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At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

131 点作者 srunni超过 9 年前

20 条评论

tristanj超过 9 年前
&gt;<i>In April 2014, she got a long email from another employee. The employee alleged that Theranos had cherry-picked data when comparing Edison machines to traditional lab machines to make the Edison look more accurate, according to a copy of the email.</i><p>&gt;<i>For one test, the device’s accuracy rate increased sharply after some information was deleted and manipulated, the employee wrote. Edison machines also allegedly failed daily quality-control checks often.</i><p>&gt;<i>Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Mr. Balwani. He replied to the employee, who no longer works at Theranos, denied all the claims and questioned the employee’s understanding of statistics and lab science.</i><p>Oh man. If you read through Theranos&#x27; reviews on Glassdoor [1] this anecdote seems totally legitimate. Multiple reviews talk about the toxic culture and how management does anything to cover their behinds. Quite a few of these were written before the scandal broke so I think they&#x27;re quite honest about what&#x27;s going on.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Theranos-Reviews-E248889_P6.htm?sort.sortType=OR&amp;sort.ascending=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Theranos-Reviews-E248889_P...</a>
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blakeross超过 9 年前
I wrote a parody of Theranos as a TV pilot that is increasingly becoming true: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pricks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pricks.com&#x2F;</a><p>(I&#x27;m sharing this here because the Hacker News community seemed to enjoy my Season 3 premiere of Silicon Valley [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10179894" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10179894</a>], but apologies if others feel it detracts from the discussion.)
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ThomPete超过 9 年前
No matter how this story ends (whether they eventually ends up with having a fully functioning product or not) this should be a cautionary tale to anyone wanting to actually change the world in healthcare.<p>Science speaks for itself and does not care how much you raised at what valuation. It requires a rigorous approach to testings and facts and data or it will be merciless if you aren&#x27;t living up to your own claims.<p>So hopefully next time someone has a great disruptive idea in healthcare, they will spend a little more time getting the science and tech right before they start worrying about becoming a unicorn.
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GabrielF00超过 9 年前
Does the composition of Theranos&#x27; board strike anyone else as very weird? It seems much more like the board of a foreign policy think thank than a biotech start up. There are three former cabinet secretaries (state and defense), two former very senior military officers, two former senators (one regarded as a foreign policy expert), a bigshot DC lawyer, and the former CEOs of Bechtel and Wells Fargo. The only physicians are former Senator Frist and a very credentialed epidemiologist, but it&#x27;s not clear to me that either would have much knowledge about laboratory testing.<p>I&#x27;m really curious what the rationale for this board composition is. [Edit: I&#x27;m curious if this is connected to Holmes&#x27; father&#x27;s experience in the foreign policy establishment]
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geomark超过 9 年前
I like how Holmes&#x27; recollection of meetings is always different than the other attendees. Only one machine had an error message, not all three. She didn&#x27;t abruptly walk out of the meeting. She didn&#x27;t refuse to answer a question due to &quot;trade secrets&quot;. And so on.
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ekianjo超过 9 年前
Interesting, Theranos&#x27; funder&#x27;s behavior is what you would expect from someone who knows nothing about Science:<p>- make bold claims<p>- avoid going into details (&quot;trade secrets&quot;, sheesh)<p>- make investors believe in your &quot;vision&quot;<p>- give talks about successful entrepreneurship to polish one&#x27;s image<p>And still nothing reliably demonstrated.<p>What amazes me the most is how clueless investors are. If they don&#x27;t care about Science, what do they care about when it comes to providing new Healthcare solutions? What&#x27;s next, a new take on homeopathy ?
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MathsOX超过 9 年前
Many in SV find it hard to grapple with traditional startups not penetrating health care to a greater degree; in Rise of the Robots (one of the Financial Times and The Economist books of the year) it&#x27;s lamented for an entire chapter.<p>Traditionally the level of fundamental research and development displayed by Theranos - in areas of health or national defence - are done for years behind closed doors and then slowly rolled out to the public to mitigate any questioning of the underlying tech since the standards are understandably higher (i.e - it has to work from the start). This stands in contrast to the &quot;move fast, break things&quot; attitude pervasive in start-up culture.<p>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s anything necessarily fraudulent about Theranos, from what I&#x27;ve read, which seems to be the not-so-subtle undercurrent in much of the commentary. Rather they flipped the model startups should use in health, which is establish a business model that works and then work on preparatory tech in the background until it&#x27;s ready to be rolled out. This seems to be largely what Theranos has done, but not what it&#x27;s purposely chosen to articulate to the public and investors as it surely would have garnered less attention&#x2F;funding. At this point Theranos seems to be playing the waiting game; waiting for their technology to reach a point where they can make a more transparent case for their business model and change the narrative once they&#x27;ve reached a point that&#x27;s more aligned with the aspirations that have been articulated by Holmes for the past decade.<p>Once again, Peter Thiel&#x27;s approach with Palantir looks to be extremely well executed and one that perhaps Theranos should have emulated.
