13 ms·

Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation

96 points by jbae29 11y ago

chvid 11y ago
I don't quite understand the negativity this company is getting. Sure the product that it is developing may not turn out successfully but that is the risk for any company that tries to innovate. Ms Holmes seems to be solid leader in the sense that she is well-connected, possesses salesmanship and communicates a clear vision. She has certainly been able to raise large funds. Sure there might be hr problems but that is the case with any company and surely professional mid level management can be hired in to fix that.
dbcooper 11y ago
The Washington Post's article about Thernos and the DoD was probably the most interesting thing published about them since the original WSJ articles. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/internal-emails-reveal-concerns-about-theranoss-fda-compliance-date-back-years/?postshare=3491449147304325&tid=ss_tw https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/inter... I found General Mattis joining their board, after supporting them within the DoD over internal objections, to be particularly interesting.
revelation 11y ago
Why are there random pictures of tools in this article?
- xkcd-sucks 11y ago
  Because they're the only functional pieces of instrumentation to be found within the Theranos building
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- oska 11y ago
  To serve as a “de-glamourising” antidote.
- aheilbut 11y ago
  It's incredibly telling that the only thing the NYT was allowed to photograph was the machine shop.
klenwell 11y ago
They [former employees] say she [founder, Elizabeth Holmes] would become angry and sometimes fire people who pointed out problems. She often spoke as though the company’s technology already existed, they said, rather than as if it were still in development. Funny how that works. I'm just getting into the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Tetlock and Gardner and came across this passage: Galen is an extreme example but he is the sort of figure who pops up repeatedly in the history of medicine. They are men (always men) of strong convinction and profound trust in their own judgement. They embrace treaments, develop bold theories for why they work, denounce rivals as quacks and charlatans, and spread their insights with evangelical passion. So even if Theranos is a complete flop, Holmes may still prove a groundbreaker in her hubris. Tetlock and Gardner sum up the problem by quoting Richard Feynman: What medicine lacked was doubt. "Doubt is not a fearful thing," Feynman observed, "but a thing of very great value." It's what propels science forward. Less so, I guess, visionary entrepreneurs.
- drcode 11y ago
  Sure, there are people in history who found their own way and we're the better for it, but for every 1000 people that "go against the grain" 999 end up just being people with not enough self awareness and a lack of personal insight.
- joelS 11y ago
  Another Feynman quote that comes to mind: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
danso 11y ago
> Ms. Holmes said that she needed secrecy to keep others from stealing her ideas, but several former employees say that Ms. Holmes’s steely focus on her mission — an attribute deeply admired by outsiders — made it difficult for her to acknowledge any serious shortcomings in the company’s products. They say she would become angry and sometimes fire people who pointed out problems. She often spoke as though the company’s technology already existed, they said, rather than as if it were still in development. This seems a little unfair to Holmes. In this one paragraph, anonymous former employees paint Holmes as a megalomaniac -- e.g. she fires people "who pointed out problems" and lies about the existence of technology. She may very well be a megalomaniac, but these assertions should at least have vague anecdotes ("A former employee recalls a 2008 incident in which Holmes fired a senior engineer in a Reply-All email after he replied that he didn't think the machine could be finished on deadline."). The judgment of what is simply pointing out a problem is sometimes context dependent. And nothing else in the story mentions other proof that would affirm that Holmes is a power-freak when it comes to being the CEO. Yes, there are plenty of anecdotes of her being headstrong in negotiations and attempting projects and deals that went nowhere, but that's a different thing than being a vindictive charlatan among her own employees. The NYT sat down with her for a 2.5 hour interview and could have at least confronted her with this and given her a chance to deny it. In contrast, the WSJ, who couldn't score an interview, had actual anecdotes [0] (the hearsay of one of Theranos's chief engineers, who had claimed the technology was a fraud before committing suicide, and emails about fudging the FDA tests). The parts about her pre-Theranos life were similar to the New Yorker's story from last year [1]...it sounds like she was the real deal in terms of being a passionate engineering student. It makes me wonder if she had spent at least a couple more years beefing up not just her engineering experience, but life experience, that some of the poor CEO decisions she's made would have been mitigated. [0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901 http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-bloo... [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler
- daveguy 11y ago
  "It makes me wonder if she had spent at least a couple more years beefing up not just her engineering experience, but life experience, that some of the poor CEO decisions she's made would have been mitigated." I think that is a very astute observation. When you are in the top 0.01% of CEOs you don't have a lot of scrutiny. Bill Gates says that he got lucky with his success and that graduating is a much more sure path to success (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/upshot/bill-gates-college-dropout-dont-be-like-me.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/upshot/bill-gates-college-...). If you do make mistakes or have a failure and you dropped out then that (for better or worse) is a focus and probably makes it more difficult to bounce back. She hasn't failed yet, but the fact that she didn't spend the extra year or two finishing her degree will make it more difficult if she does fail. And lets be honest. We all fail at least once or twice.
