YC-backed uBiome is basically Theranos-lite
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Health care and medicine isn't a "fake it till you make it" type of industry, but that's the entire model that's preached in the startup world. So, almost by definition, startups + health care is really ripe for fraud and deception.
It's not a coincidence that the companies that succeeded with the formula were internet ads, and monopolies that provided day to day services (replacing mundane stuff like taxis, hotels, social interaction, etc...)
Cerebral (cerebral.com): first, their whole business model is about being a pill farm for controlled substances. So, out of the gate that's pretty concerning (but, yes, you can make a lot of money by providing easy access to adderall and ativan). Beyond that, they're having a hell of time recruiting providers and so their lead time for appointments is pretty high. They're still taking customers on a subscription basis, but can't provide appointments. I think it's just a matter of time before that whole mess collapses.
One Medical (onemedical.com): in early 2021, they were caught letting people skip the line for covid vaccines. The house select committee on coronavirus investigated them and released a pretty damning report back in December, and their SEC filings have indicated that they're under further investigations by some various organizations. Based on this information and other chatter I've heard, I don't think that's the only questionable thing they've done.
Before COVID, you couldn’t get a prescription for controlled substances without first meeting a provider in person.
This law was enacted years ago because pill mills were popping up everywhere and dispensing controlled substances to people in exchange for $200+ phone calls. They’d do a minimal 5 minute call with anyone who signed up, speedrun through a prepared script, and then send the patient their controlled substance prescription of choice. You then made a follow-up appointment the next month for your refill, which was an even shorter phone call.
They didn’t accept insurance because no sane insurance company would deal with them. Their target audience only wanted to pay their way to prescriptions and didn’t mind.
And this is exactly what Cerebral is doing all over again. The COVID exceptions for in-person prescribing will theoretically expire at some point, but until they do there are several companies like Cerebral trying to cash in as much as possible with Instagram and TikTok ad campaigns to convince as many people as possible to sign up for literal Adderall pay-for-prescription subscriptions.
Before anyone rushes off to sign up, keep in mind that these controlled substance prescriptions will be logged in your state’s prescribing database and doctors everywhere are catching on to these pill mills. If you show up to a real doctor later asking for a prescription, they might check your prescribing history and think twice after seeing that you were getting prescriptions from known pill mills nowhere near you.
Pharmacies are also getting fed up with the sudden influx of prescriptions from remote doctors for scheduled substances.
I really hope this business model gets crushed ASAP, because if it’s allowed to continue then we’re going to see a crackdown on ADHD diagnoses and prescribing in the same way that pain management has become exceedingly difficult to come by (for true pain patients) in the wake of the opioid pill mill epidemic.
Because if there's not... Then it sounds like the easiest & best solution would be to reschedule the drugs and make them (mostly) OTC.
I can think of dozens of OTC drugs in Mexico that are a PITA to get in states due to unnecessary healthcare visits...
I'm not sure about that. If I remember correctly, the most prescribed medication for ADHD is Adderall, and Adderall is amphetamine salts. Amphetamine and methamphetamine are not the same, though they are close. Also, the difference between a therapeutic dose of amphetamine or methamphetamine and what the regular drug abuser uses is huge.
So yeah, aphetamine (Adderall et al) and meth are basically the same, pharmacologically. The anticipated differences between them in their effect on the body and mind largely aren't real.
Most studies I've seen of methamphetamine for ADHD treatment use 20-40mg doses, sometimes but not necessarily split in two. A google search seems to claim that abusers take up to 50mg at a time. That's not a lot higher than the prescribed dose.
In any case you're right that there's a big difference in street drug use vs. therapeutic doses. For street drug user a typical daily dose is on the order of 1000mg whereas prescribed doses are with few exceptions 1-2 orders of magnitude below that. MA in particular is in the lower end of the range, I'd say 10-20mg/day (partly due to it being a very expensive pharmaceutical product if in fact it's even being manufactured at present).
> The anticipated differences between them in their effect on the body and mind largely aren't real.
You're totally right about that. People associate methamphetamine with drug abuse and amphetamine with people taking adderall, but I think it's a case where the dose makes the poison.
For the abusers parts, I've found Simon et al, 2001 "A comparaison of patterns of methamphetamine and cocaine use", that would indicate doses of 500 mg, usually snorted instead of "eaten". As an anecdote, a friend that used to abuse amphetamine consumed around 300 mg a day.
