A16z didn't invest in Theranos, did Marc personally invest or what is the conflict?

The article hypes five founders, one definitely was funded by A16Z, the others I think were not but I'm not sure.

I don't know anything about the Andreessens' personal investments but just as a general rule you might question the propriety of someone that close to the VC money using your storied newspaper to promote startup founders. I'm not going to hold up the NYT as some bastion of journalistic ethics, but still.

https://a16z.com/2011/07/24/meet-our-newest-portfolio-compan...

Hyping founders you _didn't_ invest in is sort of the opposite of nepotism though.

I disagree. It's a small VC world. I'm not going to assume the author was rooting for the failure of the other four operations. One of them even was interviewed on the A16Z podcast later (the one who tragically died). If you had a graph of all the people who contributed to Palantir's success and all the ones who have made money for A16Z, I bet you'd see a lot of overlap.

Consider I have five artists in my collection, and I write an article about five artists but four of them are not in my collection. If I were to write about only the five in my collection, I might be called on it. By writing about the others I'm making it seem like the one in my collection just belongs in the group; and maybe the group will elevate my artist by association.

I might actually like all five of the artists I write about! They might be true visionaries and altruists besides! They might paint all the time except when they are running!

(Actually this kind of thing happens all the time in the art world, which makes my analogy a little depressing when I think about it...)

Sure, if you hype your own investment and add 4 more as decoy then you are hyping your own company, so that would be self serving.

The Arrillaga family fortune goes up any time the value of "SV" as a brand (or concrete asset) goes up. It's a nice trick to not have a formal COI while still closely and actively managing your interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Arrillaga

Interesting, I had no idea.

Adam, or Alfred E...?

I think you ought to actually explain the conflict of interest.

I'm trying to find a clear connection between Theranos and Andreessen-related investments. I can't find evidence of an actual investment in Theranos.

I'm not trying to dismiss you -- your theory[^1] could very well be totally right and there truly was a conflict [my duck-duck-go-ing skills only go so far]. And yeah, perhaps a person married to a wealthy tech investor ought not write high-profile articles possibly related to their partner's investments, and that publishers should be more wary of publishing such articles.

Yet I do get frustrated seeing these sorts of vague cynical quips levying specific accusations based more upon a gut plausibility of a scenario rather than a clear outline of information. It's easy to throw bread crumbs into a forest and connect them to make a path, but that doesn't mean you've found a useful path.

EDIT: Here is a somewhat-arbitrarily-selected article I found which discusses this topic: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/29/11620186/nyt-public-editor-bl...

[^1]: Technically you wrote that you were sure there was no conflict of interest whatsoever, but surely that was in jest.

I'm sure the author has no business relationship at all with Theranos and merely knows her socially.

Plausible deniability is useful in this kind of situation.

My main point from above:

> I do get frustrated seeing these sorts of vague cynical quips levying *specific* accusations based more upon a gut plausibility of a scenario rather than a clear outline of information.

We got it and I couldn’t possibly agree more if you didn’t obnoxiously cut and pasted the same criticism for every subsequent message that failed to satisfy your standards. Sometimes people don’t get our point, so we just move on

Understood. I admittedly got slightly miffed when the first few replies I received in a short time were conjecture.

As an aside, one reply had mentioned plausible deniability… perhaps ‘plausible accusability’ also exists, wherein any hypothetical crime one can imagine is presumed to have factually occurred unless 100% disproven.

They said:

> writing in the New York Times Magazine about Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs with, um, no conflict of interest whatsoever I'm sure.

The only assertion is that she was married to a Visionary Tech Entrepreneur and doing puff pieces for Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs. Like seeing an article by Michelle Obama about how democratic politicians these days are great. Nothing deeper than that I think. It was an eye roll in text form.

It’s not an entirely pointless exercise, though, because people should know how powerful figures are related, and why they are motivated to do what they do. Journalists and billionaires are regular people who when exposed to a spouse’s daily ideas and reactions will soon bend in their direction. We should expect this from Laura. And we should be better equipped to dismiss it, because she was wrong.