mrnismo92 11y ago
Who picks the pictures for these articles?
n0us 11y ago
The idea of rapid disruption in the healthcare industry makes me uncomfortable for some reason. I admire Holmes's ambition and in interviews I've watched she seems competent and well guided but something just doesn't seem to add up. How was a college dropout able to get a break in the healthcare sector? Becoming a doctor requires years of education and training and along comes this young woman who just decides "I'm going to change all of this." What? I don't understand how a person with no experience, no vetting, no medical training, no engineering training, and frankly a product that I find to be of questionable value ends up getting millions in funding and at the head of a multibillion dollar company. Perhaps I just don't understand the phobia that some people have around blood tests but it is my understanding that you get a blood test as a way to gauge your health, not because it makes you feel nice. The hold up doesn't seem to be that tons of people are afraid of needles otherwise they would be getting tested all the time. The hold up to people getting blood tests all the time is that doctors don't order them, presumably because doctors don't think people need them. As long as the test isn't extremely uncomfortable for the patient, I would think that accuracy is really the only measure of quality for a test and it seems to me that they are willing to sacrifice accuracy in favor of making people feel comfortable. Also, why would I ever get a blood test at a grocery store? Why would I ever trust some random employee at a food store to respect my privacy and be medically competent enough to administer a test like that. What exactly do I have to gain by getting one in the first place? Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this because this is just my viewpoint as an outsider. I would however never get a blood test from Theranos and if I wanted one I would call my practitioner and have them administer one at a doctor's office, not at the local grocery store.
- panic 11y ago
  Becoming a doctor requires years of education and training and along comes this young woman who just decides "I'm going to change all of this." You don't need to be a doctor to hire doctors. Aren't startups supposed to be all about this kind of disruption by outsiders? People who come along and decide "I'm going to change all of this"?
  - n0us 11y ago
    Perhaps not, and perhaps she has a gifted eye for talented medical professionals/chemists and/or is able to put people in place who do but it's still a company being built by someone who doesn't really have the deep domain specific knowledge that would be required to make truly informed decisions. How many tech companies were founded by people with literally zero experience in tech? probably not many except medicine is even harder to learn. While you can spend all day reading Stack Overflow and writing apps to become a reasonable programmer it isn't like you can do the same thing with Web Md and become a reasonable doctor.
xkcd-sucks 11y ago
Why are all these articles about Holmes' personality?
- wavefunction 11y ago
  What else does a chief-executive have? Number crunching is left to the CFO. Engineering strategy to the CFO. Domain knowledge to the CMO. Operating strategy to the COO. Did I leave anyone out?
  - cant_kant 11y ago
    CIO ? My mistake.. ..that role has been outsourced to Bangalore.
    - w1ntermute 11y ago
      The second CFO was supposed to be CTO/CIO.
- danso 11y ago
  Because she refuses to talk specifics about the technology. And the subtext is that Theranos has been able to attract such a high valuation based on her personality even when the technology isn't apparently there.
  - revelation 11y ago
    Also, have you looked at Theranos website? She is just.. everywhere.
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      The sound of that is almost hilarious so I took a look. There are two pictures of her in the rotating highlights things and one on the company page. I clicked around on at least 10 other pages or so and didn't find any more pictures. Didn't seem like "everywhere" to me unless I happened to visit the few pages without her photo.
jerryhuang100 11y ago
> Dr. Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader from Tennessee who joined Theranos as a director last year, supports Ms. Holmes and asserts that “the data I have seen speaks.” But he also points out that the Theranos story has taken on the cast of a vicious political campaign and there’s nothing more appealing than watching a front-runner fall from grace. This is ridiculous. A lifetime politician accuses other clinical scientists and medical practitioners questioning Theranos' basic technology and its secrecy as political campaign? That's not how Science and Medicine work. Even that "a front-runner" statement is questionable. Theranos can not even releases its revenue number to be compared to LabCorp or Quest Dx. > In the early 1990s, Mr. Holmes moved the family to Texas where he worked for energy companies, including Tenneco and Enron. (Mr. Holmes has since returned to public service and now works at the United States Agency for International Development.) NOW that gets very interesting! Mr. Holmes [1] was found to be listed as officers in at least four Enron subsidiaries[2,3]. Guess that would be great lessons for some future entrepreneur. Conveniently such Enron experiences are not listed on USAID website [4]. [1] http://individual-contributors.insidegov.com/d/c/Christian-Holmes http://individual-contributors.insidegov.com/d/c/Christian-H... [2] http://www.corporationwiki.com/Texas/Houston/christian-r-holmes/34634412.aspx http://www.corporationwiki.com/Texas/Houston/christian-r-hol... [3] http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~eesi/scs/Holmes.htm http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~eesi/scs/Holmes.htm [4] https://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are/organization/christian-holmes https://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are/organization/christian-holm...