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ekianjo超过 9 年前
&gt; Sunny Balwani is an entrepreneur and a computer scientist. Sunny joined Theranos after dropping out of the Computer Science program at Stanford University. He received his MBA at UC Berkeley and undergraduate degree from UT Austin.<p>Honest question, can you claim to be a Computer Scientist if you drop out from a computer Science program ? To me it sounds like calling yourself a Doctor after dropping out following the first year of Medicine Studies.<p>Needless to say, this smells of arrogance more than anything else.
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ekianjo超过 9 年前
&gt; He replied to the employee, who no longer works at Theranos, denied all the claims and questioned the employee’s understanding of statistics and lab science.<p>&gt; Quality-control failures were due to the “newness of some of our processes, which we are improving every day,” Mr. Balwani wrote.<p>&gt; He added: “This is product development, this is how startups are built.” The reply ended with an edict that the “only email on this topic I want to see from you going forward is an apology that I’ll pass on to other people.”<p>I would rather question Balwani&#x27;s understanding of Lab Science and Statistics as someone who has never had a remote experience of lab science in the first place. And about his understanding of Statistics, I have no idea where he thinks he has any authority either. MBAs are not particularly known to be very good at grasping probabilities.
Mithaldu超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m honestly getting kind of annoyed with seeing stuff about Theranos, since everyone writing about them is beating about the bush, and only ends up describing how Theranos communicates with a startling lack of earnestness.<p>Example from the video, paraphrased:<p>Mod: &quot;What prick tests are you <i>able</i> to do, using no commercially available lab equipment?&quot;<p>Holmes: &quot;[lots of waffling] We&#x27;re currently only doing the Herpes test. [proceeds to not answer the question]&quot;<p>Mod: [accepts the non-answer and moves on]<p>This kind of reporting is entirely useless, unless it&#x27;s some kind of attempt to subtly out Theranos for being dishonest.
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aceperry超过 9 年前
For awhile, I kept seeing job posts at Theranos, which is how I know the name. I didn&#x27;t know whether they were expanding or just had high employee turnover. The WSJ articles and the strange Glassdoor reviews (either totally love the company and CEO or extremely negative about the company and its ethics) leads me to believe that the WSJ is correct. The latest article with the video interview of the CEO, makes me think that she is incredibly smooth at spouting the BS, to the point of being a pathological liar. This company will be VERY interesting to watch during the coming year.
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timrpeterson超过 9 年前
Theranos = Pets.com of this decade&#x27;s bubble, which will once again be defined by founders, often young ones, having no clue what they are doing.<p>Investors can you please get better at realizing that sometimes experience and know-how can help?
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asdfologist超过 9 年前
As the article says, &quot;blood tests sometimes provide life-or-death answers.&quot; If these allegations of fraudulent testing are true, then the executives belong in jail.
rdlecler1超过 9 年前
The key questions that needs to be addressed, is how homogenous or heterogenous are blood markers at the level they want to measure at? The machines may be reporting results accurately, but a pin-prick-sized droplet may simply not be a large enough sample size for the tests they want to run.
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FussyZeus超过 9 年前
Holmes&#x27; backstory is getting so redundantly covered. It&#x27;s like how every Superman movie has to walk us through how he was sent to Earth when Krypton was destroyed.<p>I suppose if the author didn&#x27;t talk about Holmes&#x27; history, though, they wouldn&#x27;t have half the damn article. Certainly nothing interesting to talk about with that company by itself, were it not for the headline grabbing founder.<p>That said if I read about how this &quot;inspiring&quot; person dropped out of Stanford when she were only 19 one more time I might lose my mind.
Animats超过 9 年前
How can I short Theranos?
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6d0debc071超过 9 年前
It&#x27;s a long shot gamble funded by some people who maybe should and maybe shouldn&#x27;t know better - I don&#x27;t pretend to be in a position to judge the science in this case. So, who cares? I don&#x27;t mean that in a derogatory sense, I mean it in the sense that you might set yourself a limit of a few hundred pounds for a game of poker one night. If it pays off, great. If it doesn&#x27;t, no biggy. If they&#x27;re committing fraud, then there are regulatory mechanisms in place around that - how far you trust those is an issue, but it&#x27;s a much larger issue than one company.<p>The big sin that you mustn&#x27;t commit, and that many do anyway, is to trust a private company&#x27;s data where a potential conflict of interest like this exists. Run your own trials.
devanti超过 9 年前
though not yet proven, I believe we may have found the Enron of our decade
melted超过 9 年前
The company&#x27;s name sounds vaguely like &quot;tear anus&quot;. What did they expect?
desireco42超过 9 年前
Is it just me or WSJ increasingly is behaving like apologist for big business?<p>They probably always were, just now I am noticing.