My main point from above:

> I do get frustrated seeing these sorts of vague cynical quips levying *specific* accusations based more upon a gut plausibility of a scenario rather than a clear outline of information.

I edited in a response to that, to the effect that this kind of vague accusation is not that vague, people are predictable, and we should know who we get our information from.

Understood -- I can agree with that in general.

BTW I totally understand that HN is not Debate Club, and that comments aren't required to be formal, rigorous, evidence-based arguments. Occasionally I just feel compelled to point out times when beliefs about people in general are used to justify accusations against specific people in specific circumstances -- even when I can empathize with the original sentiment, as was the case with the OP.

I did clarify, but I'm curious what specific accusation you read from my comment.

I re-read it a few times and I don't see one regarding Theranos other than sloppy writing. My "gut plausibility of a scenario" that the author is pumping up her husband's portfolio company in an NYT article is pretty easy to validate by reading the article itself, it just happens to not be Theranos.

Are you seeing something that's not there, or am I failing to see something that is?

Thanks!

BTW I agree with your overall sentiment. Sorry if I was too obnoxious with my post. Sometimes I overthink things (such as with the rest of this comment).

On your comment:

> > She only pauses in her work to run — seven miles a day.

> -- Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, yes that Andreessen, writing in the New York Times Magazine about Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs with, um, no conflict of interest whatsoever I'm sure.

> Turns out Palantir's Alex Karp was also "harnessing goodness through technology." No idea how she missed Adam Neumann.

> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/el...

My issue is only with the first two lines, therein I can only discern one meaningful interpretation given the context.

1. You begin with a puffy quote from the article about Elizabeth Holmes

2. You name the author and publisher

3. You commented that she was writing "with, um, no conflict of interest whatsoever I'm sure" -- which is most likely sarcasm and that you suggest the opposite is true.

Therein is a claim (or at least a stated belief): that the author had a conflict of interest when writing about Elizabeth Holmes.

The nature of the conflict wasn’t clear. I looked it up (and later posted an article which asserted such a conflict) but didn’t find any clear connections between the Andreessens and Holmes/Theranos specifically.

In your #3 you seem to have overlooked the phrase “about Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs,” which is what the eye-roll about conflict of interest pertains to.

I get what you misunderstood and I think I now get why, but I disagree that it’s what the “verbal eye roll” (love that phrase from another commenter) is actually doing on the, er, page. Guess we can summon the English teachers now, but I’m sticking to my style. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

That's fair

I don't think there's a literal "conflict of interest" but there's definitely a "protect your friends" thing going on.

Laura is from the rich Stanford/Menlo Park VC/Palo Alto crowd, and that's Holmes' base of support as well.

My main point from above:

> I do get frustrated seeing these sorts of vague cynical quips levying *specific* accusations based more upon a gut plausibility of a scenario rather than a clear outline of information.

It really is amusing that you have to keep posting this comment as I don't think anyone gave you an actual answer to what you're asking for, even after you clarified that you wanted specific, concrete accusations rather than vague ones. It's like people are wanting to reply to you but keep simply glossing over what you wrote.

> Laura is from the rich Stanford/Menlo Park VC/Palo Alto crowd, and that's Holmes' base of support as well.

What support did Holmes have in SV?

Yes, Draper put in some early money and Ellison put in some money, but the vast majority of Theranos' money seems to have come from outside the valley. (Yes, George Schultz lives in SV, but he's part of the SV investor "scene.")

You're thinking of the Sand Hill Road VCs, I guess. You're right: not much if any.

However, Schultz was in the Hoover Institute (on the Stanford campus), and he introduced her to lots of other government / defense heavyweights. James Mattis actually testified at the trial, for instance. Once you have a prestigious backer, the others fall in line like sheep.

I actually met Laura once, before she married Marc. Those people all know each other, believe me (I'm not one of them, in case you were wondering; it was some charitable thing).

