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they probably excluded all the boring and reasonable parts of the story

>When she was 9, her family moved to Houston, where her father had taken up a job with Tenneco (Oil Company). Intrigued by their father's work in China, Elizabeth and her brother learned Mandarin Chinese at a young age.[5] She spent her teenage years in China, and while still in school, started a business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.[8][5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

The New Yorker had a good article that covers her background. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler

> Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery.

Every time I read about these ultra successful people, I just think they are freaking machines... and I don't mean that in a derogatory or mean way.

I am genuinely amazed people can operate like that. I know I can't.

Her story is quite comparable to Bill Gates. She's levelled up compared to her parents but they were by no means poor.

I hope I'm proved wrong, but it does sound too good to be true.

Seriously? Just because you can't imagine it, it must be a scam?

Yes, clearly that is exactly what I'm saying. Intelligent CEO == scam.

It takes more than intelligence to start a Biotech company. You need money, equipment, skill, and usually experience.

Medical breakthroughs usually require years of research and skills that are acquired working on a PhD. I'm not saying it's not possible for a 19 year old to make a world changing discovery, but when no one will say what exactly that world changing discovery is, I get a bit skeptical.

Actually, there does not need to be a 'discovery' here, merely fantastic execution on existing technology. It's a bit like combining a bunch of stuff that already exists in a novel way and then playing that for all it is worth. This does nothing to belittle the accomplishment here, it's fairly amazing if what they've done is as accurate as they claim it is but from what I've been reading over the years all the pieces were already there, it's just that nobody bothered to combine them like this and the execute the hell out of it.

Classic disruptive startup, very impressive if you dig down a bit further.

Impressive that a founding student (not the professor who sponsored the research) has retained 50% equity at a $9B valuation. The history of those negotiations will hopefully become a Harvard or Stanford Business School case study.

Her family connections might had something to do with it. Its easy to screw poor kid, but Oil executive family that regularly has Secretary of State, a former Secretary of Defense, and a former Senator dinner guests? Better think twice.

>Classic disruptive startup,

I don't think you can call this a classic disruptive startup. Look at the board members; they are some of those most powerful people on the planet, and yet the founder still maintains 51%.

Either she is insanely charismatic or she discovered something earth shattering (either a novel discovery, or a novel use of existing discoveries).

This is not a new company and that board was not in place from day 1.

If you've got the money, you too can have a board like that.

Yes, but why do they have so much money? So a 19 year old walks up to an investor and says:

"Give me $16 million. I've got an idea for a new way to do blood tests. It doesn't work yet, and I've got less than a year's experience in the field. But I'm wicked smart because I learned Mandarin as a child, and my professor believes in me. Oh and by the way I'm going to maintain control of my company and never want to give up more than 50%"

That surely didn't happen. She must have something that at least looks very impressive to have negotiated those terms, but what I don't understand is why no one is talking about what that is. They have patents to protect them. Why aren't they releasing peer reviewed studies?

They have so much money because there is lots of money to be made in this field and they have a pretty compelling story.

Also, those investors have likely done their due diligence and liked what they saw.

A compelling story doesn't buy $16 million for a 20 year old with no track record, no product, no customers, and no experience.

From further reading, her initial idea was just that, an idea. She thought it would be possible to make a handheld device that could do blood tests.

How you go from that to $16 million without the slightest demonstrated ability to execute is my question.

> From further reading, her initial idea was just that, an idea. She thought it would be possible to make a handheld device that could do blood tests.

Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

Money attracts money. This is perhaps the long-tail of the investment insanity which happened over the past decade and culminated in the GFC for the finance sector. It somewhat stands to reason that the fiscal fervor of the times has perhaps just fallen into an area where the payoff period is typically longer.

There's a very good reason to be skeptical when the most anyone can say about the company is the composition of it's board - noteworthy, but I wonder how often that was used to pitch to each of its members.

It's worth rereading the story of Enron when parsing things like this - there's a lot of parallels.

Given what has occurred elsewhere in the economy in recent years, the fact that people have thrown lots of money at a compelling story means nothing without being able to look inside the box to see what is going on, Bernie Maddox managed to get a lot more money raised than these folk.

You don't raise that kind of money without DD. So presumably somebody got to look inside the box but they did not make it public. That's pretty common in the tech investment world.

