amb23

The biggest takeaway here: surround yourself with the right people.

I find it hard to believe Holmes wanted to outright commit fraud with Theranos. Instead, some combination of startup “disruption” tactics and a crew of unqualified yes men led to a toxic company culture that cultivated lying and, eventually, criminal fraud.

On the first point: There’s a very real culture in Silicon Valley where it’s expected that everyone lies, at least a little bit. Startups will massage their numbers in VC pitch decks, or launch “Wizard of Oz” products that aren’t based on new tech. If you’re on a client-facing team, you’re expected to learn which white lies to tell. Most startups get away with this without a problem, and Theranos probably expected to as well when they came out of stealth mode and debuted their testing equipment. But this process doesn’t work in biotech when it affects real consumer health outcomes; there is a reason behind much FDA bureaucracy, and it’s to protect people’s health. The tech industry could use a better ethical backbone overall.

On surrounding yourself with the right people: The anecdote about the manager who lied about results, was given promotions and accolades, and then promptly quit when it became time to become accountable, was telling to me. First, there was a lack of checks and balances in place to prevent these lies—how was Holmes supposed to know the manager was lying? The board had little technical or scientific background, and it’s not clear that the company set up processes to ensure research was sound. And the most likely reason why? They probably just trusted people and didn’t expect that these problems could happen. The only way to ensure you’re not blindsided by issues like these is to make sure those around you are capable, experienced, and have been through this before.

Company culture is everything. As bad as Theranos is, the tech industry is rife with fraudulent practices and bad apples. I’d hope Holmes’ criminal charges make executives pause and think about setting up processes to allow for honesty and accountability. Unfortunately, though, the mainstream narrative has been to paint Holmes as an unsophisticated crook instead of looking at the systematic problems of the company as a whole, and that means people will keep on keeping on with the practices that led to Theranos’ downfall.

The most pernicious, nastiest habit to get into is to think that you are stuck in your situation and there is no alternative. True for individuals and whole societies.

Really wish this article wasnt full of crypto psychobabble because the cooperative business structure has real teeth, both as an alternative fundraising/equity structure for tech companies and for regular, everyday businesses across the US. Establishing clear ownership structures among workers in a way that allows them to have a voice in company operations and share in the profits is the most democratic mode of capitalism and clearly fairer than the oligarchic form of capitalism we’re living in now. I wish more startups considered this path.

When decisions are heavily sales-driven--be it the loudest voices in the room are the sales team, or a big deal is coming down the pipeline requiring custom work--individual solutions start overriding problem-based thinking. It leads to a nasty cycle where clients just blindly ask for features and changes, but no one actually sits down to discuss or think about the "why" behind them.

Honestly the best way to deal with this is to train sales and client-facing teams to start defining the problem in the first place, and to set expectations with clients that the conversation needs to be about problems instead of proposed solutions. Product then needs to gather all the requirements (scoping how much dev work it takes, metrics on how much a change affects all clients vs. individual ones) to make good decisions on what the best solution should be. It's cheap to say "product teams need to be more problem-focused" because the idea pipeline rarely starts on the product team in the first place. Client-facing teams need to play a stronger role in defining the problem itself.

(This is mostly relevant for B2B, by the way. May not be as true for consumer tech.)

For anyone interested in diving deeper into this topic, I highly recommend the book "The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction" by Matthew Crawford. Of all the books I've read this year, this one has stuck with me the most--it's a fascinating study on the attention environment & its influence on our notions of identity.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Beyond-Your-Head-Distraction/dp...

"Code is governance" -- the article does support the idea of cryptocurrency as fiat money because the laws, in this case, are the code. The developers and miners, no matter their good intentions, do hold power over the currency that everyday investors do not have. No matter how egalitarian the distributed ledger set up looks on paper, we'd be remiss to think the power structures behind cryptocurrencies are so radically different from the fiat currencies developed in the past and used at present. With time, especially if the cryptocurrency bubble pops, we'll be sure to see those structures made more explicit than they seem now.

That survey seemed to be designed for a the sensationalist headline. When half the country's vote doesn't matter anyways (due to the Electoral College) it's easy to trade "the right to vote in the next two presidential elections" with tens of thousands of student loan debt that prevents you from, say, buying a house and starting a family.

It's all about tax breaks. This is a blatant attempt by Amazon to get years of taxes abated in order to provide the increased regional economic benefit of... doing exactly what they'd do anyways if they didn't get the break. US city and state then competes against other US cities and states in a battle to provide the larger tax break.

It's an odious practice in my opinion, and I wish lawmakers would do something to curb it. But being able to tell your constituents "Hey, look at me, I got Amazon to come here!" makes for great campaigning.

There's no way this software is not inherently biased on very basic measures--a lisp caused by a disability probably wouldn't pass muster, nor would a southern accent. But the real tragedy here is that it equates the way someone presents themselves--not the content of their words or the strength of their skills--with job performance. It exacerbates the worst vices of HR and hiring practices and performance reviews. It's an algorithm for superficiality.

This company should remove this product from the market immediately. How this passed off as a good idea all the way through the product development cycle is beyond me.

This has been an ongoing issue in Vietnam. I taught in Vietnam at a teacher training college four years back. Most of my students who attended had no aim to become teachers: they instead wanted to work as tour guides or translators or gain a standard white-collar office job in international business. Their reasoning was that it was too hard to become a teacher--too many applicants for too few spots. (And besides, the pay was terrible.)

The comments on 2 years of Marxist ideology are very exaggerated, but there is a general truth in that there's a large mismatch between the education and the outcome for university students. Vietnam would do well to encourage skills-building instead of limiting studies to professional tracks where job prospects are limited and theory is of no use.

I'd assume they're taking advantage of the Open API laws for financial institutions in Europe.

The US is a long ways away from having this.