Yes, Schultz introduced Theranos to "not SV" people, such as Mattis and the Walmart heirs.

How does that make Theranos part of the "Stanford/Menlo Park VC/Palo Alto" crowd?

>based more upon a gut plausibility of a scenario rather than a clear outline of information.

What meets your threshold for a conflict of interest? Maybe I'm being too harsh, but this seems to meet my personal threshold.

It's like if a politician heads a committee that has large sway in government contracts and they are close to someone who happens to invest in companies that bid on those contracts. It's easy to see a conflict exists even if a straight-line to a crime does not. Ethics often boils down to managing these conflicts so there isn't even a perceived avenue for impropriety. A politician breaches ethical boundaries irrespective if there’s unequivocal evidence they let the relationship impact their decision. There does not need to be a smoking gun.

I think that Fox news has been around enough that people really don't expect any media to be neutral anymore. It just seems natural and normal for any media outlet to be vertically integrated into something. Washington Post seems to be anti union and against billionaires being taxed? Whatever.

when fox news came out, most news agencies (maybe all) were already left, so it choose to do something different and liberals have been bemoaning that ever since.

This reads like a PR release:

> By breaking down barriers to testing, she’s paving the way for a scalable approach to early diagnosis and therefore lower-cost, less invasive treatments. And by standing up to lawmakers and entities with vested interests for individuals’ fundamental right to access their health care information, Holmes may be doing more than running one of the world’s most successful start-ups — she may be starting a movement to change the health care paradigm as we know it.

A hagiography (/ˌhæɡiˈɒɡrəfi/; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος, hagios 'holy', and -γραφία, -graphia 'writing') or vita (from Latin vita, life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies) is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagiography

"If you haven't yet heard of Elizabeth Holmes, you soon will."

And how!

If you just stop reading right there, the article is perfectly cromulent!

TIL the word cromulent, cheers.

Checking in.

HN, embiggening your vocabulary day by day.

For those curious on cromulent:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-crom...

> All of which is great fodder for flashy headlines.

Yes... Something like that.

I do feel sorry for her in a way. She was riding a treadmill of expectations. Started off slowly, probably thinking "yeah, we can do this" and by the time the treadmill was moving at light speed, it was too late to get off.

Even TED has removed her talk from YouTube. What responsibility do the media bear when their shallow hype turns out to be false and damaging to all parties?

Nah you shouldn't feel bad for her, if you read into it she was constantly lying from the very beginning. As for media responsibility, I don't know how responsible they really are here for the actual fraud. While Holmes sent their stories of her to investors, she also had fake documents and other lies that made the bulk of her pitch (ie the military work).

> She was riding a treadmill of expectations. Started off slowly, probably thinking "yeah, we can do this" and by the time the treadmill was moving at light speed, it was too late to get off.

She absolutely was not. It was completely obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the subject that what she was doing was fraudulent.

I have no knowledge of the subject.

I do, however, have a strong allergic reaction to motivational speeches from wide-eyed people with enormous grins. Well, from anyone; but the wide eyes and the permanent grin (and the embarrassing grooving-along to MC Hammer) would have driven me away from that firm in an instant.

I'm amazed that anyone fell for her.

> riding a treadmill of expectations

... which she started up herself. Read about the Stanford prof who saw through her before she even started the Theranos journey.

Stanford Prof. Phyllis Gardner

Mercury News: "She saw through Elizabeth Holmes. Now Stanford professor is star in Theranos saga."

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/03/she-saw-through-eliza...

IIUC she'd fire anyone who'd challenge the hype or raise issues in the company. Not sure why you'd feel bad for her.

I feel bad for her too. She messed up, and probably did it intentionally too. That's messed up, but how much physical harm did people suffer? 60 years of prison time's worth? Near as I can tell a bunch of investors lost some money. Are they on the street now, begging for dinner? Kinda doubt it. Maybe there's a more fitting punishment.

It's pretty fitting, given how large the reward for pulling the fraud off was.