My point: For many of these substances, I'm perfectly capable of managing my own dosing, side-effects, and knowledge resources without a government-mandated overseer. Maybe the solution is to deregulate & facilitate access to knowledge providers, but not enforce more regulation.
But in your original comment you asked if there is any evidence that there is adverse effects from excess prescriptions. And, well, there's plenty of adverse effects from meth use (source: every trailer park in small town America). And studies have shown that the amphetamines commonly prescribed for ADHD produce an indistinguishable high amongst recreational users.
So if you made these drugs unscheduled and available over the counter, you'd basically just replace drug cartels and your local dealer with the Pharma industry and your local CVS. Which don't get me wrong, is a massive fucking improvement! I'm all for that. But you'd certainly also have a heck of a lot of meth-heads wrecking their lives with over-the-counter meds.
Any such legalization and normalization would require active community support and intervention to help substance abusers too.
Sure, it would primarily be the people who had no control over themselves in the face of their addictions, but making all drugs legal would cause many, many people to either overdose or to keep taking the drugs until they died from secondary effects.
If that could be mediated, I am all for full legalization of all drugs, including "hard" drugs like cocaine and heroin.
Other countries have done similar things and found a decrease in usage among both new and previous users, a decrease in overall drug-related deaths, a decrease in drug-related crime, and an increase in rehabilitation.
I may not approve of using drugs myself, but I think what I do with myself is my business and what others do with themselves is their business. I would prefer for things to be as good as they can be with the goal of getting better, and broad scale legalization has strong potential to be a step in the right direction.
As a terrible analogy, if we made it against the law to wear seat belts, some people would die who would not otherwise die.
Most people would continue to wear seat belts anyway as they are aware that wearing a seat belt is far safer than not wearing a seat belt.
Further, it makes sense that a large portion of those people who would die would be the ones that weren't wearing seat belts to begin with regardless of the law, but it stands to reason that some percentage of people who die would be people who would have worn seat belts but chose not to because it was no longer illegal to drive without a seat belt.
I feel there would be a similar outcome to mass drug legalization. Most people would have no change in their lives. Some people who were subconsciously mid-drug induced suicide would continue on and die quicker thanks to the ease of access and legalization, but there would be some people who, without the legal issues and difficulty of obtaining the drugs being an inhibitor would then choose to indulge, and some fraction of those people may overdose or otherwise harm themselves where they would have been protected by the current status quo.
It's hard to navigate mentally but I feel confident in the statement even if it is not fully formed.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-03-11/cerebral-...
The "TikTok-ification" of medicine is pretty frightening as well.
> One ADHD content creator, Reece Palamar, has posted about a half-dozen Cerebral-related videos to his almost 600,000 TikTok followers. (https://www.tiktok.com/@reeceisrandom?lang=en)
> In [another ad] a woman is asked: “Yo, bro, who got you smiling like that?” She then begins dancing with a box of prescription pills. (https://www.tiktok.com/@samanthaswanson1?lang=en)
Do either of these creators look like they're qualified to provide medical advice? They're getting millions of views to dance around and convince people that they have ADHD and need amphetamines. Why? Because they have trouble keeping their lives organized in an age of smartphones and constant media bombardment. But doesn't everyone?
> Some ads suggest that symptoms as common as difficulty with multitasking, focusing, and stress, as well as poor planning, procrastination, and disorganization can all be symptoms of ADHD. (They can also, as one former Cerebral nurse says, “simply be attributed to being an adult in 2022.”)
While this article is particular to Cerebral, they are not the only offenders. There is a whole cottage industry around convincing people with mild organizational problems that they have ADHD, even in "traditional" psychiatry. It's happened to family members and friends of mine.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and went through an Adderall -> Vyvanse -> Ritalin pipeline. I eventually settled on using half of the smallest available dose of Ritalin (5mg/2 = 2.5mg) and that is plenty for me. It's scary how many people I know who are dependent on regular doses of 30+mg of amphetamines.
I’m actually very worried about where this is heading. We had a cohort of mentees come through a mentorship program I help with who ended up recommending Cerebral to each other and getting prescriptions together. I didn’t catch on until later when they started talking about regrets, but I was stunned at how easily they were prescribed excessive doses in exchange for cash payments.
Once the initial euphoria of a medically unnecessary or otherwise excessive amphetamine prescription wears off (and it will), some people end up in a rather unhealthy place. There is no free lunch.
https://www.readmargins.com/p/softbank-robinhood-and-a-margi...