Presumably someone did, but it would not at all be unheard of for due diligence to not be particularly diligent at all and for later investors to then trust to the diligence of the earlier ones, as after all, being thoroughly diligent is exceedingly expensive and why double up when someone else has already checked...

I would agree that you usually do not raise that kind of money without reasonable DD, but there are more than enough counter examples out there of people bullshitting investors out of very large sums, both deliberately and through deluding themselves.

That does happen but less frequently than you probably think. In this case there was a company with a track record and a bunch of tech which could be audited, that's a relatively straightforward affair. It gets a lot harder in early stage 'virtual' (as in: no physical product) companies.

Found this, don't have the money to spend though. http://decibio.com/theranos

Good find! I'm curious what their long term plan is, if they're going to stay private or IPO at some point. If they IPO you can expect a lot of information to become more widely available than it is today.

…insanely charismatic or… discovered something earth shattering…

Or just kept executing well.

The company is 12 years old. The initial investments and staffing were likely modest and provisional.

But going back to investors year after year, always having delivered what you predicted at each step, and proving that you've accumulated proprietary technical advantages, will get you to a giant company.

>The initial investments and staffing were likely modest and provisional.

The initial investment was $16 million from what I've read. That's a lot of money to give to then 20 year old with no record whatsoever.

When you say, "no record", it seems you haven't read (among other things) the New Yorker profile linked above.

Per that account, by the time Theranos raised its first $6 million in late 2004, Holmes had been working on it for over a year, had at least one patent in process, and had convinced her chemical engineering professor, a dean of the Stanford engineering school, to be an advisor and board member. (He's since joined Theranos full-time.)

So it's not, "kid with nothing but idea and moxie handed money" – but rather "star researcher impresses and recruits a bunch of domain-experts, which then attracts investments".

I have read that, and to me that is "no record". By record, I mean a demonstrated ability to actually turn an idea into a product.

When she got that first $6 million, and another $10 shortly after, she had no product, no experience, and it wasn't even clear if the technology to do what she proposed was feasible.

I've read her first patent, it's super broad and covers a huge number of possible implementations. There was no way for her to know at the time if any of it was really feasible. And none of it was feasible at the time--it just wasn't ready yet as evidenced by the fact that it took 10 years before anyone heard anything about it.

It took 11 more years of research to get to anything remotely commercially viable. She basically convinced people to pay her to do 11 years of pure R&D. Name me one other founder who has been able to do this with no academic credentials, and no record of success--much less a founder who was 20 at the time.

>"star researcher impresses and recruits a bunch of domain-experts, which then attracts investments"

She wasn't a star researcher at the time. She had almost no formal training, no publications, and a year of experience as an undergraduate.

Edit: I'm not the only one who is very skeptical.

http://pathologyblawg.com/pathology-news/new-yorker-theranos...

Then, it's probably a good thing those scientists and investors back in 2004 trusted their own expert judgements about what a suitably promising "record" would be, after actually meeting her and reviewing her proprietary research.

Had they waited for the decade-later opinion of a layperson web-developer who's skimmed the first patent abstract, they might have missed out.

It's a good thing that another layperson web-developer is on hand to let them know that their investment, which still hasn't made a profit after 11 years, and has no credible evidence that it ever will, was a wise decision.

What the company does now has almost nothing to do with her original patent applications, so it looks like her original proprietary research didn't amount to much.

They paid a smart person millions of dollars to essentially build a research lab. And after 11 years of research, they now have a way to maybe do some blood tests with a finger prick instead of a blood draw. But there are still questions remaining about the accuracy of these very small sample sizes. Some of the doctors and lab techs opinions I've read, say that even if the technology is flawless small finger drawn samples are much more prone to contamination. The article mentioned on HN even mentions that their tests would be more sensitive to inaccuracies caused by poor operator technique.

How many PhDs out there could have done something similar with 11 years and $400 million.

There are also plenty of experts who are skeptical of Theranos' claims. http://pathologyblawg.com/pathology-news/new-yorker-theranos...

Also you can read here about a first hand account of their procedures. It doesn't sound nearly as revolutionary as the hype is making it out to be. http://decibio.com/blog/theranos-small-sample-big-opportunit...

Theranos reports being cash-flow positive, with customers in hospitals, drug companies, and the US military (in addition to their retail blood testing).

I'm not affiliated with Theranos, but I see that they are hiring for a large number of open positions, including some related to your areas of professional expertise: https://www.theranos.com/careers/software-development