There are, of course, a lot of people walking free who have done far worse things. (The Sacklers, for instance, should all be subject to a combination of prison and utter financial ruin. If the world were just, most of them should be living on the street, right now. Instead, they are making quaint arguments about how a third of their drug wealth is fair recompense, and how their plundered offshore billions should be protected from bankruptcy.)

> but how much physical harm did people suffer

Is physical harm the only harm that matters?

> Are they on the street now, begging for dinner?

That's not how justice works.

Why is it justice to dole out physical harm (prison) for actions that didn't cause physical harm? America has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...).

I'm not interested in the incarceration rates in the US (the legal and social system is so messed up it's difficult to find a starting point - Europe is not different either for the record), the discussion is about what is a valid justice course of action.

Some crimes need physical intervention in order to protect society. It's just reality. For example, a thief that breaches private property needs to be punished, because not only did he steal, but he also caused a loss peace in society, which affects everyone.

I think the harm was caused by using the investors and prestige of the company to build the consumer confidence into passing faulty testing on to patients and some patients testified to receiving pretty devastating false positives and results. Their customer service was directed to minimize their potential failure rates until one of the later lab directors voided a lot of the faulty test results after discovering how bad it actually was. While I believe she was mainly convicted of defrauding investors, it's not like her actions happened in a bubble. They operated for like 10 years like that.

That's the problem I have though. The people who were really hurt, will they get any restitution from this? Somehow I doubt it, but the investors will walk away feeling vindicated.

Her lawyers pressure resulted in Ian Gibbons suicide [0], they provided false medical results that could have missed crucial health results, the provided false medical results that could have caused high levels of stress and worry, etc...

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

That would be a separate case I would think, and not one that Gibbons' relatives would be likely to win.

When I read this comment, the comment directly above it talked about people receiving incorrect test results and included links to relevant articles. I think its safe to say that some of Theranos' users did suffer non-financial harm.

Her story arc is much like Bernie Madoff's. He, too, only really hurt wealthy investors. But did anyone feel bad for him?

Only hurt wealthy investors? What about people who received incorrect testing results, like the woman who was given a false-positive HIV result and the woman who was incorrectly told that she was miscarrying?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/theranos-results... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/theranos-gave-wo...

They certainly got a scare, but it's hard to see that they were harmed.

Generally, when one gets a scary result from a test, another test is done to confirm.

The false negatives would have been a better example.

True. But when I've gotten negative test results, I'm well aware that they aren't a guarantee of anything.

I felt bad for his family.

Please actually read the case files and evidence presented by the state, your characterization of her is incorrect. The jury's verdict confirms that.

I think its wrong they removed her talk. It should be there, mistakes should be shown too.

> Even TED has removed her talk from YouTube.

Why? I would add a disclaimer that they don't endorse it and maybe a link to the ruling but at this point it's an historical document.

They care more about their brand than preserving history.

Gell-Man Amnesia Effect in full effect. Will we remember when we read the next PR piece/pump and dump disguised as journalism?

I remember thinking that all the hype about her was somewhat over the top.

I was going through a health tech startup incubator at the time, and it became a bit of a meme where we'd poke fun at anyone who bought into Theranos. Some went as far as putting together a slide deck to debunk the claims about running labs on such tiny volumes of blood. This was when and where I learned about the heterogeneity of blood.

It was an obvious farce. If they had real tech they could have simply done a million comparative tests on the military/VA or at free clinics and showed the relative accuracy.

Yeah it was surprising that so many people with health care backgrounds fell for it.

you turn the page, and you forget.

No one in the media seems to still question if cryptocurrencies are serious investment assets despite little actual proven utility beyond being a speculative investment asset.

>Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud

>Speculators might make money on it, but the arguments for its usefulness fail completely.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is...

>Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history

>It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocu...

>The Great Cryptocurrency Scam

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2018/11/20/the-grea...