In short, the background of Softbank founders is in plumbing of the financial system. They intentionally bid up dubious companies into obviously unsustainable valuations, with the aim to make them highly illiquid. Faced with illiquid stocks, many of the assumptions behind trading models break down, and obscurities of the financial plumbing come to fore - the water Softbank knows really well. Eventually, index funds include a portion of the bid-up companies on their balance sheets, FOMO investors roll in - that's when Softbank unloads their bags
If get an answer so, let me know. A friend of could use some SoftBank millions as well!
I would guess that her "job" is to have a recognizable name and face that they can put on her advertising, and probably to not go around committing crimes or doing things that would make her name less valuable to the public at large in the process.
However, Harry is not a "former" prince - he is still Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and sixth in line to the throne.
That doesn't work for mental health though. Money can't buy more therapists to meet patient demand.
Edit: more importantly I would never trust my mental health with a company that takes money from Khashoggi's murderers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fund
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khash...
The funding world is _weird_ and I really wonder when the music will stop. I thought (hoped? against my short-time self-interest) that COVID will be such a crisis that will make people reconsider all these crazy spendings, but, apparently not!
YOLO I guess
It's interesting that Khashoggi's assassination is what seems to bother people most about the Saudis. Not the invasion of Yemen that has killed over a hundred thousand civilians or the littany of other crimes.
Considering what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen, with implicit support from NATO countries, and what Russia is doing in Ukraine we (as in Europe and the "West") should have stopped all business relationships with Saudi quite a while ago.
Saudi's actions bother me so, up to the point I refuse to work as much as possible with them, for them or with money from them. Luckily, for now at least, that is made easy since (to my knowledge) my employer isn't funded by Saudi blood money. It is funded by Chinese money so, which poses an interesting dilemma.
It doesn't diminish the deaths of 100k civilians. No whataboutism debate necessary, both are barbaric. One was top of mind, neither is mutually exclusive.
The common denominator between Saudis and Russia is oil and lack of conscience or moral compass. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
These drugs develop dependencies in long-term users (I would know). They can have pretty nasty side effects, and even the more benign options can still cause mood swings and appetite issues (again, I would know). For most people, it can take years before tolerances stabilize (I got lucky). They probably have long-term effects on your brain that we don't know about yet, but meth gives us a good guess.
At its core, One Medical is still offering actual healthcare services. I use them and appreciate the convenience of the app and integrated EMR that they offer. I'm not pleased about the shadiness here, obviously, but it's still so wildly better an experience of primary care that I'm not going to switch over it.
They've done a good job at creating a real loyal base of customers, but they've also painted themselves into a corner with their business model. On one hand, they sell memberships en masse to self-insured employers claiming they lower total cost of care so can save them money. On the other hand, they're building partnerships with large healthcare systems, where the partners view One Medical as a source of insured patients that will eventually need specialty services. But large healthcare systems are notorious for being expensive. So, their two main business models are in conflict with each other. I think some of the things we're seeing are a reflection of this lack of a coherent strategy, and some of the flailing that comes with different arms of the business having opposing needs.
It's interesting you mention their integrated EMR. One Medical builds their own medical record system and patient app. My understanding is it doesn't use any of the standards the rest of the health tech world uses, which is why (last I heard) they weren't offering HealthKit integration -- not that there's not a demand for it (with such a tech focused user based, I imagine it's a common request), but rather they couldn't deliver on it quickly because their infrastructure just isn't set up that way.
This is basically the opioid epidemic being repeated with amphetamine.
If you believe you actually have ADHD, get a real appointment with a real doctor and build a real relationship that doesn’t involve a cash-only subscription to a pill mill. Using a pill mill will jeopardize your future doctor relationships and the pill mills will be shut down as soon as the COVID controlled prescribing exceptions expire.
Pill mill or not, let people find a way to live their best lives. Unless you're a doctor or healthcare professional, stop telling others how to live their lives.
Unless you understand that your use-case might not fit the public, stop implying substances are controlled for no reason.
In a country like the US where big pharma keeps lobbying to regulate as little as possible I would pause and think about why they're not OTC and how it would affect the general population if they were.
Ah like the War on Drugs, got it.
> Unless you understand that your use-case might not fit the public, stop implying substances are controlled for no reason.
You're constructing a strawman. You're taking what I said ("whether it's a pill mill or not, let folks live their lives") and interpreting it in the weakest way possible ("implying substances are controlled for no reason".) This is not what I said. A "pill mill" (some pejorative used for institutions that folks disagree with apparently) is an institution that has some medical liability. It's not making every substances an unregulated one.
