I watched the Q&A and part of the presentation on Periscope. It was a little hard to follow, but Holmes appeared to be on a short leash during the Q&A period, constrained to only talking about the new invention and cloud architecture, and deferring all the pointed questions about nanotainer numbers and anomalies to the three employees she brought on stage.<p>It also looks like they're going to attempt to get some kind of fast track approval of this new device by playing on Zika virus fears. There was one very pointed audience/expert question about the validity and inconsistency in their Zika virus claims that didn't appear to be fielded well.<p>As I understand it, this device will still take a small amount of blood, dilute it, and then theoretically perform up to hundreds of tests. So while Holmes made no attempt to answer the question of "how many finger pricks will it take to do these tests", one of her employees was still making the claim that a microliter dilution was enough--going from 170 uliter to 1 uliter.<p>The play could very well turn into Theranos waging a press and political war with the FDA around Zika in order to rush this out. The board advice may be paying off from a political/PR standpoint even though the presentation didn't answer any questions from a scientific standpoint.
How is a person with a track record that tainted still in this position? And how is that organizations like the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) would still grant such a person access to such a large group?
> “We hope to achieve FDA market authorizations of these exciting technologies in the coming years,” she said.<p>I've never thought about what it takes to run a medical devices company but think about that statement. It looks like Theranos just did a huge pivot and they won't be able to generate any revenue from the resulting pivot for atleast a few years?<p>At this point, shouldn't goal number one be to get a product, any product approved by the FDA, are they the only governing body they need to get approval from?, and then get it to market ASAP?<p>Someone get Holmes a copy of Ben Horowitz book "The hard thing about hard things". If she wasn't already, she is now a war time CEO.
The complete video presentation:<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JRG733ReQ" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JRG733ReQ</a><p>Slides:<p><a href="https://www.aacc.org/~/media/files/annual-meeting/2016/theranosaaccpresentation.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.aacc.org/~/media/files/annual-meeting/2016/thera...</a>
Legitimate question to people involved in funding, incubators, etc. Does this hurt the perception of women founders/CEOs in the margin (where a VC or maybe YCombinator has to pick five companies out of ten where eight look pretty good)?<p>I mean, I've seen a lot of criticism in the non-stupid parts of the internet about Marissa Mayer, for example -- and she arrived really late to the party.<p>Now, I know that rushing to conclusions about "women entrepreneurs" from three, five, fifteen, sixty-seven cases is really sexist because we don't rush to say men are terrible entrepreneus because of countless projects gone awry. I mean, I can only imagine the vitriol Nick Denton would have gone through were he a woman.<p>But people are sexist. People are racists -- if instead of female CEOs we were talking Sri Lankan CEOs, we'd have long arrived at a cliché conclusion, I think. Am I too pessimistic?
I'm inspired by Holmes. It's clear that she's trying to do something very hard that would benefit humanity but instead her company's failures are making headlines. People on Twitter are spewing sexist garbage about her, or trashing her character, but to me she looks like she's just soldiering on. Respect.<p>I don't know how I'd handle the level of scrutiny she's under.