>Dogecoin Creator Says Crypto Is a Scam

>Jackson Palmer went on Twitter for the first time in two years to remind us that the wealthy are ruining everything—even cryptocurrency.

https://gizmodo.com/dogecoin-creator-says-crypto-is-a-scam-1...

Articles you cited are from years ago or a contributor (not an employee) of Forbes.

I met Jackson Palmer in 2017/2018 and he had a level head for looking through this mania.

Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy.

The first one was from under a year ago.

> Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy.

OT, but why would Tether impact Bitcoin? They are totally different use cases of crypto.

The market structure allows tether to be printed and then to pump Bitcoin. So it doesn’t matter what the use case is.

I’d like to bet someone on this. If you or others are interested maybe we can refine a wager. :)

I’m thinking that in 7 years there will be something built with blockchain tech (not cryptocurrency) that is used by 10M people?

(I know you said cryptocurrencies but many people conflate the two and feel it’s all bogus..)

Anyone could win instantly by pointing out git. The hype is new, but not the concept.

Is git fueled by superfluous energy-wasting (=environment-destroying) "proof of work"?!?

There's a decent amount of bike-shedding over which workflow is the best, and that is a sort of inefficient "fuel" for git as a tool at some level...

What definition do you have of blockchain tech that git fits into it?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

"A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked together using cryptography.[1][2][3][4] Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree). [etc]"

Do you have a definition that git doesn't fit into (without getting too pedantic, e.g., git being a DAG of records rather than a list)?

A blockchain can be a turing complete computer?

I don't understand what your question is. Are you saying that all blockchains must be turing complete and that git isn't therefore it's not a blockchain?

I didn't mean it as a question. What I meant was that blockchains can be Turing complete and git doesn't have that level of sophistication as a system.

I didn't think blockchains had to be turing complete. What definition do you use that requires that? I can't see that the original bitcoin paper implies such a requirement, but maybe it can be derived somehow.

Sure it wasn’t in Satoshis paper but most of the largest block chains are now essentially virtual machines and transactions can be arbitrary code written for those VMs, where the fee is the computational cost for the nodes to run that code.

I still don't understand where this is going. If you're saying git is not a blockchain because it's not turing complete that means all blockchains must be turing complete. I don't think that is true.

Hashing is not the same as blockchain.

Well, some icons are half-lying/half-BSing/half-actually doing cool stuff. Will we remember their lies?

PS: you know who I'm talking about, just don't want to invite fans here.

I got conned by pump and dump stock scam. The perpetrators got sentenced to 5 years. I was amazed to get a restitution check in the mail.

I hope to be smarter next time.

Wow, that is amazing! What portion of your investment was returned? You don't have to say the actual amounts if you don't want, but I'm curious about whether you got 1/10, 1/2, or all of your investment back.

Actually, all of it! (It wasn't a large amount, though.)

I will never forgive Bloomberg for their atrocious handling of Apple/Amazon/Supermicro "hacking" case where they didn't retract their claims despite no proof or evidence. I never cite that publication, it's toxic to me.

No of course not, we as a society do not learn from history very well. It's not like this woman is the first con man ever to defraud investors. And she won't be the last.

LOL, um, you are on a silicon valley startup site?

The valuations of practically every company that comes out of here until it "goes public" is almost entirely based on this hype media infrastructure, or at least are dependent on somewhere between four and eight 0s in those company's valuations.

This is a parable about sociopaths in society. They are tolerable as long as they are usable fools: useful for war, useful for flogging troops, play within certain rules. But there's a line, and you cross it, you risk revealing all the other vampire sociopaths that are controlling society.

I have no sympathy for this postmodern uncanny valley AI-generated faildaughter CEO person-like matrix construct with empty, flaccid eyes. But she's a fascinating mirror into the CEO sausage factory.

Agree. And it was further shameful how the hype machine may have utilized her gender to try and portray her to young women and girls as a role model. When there are plenty of female CEO ushering in successful products like Dr. Lisa Su or whomever.

It is funny that TED has removed her talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE

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