- mikesickler 11y ago
  As a med student, Bill Frist adopted cats from animal shelters under false pretenses so he could experiment on them, sometimes fatally. Definitely a good fit!
  - laarc 11y ago
    An accusation this serious should be accompanied by evidence, or dismissed.
    - RockyMcNuts 11y ago
RockyMcNuts 11y ago
An author of one of the gushing cover stories on how he feels he was misled - http://fortune.com/2015/12/17/how-theranos-misled-me-elizabeth-holmes/ http://fortune.com/2015/12/17/how-theranos-misled-me-elizabe... I know founders sometimes need to create a reality distortion field and sometimes act as if, but as a patient I would also expect transparency to understand exactly what the company is doing and if the tests are accurate. Puffery and misdirection in a business whose key selling point is accuracy is a bit concerning.
hvo 11y ago
If i post an article on Hacker News,it wont make front page.But if someone else posts the very same article many hours later,it will https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764636 Talk of double standard.
- lmitchell 11y ago
  Or you just posted mid-afternoon in the Americas and fairly late evening in Europe, instead of hitting American prime time right on the nose... :)
mikexstudios 11y ago
The images in this article are awful: generic shots and captions of a machine shop; a (possibly empty) black box that's supposed to be a testing machine. Where are the actual machines doing the tests? Where's the science?
- aheilbut 11y ago
  It's so bizarre that it must be intentional.
- Naritai 11y ago
  The main topic of the article is about how Theranos won't share any info about the science or about the machines. So that's probably all the NYT has to work with.
- foobarian 11y ago
  The photo of a couple adjacent "machinist" stations was puzzling. They were pegboards with some carpenter tools like a cordless drill, hammers, wrenches, etc. Not very confidence inspiring.
Gatsky 11y ago
In my opinion, Holmes is a fanatic. This is subtly different from being fanatical or obsessive about certain things, which is probably a good or even necessary characteristic for a founder. She seem to just be a fanatic. She has found a mission, and is pursuing it without any second thoughts. Never mind whether anybody else thinks that the mission is actually that important... Fanatics have the ability to impress those close to them, because of their overriding zeal. From a distance though, they seem crazy and somewhat deficient human beings. I'm not sure that fanatics do science well, or handle other people's money that well either....
bbarn 11y ago
This company exists because she is a she. A man of similar privileged upbringing starting a company based on vaporware would not be nearly as interesting as an apparently unemotional woman seems to be to the industry. She's so mysterious, doesn't have a boyfriend! So dedicated, must be right! Just proof that gender bias exists from the bottom to the top, and our media hype machine plays on it just as well as those evil white men with the money do.
- nova22033 11y ago
  >A man of similar privileged upbringing starting a company based on vaporware Bill Gates had a privileged upbringing...
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    And Microsoft 12 years after its founding was much, much more successful than Theranos is.
- LargeCompanies 11y ago
  Huh... a man who is born with a silver spoon in their mouth would not be able to achieve something similar? He may not be able to get the press she gets, but with his parents' and their networks' money he would be able to do a great deal. Im not sure why she is so highlighted .. she grew up wealthy and getting investment from her parents' network Im sure wasn't a hard thing to do vs. the majority of us who have no such luck, rather we work hard/harder to make it.
cft 11y ago
I actually wonder if this is an early signal that there maybe corruption inside the FDA. The goal of recruiting a BoD of this level of influence but of irrelevant skills was an attempt to control the outcome of the FDA approval process, regardless of whether the tests actually work or not. The purpose of NYT article seems to be to message that while Holmes may get removed from the CEO, the shareholders are still hoping to retain the value.
- late2part 11y ago
  When you hear hoofbeats, you don't think zebra. I'm no fan of Theranos, but the more plausible explanation is that she's blue bood family w/ connections, and they're pulling those in because they can. I don't accept as supported the assertion that influential accomplished people on your BOD means you're out to corruptly influence process (any more than general business).
bane 11y ago
Theory: They had some early tech that looked promising in some specific clinical circumstances that through dumb luck were the ones that were tested early on. Holmes, as an almost engineer with no particular experience in anything, thinks medicine is just like engineering. It didn't work in the general case or was less accurate than acceptable for medicine, and so now Theranos is basically just doing normal lab tests, but subsidizing the costs with VC money and trying to make it up at scale or a breakthrough in the original technological approach at some point in the future. Holmes is spinning a convoluted web of misdirection, nonspecific, fractured answers and non-answers until either or both of those things happen. The questions are easy to answer and wouldn't give away any trade secrets, but she pretty systematically refuses to give simple direct answers to very simply questions. If answering these simple questions, like how many tests they can run using their tech, would give away trade secrets then their tech isn't likely very interesting. The copy coming out of the company insists they are able to do the things they claim, but it doesn't appear they have any particularly commercial ready technology to go to market with. Holmes is caught in a bit of a bind, she used her family's powerful connections to raise absurd amounts of money on nothing at all and now has to deliver or face the wrath of