Other than leading to the same thing they have nothing in common, and the reason there is a war on drugs is a complex, heated political topic. At no point did I say the war on drugs is a good thing.
You're constructing a strawman, You're taking what I said (leads to people's misery) and interpreting it in the weakest way possible (drugs are bad). This is not what I said, I said that exposing the masses to addictive drugs is a really bad idea. You tried giving opioids to everyone, everyone got hooked on opioids, rinse and repeat.
I'm not saying we should mistreat or lock up consumers of drugs, I'm saying it's a good idea to limit exposure in the first place. Drugs help people everywhere, they also ruin people everywhere.
Crack dealer dot com definitely should be demonized
No it isn't, it's a repeat of the previous American amphetamine epidemic, which has somehow been successfully memory-holed despite lasting multiple decades.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americ...
I'm elated this exists, and find your demonizing of it to be insensitive, hyperbolic and distasteful. Please mind your own business.
You say you can name other companies that have not yet been "discovered" yet, and yet you name zero companies. Are you just teasing. Please name them and let's have a look.
They're not Theranos-level situations... that was just insane in how brazen its fraud was. But more the uBiome-type, where it's illegal or deceptive and at risk of being shut down as a result. And, not to mention, their behavior might be actually harming patients.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Edit: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/ubiome-co-founders-char...
Nowhere here does it say the tech was fake. Mostly insurance fraud. I don’t think the label “theranos-lite” is correct.
What they did that was problematic was they basically offered the service with a nod and wink guarantee that they wouldn't bill you for the service, but would rather have a doc in their employ rubber stamp a "prescription" for the test, to then bill your insurance. They would bill insurance some fairly astronomical amount, too, like, IIRC, $3k-$4k. They'd warn you the entire time "if the insurance company sends you an EOB telling you there's a balance you may owe from us, don't worry, we won't charge you!"
Multiple layers of problematic, both with regards to how they threaded the needle to get a script written for the test to be defensibly "covered" by insurers, and the rates they were charging.
But at least the tech seemed validated and fairly accurate.
It seems like if your underlying technology actually works but you run the rest of your business with the same scams as Theranos, you qualify as Theranos-lite
Blood from a finger prick is just not homogenous enough to give accurate levels of pretty much anything Theranos said they could test.
The most egregious thing uBiome has been accused of doing basically amounts to insurance fraud, which isn't great but also isn't on the same level as lying to customers about the accuracy of the test results they've received.
Insurance fraud isn't what made Theranos "Theranos" at all, so I wouldn't call a corp doing that "Theranos-lite".
That is dangerous and could have seriously hurt, or killed, someone. No amount of billing fraud, however egregious, could possibly match that level of irresponsibility.
There were several useful tools on github and other sites: https://github.com/ubiome-opensource/microbiome-tools
https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/02/26/biohacking-comparing-mu...
https://microbiomeprescription.com/
I now use https://biomesight.com/ instead of ubiome.
But other than fancy scientist lingo, did they actually give you "recommendations for food, prebiotic supplements and lifestyle adjustments based on up-to-date research findings" ? Did they give you enough real information that you could actually adjust your life for better??
https://shop.biomesight.com/collections/frontpage/products/g...
I’ve been shifting my microbiome for the best part of a year, and boy is it difficult, especially if you have non-trivial issues. I think there’s a huge space here for potential startups that can start capturing research into actionable intervention steps (nobody is doing it well at the moment).
Maybe it is because health-insurance billing is already so opaque and error-prone it provides cover for questionable services. Also, if the service is "free" to end-users (because it is covered by health insurance) then why not try anything in the name of self-health?
It seems the most sanctioned vertical to fake-it-till-you-make-it till you hit critical mass and then you are too big to fail because big SV names have already anointed you a winner.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-inside-story-of-...
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerber...
My take is it isn't just the tech side of health that is scammy. In sleep and neuro, we see all sorts of products which make outrageous claims that they say are backed by "science" from leading research organizations, but when you go looking for the research, there is nothing there!
I think sometimes people want to believe their own BS. I wonder how often the people selling/peddling their wares believe what they are saying, or just don't care.
We're being very cautious in our GTM to make sure we build a lasting and trusted company at https://soundmind.co
We're starting here because there is a large volume of good research in stimulating SWOs.
Does that answer your question? I've just sent you a Linkedin request if you'd like to discuss further.
Sleep labs especially in universal healthcare setting like the one I work on are there to assist patient healthcare outcomes.