those same powerful connections. She's also managed to fill the board up with big names through her family connections who have absolutely no medical background at all (except for Dr. Foege) in an effort to give some kind of legitimacy. Here's an example of her answering simple questions to get a feel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8qgmGtRMsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8qgmGtRMsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs-oj7U-bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs-oj7U-bo Here's an example of how she answers things, (exact quote) "So we have developed hundreds of tests over the course of the last 12 years that can run on a tiny sample using proprietary Theranos technology..." The critical missing components to this statement: a) To what accuracy compared to traditional tests? b) All of the tests on one sample, or one test per nanotainer sample? c) Are all of those tests current tests that Theranos would run on a sample? (R&D could be generated 10 tests a week, but 90% of those tests could be poor, or could not be clinically useful) She then goes on about taking the data they've generated for their FDA submission and putting it into the public domain and being a leader in transparency. She goes on to talk about all the various technologies Theranos has developed, but it's only the nanotainer tube that's being tested and blah blah blah it's all very complicated and none of the answers clarify or complete any other answer - it's like getting a good image from a shattered mirror. Simple yes/no answers turn into minutes of non-answers. This isn't difficult, but she makes it absolutely excruciating. Here's an exceprt from her bio from theranos.com "Theranos' breakthrough advancements have made it possible to quickly process the full range of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood - instead of numerous tubes - and at unprecedented low costs, and are now directly accessible to people and their physicians through Theranos Wellness Centers opening nationwide." Except not a single part of this has been demonstrated to be true in any way.
robbiep 11y ago
There is so much ... hype around this technology. But some of their use cases aren't all that useful, and their technology (while supposing to be cheaper) is often done on handheld units at the moment in isolated regions. Let me explain: Use cases outlined in this article that have minimal real medical benefit, but sound great: - Home blood testing (why? there are only 2 types of people who may find this useful: patients on Warfarin, and patients on dialysis. Dialysis patients (if not on home dialysis) get tested 3 times a week when they go to dialysis. INR is usually stable once established, ceteris paribus) - Field blood testing (Mostly pointless. Clinical signs are much more useful in a casualty situation. Arterial blood gasses are useful in resus rooms in emergency departments but in the field you want to keep them breathing, not go reversing exotic blood gas abnormalities) For the majority of tests (EUC, CMP, LFT, FBC, Coagulation studies) in rural/isolated places, the i-stat machine is used in australia. This is priced ok... around $40 per cartridge for around 6-10 results. The i-stat works with not much more than a couple of drops of blood as well, although it needs to be drawn from a vein, not a finger-prick. Other tests, like lipids, or antibody markers, etc, are rarer and much more expensive. It would be great to have them cheap (but again, we don't really know how cheap theranos is saying tests are going to be) which may make them more common, but again there just isn't much benefit in taking them regularly. Theranos may well be a white elephant. which is unfortunate. The promised technology (fingerprint testing) would be great. But I can't comprehend how they could go for 12 years without a product. And as a doctor, I would be very suprised if the technology works as advertised. There is unfortunately too much hype surrounding this product for me to believe that we will get what has been promoted, but you never know and I would love to be pleasantly surprised. I wonder how popular this viewpoint will be here on HN - the home of lifehacking and microanalysis of bodyfunction (often without the corresponding knowledge to go with it, but prefaced with a view that 'more data will always be better').
- laarc 11y ago
  I was hoping the product would pivot to passive blood pressure monitoring. I want my blood pressure to be recorded every few seconds, logged and cross-referenced against what I did, ate, and drank. For correlation purposes, knowing those things can be as simple as snapping a photo. Smart people apparently claim that blood pressure is one of the most reliable indicators of how long you'll live. If so, then it's always seemed strange it's (almost) never measured.
Asparagirl 11y ago
Have you guys seen Elizabeth Holmes' Twitter favorites? 99% of them are faves for someone saying how inspiring she is. How she breaks glass ceilings. How she's doing something significant. How the press just wants to build people up to then tear people down. How she should run for president. How her speeches were transformative. How she has vision. Her bio. Her story. Videos of her. Press puff pieces about her. Her face. Her. I've never seen anyone on Twitter use faves in quite this way. It's not faves about anyone else's content or jokes. It's not faves about Theranos, either. It's all. about. her. https://www.twitter.com/eholmes2003/favorites https://www.twitter.com/eholmes2003/favorites #narcissism
- bane 11y ago
  That's pretty weird. I didn't believe you until I checked it out myself. I wonder how much of Theranos is a long-play effort to create a "brand" around Holmes? Perhaps years later, long after Theranos is dust, she'll point to it as a huge success that made her into the billionaire she became.
swingbridge 11y ago
It's really put up or shut up time for this company. There's been so much hype around this, but things are starting to smell funny.
tronreg 11y ago
Is Elizabeth Holmes breaking the law?
FussyZeus 11y ago
This company is 12 years old and has never once made an honest dime. How the hell is she or it succeeding in any capacity?

96 points by jbae29 11y ago

chvid 11y ago

I don't quite understand the negativity this company is getting. Sure the product that it is developing may not turn out successfully but that is the risk for any company that tries to innovate. Ms Holmes seems to be solid leader in the sense that she is well-connected, possesses salesmanship and communicates a clear vision. She has certainly been able to raise large funds. Sure there might be hr problems but that is the case with any company and surely professional mid level management can be hired in to fix that.

dbcooper 11y ago

The Washington Post's article about Thernos and the DoD was probably the most interesting thing published about them since the original WSJ articles. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/internal-emails-reveal-concerns-about-theranoss-fda-compliance-date-back-years/?postshare=3491449147304325&tid=ss_tw https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/inter... I found General Mattis joining their board, after supporting them within the DoD over internal objections, to be particularly interesting.

revelation 11y ago

Why are there random pictures of tools in this article?

xkcd-sucks 11y ago
Because they're the only functional pieces of instrumentation to be found within the Theranos building
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
oska 11y ago
To serve as a “de-glamourising” antidote.
aheilbut 11y ago
It's incredibly telling that the only thing the NYT was allowed to photograph was the machine shop.

klenwell 11y ago

They [former employees] say she [founder, Elizabeth Holmes] would become angry and sometimes fire people who pointed out problems. She often spoke as though the company’s technology already existed, they said, rather than as if it were still in development. Funny how that works. I'm just getting into the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Tetlock and Gardner and came across this passage: Galen is an extreme example but he is the sort of figure who pops up repeatedly in the history of medicine. They are men (always men) of strong convinction and profound trust in their own judgement. They embrace treaments, develop bold theories for why they work, denounce rivals as quacks and charlatans, and spread their insights with evangelical passion. So even if Theranos is a complete flop, Holmes may still prove a groundbreaker in her hubris. Tetlock and Gardner sum up the problem by quoting Richard Feynman: What medicine lacked was doubt. "Doubt is not a fearful thing," Feynman observed, "but a thing of very great value." It's what propels science forward. Less so, I guess, visionary entrepreneurs.