However, built into how we are going to market, it is doubtful we will have many people who are looking for solutions to their sleep problems. Ignore our current landing page, that is a broad generalization, we will update to be much more specific when the time is right.
At the same time, we are discussing internally giving access to the full data suite for users who do need it. For example, we're working with some researchers, and have interest from air force, etc. who want the full data.
Do you have thoughts on what you loved about having the info from Zeo? Do you use another tracker now? I use Oura as well as our headband to compare how good our classification is, but I don't find the data itself valuable.
I currently use the sleepcycle app. Not nearly as useful as an actual EEG headband.
Maybe consider also giving full access to people like me? Like a dev mode or something.
EEG is probably overkill for most people, but it is the only way to detect SWO, and other parts of sleep we want to manipulate via sound. Plus, having a band on your head with bone conduction gives us an easy way to get sound stim to you.
We'll have something in the future which is more generalized to a larger audience, but we're focused on a few groups that need what we're doing atm.
Here's an example of a piece of research https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/aae18f/...
During your deepest sleep, there are bursts of brain activity called Slow Wave Oscillations. These SWOs are responsible/related to memory consolidation, clearing of amyloid plaques, regulating hormonal response, and more.
When we detect an SWO, we provide a sound (auditory stimulation) and the response of your brain to the sound is to increase the power of the SWO by up to 40%. Much of the existing research measures the improved cognitive response of an individual post sleeping with stim, compared to baseline and sham.
On my task list this month is to write a whitepaper which describes the stim and points to a bunch of the different research (there is lots of it). I'm writing the whitepaper in order to make it easy to understand for investors, and give them a jumping off point to get deeper in the research, should they want to do that.
I'll potentially publish it broader if there is an audience for it.
We think we've got it, but we need to get it on more heads (we have enough testers...).
I'll post about it once we confirm we've got it working, and have our patents in.
There are few objective truths in medicine. Our understanding of human health is still fairly basic. On top of that, many of our best interventions, drugs, and procedures produce only middling results. When the state of the art is poor, it’s easy to sell a vision for improvement.
Measuring the success of health tech is very difficult. What does product market fit look like for early cancer detection? From afar, it may seem as if success for a cancer screening company should be simple to measure: how many cancers can the technology/company detect?
That’s not the case. In medicine there are always confounding factors. For example, in cancer detection, many cancers are low threat (not the same as benign). Identifying a cancer that is unlikely to threaten your life, or worse a false positive result, will end up making your health worse. You will undergo unnecessary biopsies and stress until the issue is resolved.
You might think: OK, but that’s measuring the wrong thing, the real metric to measure is how much longer those patients live with or without the cancer screening tech. You’d be right, but accurately measuring that takes 5+ years.
All this is to say, health tech is a difficult path, perhaps the most difficult path to production in all of tech. Along that road, there are many opportunities for unethical operators to cut corners.
At least in America, it seems a consequence of the stratified, multi-party market.
Each participant only has limited visibility into the entire stack, which allows scams to appear more legitimate than they might in industries where each participant has a better view of the whole.
Also, as you say, it's just ridiculously manual for data entry. :-( But slowly getting better. But that means that the sort of heavyweight detection or correction algorithms one would use elsewhere would just spew nonstop false positives.
To top it off, when Healthcare start up over-promise and under-deliver it gets a level of criticism and outrage that is higher then many other sectors
$ wc -l p65chemicalslist.csv
1056 p65chemicalslist.csvA building has one of these pro-forma signs in front of it. Should a pregnant woman not go in the building?
sed -n $[ $[$RANDOM % 1056 ] + 2]p p65chemicalslist.csvMost investors have a very low understanding of actual biology, or even anything outside of "IT". See: uBeam
Some information here:
https://se-legal.de/schlun-elseven-lawyers/lawyer-for-extrad...
Regardless: marrying to avoid extradition may work, but it may also work against you if it appears that the marriage was a sham to avoid extradition. Finally, the US is required to cooperate in order to give up your US citizenship, which for fugitives they are unlikely to do.
Can't tell if I'm getting older or if more often now some of the newer YC inductees are getting accepted on factors other than their tech accumen.
Nobody who knows anything thinks it's actually a quality signal anymore, it's really just a high passthrough noise filter
From their perspective, they still just need the 1 giga unicorn a year to give their LPs excellent returns so it is what it is
The reputational risk is minimal, and bad eggs can be written off as mistakes/chance character failures.
With YC, they are judging companies at 10 minute interviews, I'm guessing they aren't able to do much due diligence.
I wonder what secrets are being shared by anonymous accounts today that we will only understand in 2032.“
https://twitter.com/alanmcole/status/1510809555143438348?s=2...
However, extraditing just her (cannot extradite him, he is a citizen) will be probably hard due to technicalities and bureaucracy. The health condition may be a factor in a German court decision. Furthermore the alleged crimes and penalties are a major hurdle... According to the twitter thread, she'd face up to 95 years imprisonment, which creates two legal problems for any extradition: It is a vastly longer sentence than what she'd face in Germany for equivalent crimes - so a German court might require assurances first that in the US she wouldn't face a maximum sentence so vastly different than one she'd face in Germany [0] - and 95 years could be considered by a German court as an effective death sentence and Germany does not allow death sentences - this was the case when Turkey wanted some PKK people extradited on terrorism charges, and had agreed to max life imprisonment without parole instead of a death penalty, but the highest German court then ruled against extradition, saying life imprisonment without parole / likely death in prison is equivalent to a death sentence, as it removes any hope for the prisoner to one day become a free person again, and considered that cruel and inhumane[1].
I'd think she might not have been extradited yet because behind the scenes the US and Germany might be still haggling about what charges with what maximum sentences she might be charged under, before the German state prosecutor office files for extradition on behalf of the US. If she manages to become naturalized before that, that may mean game over for any extradition.
Germany could refuse naturalization based on her alleged criminal behavior, but that's unlikely, as she wasn't convicted and as the alleged crimes are non-violent; Germany will usually only refuse naturalization of spouses when there have been previous convictions or solid allegations of extremist and/or grossly violent crimes.
[0] E.g. Puigdemont, one of the leaders of the Catalonian separatist movement, was requested to be extradited from Germany to Spain on the charge of "rebellion". German courts found that there is no equivalent crime in the German penal code, and refused to extradite on this charge. Spain would have had to drop the rebellion charge, and have him extradited on the lesser misuse of public funds charge, which they weren't willing to do, so the extradition proceedings were aborted.
[1] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...
[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
It does happen in some cases though.
France is the same, as they claim the US system favors the rich and is unfair (or so I’ve heard)
No need to make it about the US, France doesn't extradite its citizens to any other country. It has nothing to do with any claim regarding the US legal system.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18041106
“The grapevine says this place is a dog and pony show.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18042433
“Grapevine is true. What they are doing is extremely questionable. They are billing insurance thousands of dollars for tests that are rudimentary and only look at absence or presence of microbes.”
Yes, Theranos was headquartered in SV, but, the vast majority of the investment money came from outside. (The only SV money was some very early stuff from Draper, which was a relatively small amount, and some later money from Larry Ellison.)
Yes, George Schultz lives in SV, but he's not of SV.
For the affirmative: Holmes was a Stanford student; the company was located in Palo Alto; she grew up idolizing Steve Jobs and thought she was emulating his approach; early investors were Tim Draper (personally or via DFJ? It’s not clear to me), Ellison and ATA.
For the negative: Draper’s investment was a super-early, “family and friends” investment when the company was just a “promising idea”, kinda like a YC investment, and he didn’t invest again; Ellison isn’t a VC and was also just excited by the concept and the founder; other than Draper, none of the main SV VCs invested - i.e., Sequoia, KP, Bessemer, Graylock, Benchmark, Accel, General Catalyst, Index, etc, or even any smaller ones with any pedigree (ATA was a new firm in 2004 and is now defunct, and never had any repute); most of the funding, even quite early, and especially later, came from sources outside SV, eg Murdoch, politics figures, and other non-SV investment firms - you just wouldn’t raise funds from those kinds of sources if you were making it as a conventional Silicon Valley startup.
DFJ/Threshold did the seed round, $500k, but doesn't seem to have invested afterwards. ATA did B, at $9.1M, and was a minority investor in C, which totaled $28.5M; Ellison was the C lead and there was a third.
In short, maximum for DFJ, ATA, and Ellison from those three rounds is <$40M. (Rupert Murdoch did A, $5.8M.)
Theranos raised a total of $1.4B. $40M, aka <3%, is in the noise, and the fact that it was early not late says that SV wasn't interested.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/company_fin...
Most of the big names connected with Theranos are former/future cabinet secretaries.
I can’t think of any other time anyone talked about “Henry Kissinger” and “Silicon Valley” in the same sentence.
He is also not alive.
Not sure it necessarily applies in this case though.