drcode 11y ago
Sure, there are people in history who found their own way and we're the better for it, but for every 1000 people that "go against the grain" 999 end up just being people with not enough self awareness and a lack of personal insight.
joelS 11y ago
Another Feynman quote that comes to mind: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

danso 11y ago

> Ms. Holmes said that she needed secrecy to keep others from stealing her ideas, but several former employees say that Ms. Holmes’s steely focus on her mission — an attribute deeply admired by outsiders — made it difficult for her to acknowledge any serious shortcomings in the company’s products. They say she would become angry and sometimes fire people who pointed out problems. She often spoke as though the company’s technology already existed, they said, rather than as if it were still in development. This seems a little unfair to Holmes. In this one paragraph, anonymous former employees paint Holmes as a megalomaniac -- e.g. she fires people "who pointed out problems" and lies about the existence of technology. She may very well be a megalomaniac, but these assertions should at least have vague anecdotes ("A former employee recalls a 2008 incident in which Holmes fired a senior engineer in a Reply-All email after he replied that he didn't think the machine could be finished on deadline."). The judgment of what is simply pointing out a problem is sometimes context dependent. And nothing else in the story mentions other proof that would affirm that Holmes is a power-freak when it comes to being the CEO. Yes, there are plenty of anecdotes of her being headstrong in negotiations and attempting projects and deals that went nowhere, but that's a different thing than being a vindictive charlatan among her own employees. The NYT sat down with her for a 2.5 hour interview and could have at least confronted her with this and given her a chance to deny it. In contrast, the WSJ, who couldn't score an interview, had actual anecdotes [0] (the hearsay of one of Theranos's chief engineers, who had claimed the technology was a fraud before committing suicide, and emails about fudging the FDA tests). The parts about her pre-Theranos life were similar to the New Yorker's story from last year [1]...it sounds like she was the real deal in terms of being a passionate engineering student. It makes me wonder if she had spent at least a couple more years beefing up not just her engineering experience, but life experience, that some of the poor CEO decisions she's made would have been mitigated. [0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901 http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-bloo... [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler

daveguy 11y ago
"It makes me wonder if she had spent at least a couple more years beefing up not just her engineering experience, but life experience, that some of the poor CEO decisions she's made would have been mitigated." I think that is a very astute observation. When you are in the top 0.01% of CEOs you don't have a lot of scrutiny. Bill Gates says that he got lucky with his success and that graduating is a much more sure path to success (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/upshot/bill-gates-college-dropout-dont-be-like-me.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/upshot/bill-gates-college-...). If you do make mistakes or have a failure and you dropped out then that (for better or worse) is a focus and probably makes it more difficult to bounce back. She hasn't failed yet, but the fact that she didn't spend the extra year or two finishing her degree will make it more difficult if she does fail. And lets be honest. We all fail at least once or twice.

mrnismo92 11y ago

Who picks the pictures for these articles?

n0us 11y ago

The idea of rapid disruption in the healthcare industry makes me uncomfortable for some reason. I admire Holmes's ambition and in interviews I've watched she seems competent and well guided but something just doesn't seem to add up. How was a college dropout able to get a break in the healthcare sector? Becoming a doctor requires years of education and training and along comes this young woman who just decides "I'm going to change all of this." What? I don't understand how a person with no experience, no vetting, no medical training, no engineering training, and frankly a product that I find to be of questionable value ends up getting millions in funding and at the head of a multibillion dollar company. Perhaps I just don't understand the phobia that some people have around blood tests but it is my understanding that you get a blood test as a way to gauge your health, not because it makes you feel nice. The hold up doesn't seem to be that tons of people are afraid of needles otherwise they would be getting tested all the time. The hold up to people getting blood tests all the time is that doctors don't order them, presumably because doctors don't think people need them. As long as the test isn't extremely uncomfortable for the patient, I would think that accuracy is really the only measure of quality for a test and it seems to me that they are willing to sacrifice accuracy in favor of making people feel comfortable. Also, why would I ever get a blood test at a grocery store? Why would I ever trust some random employee at a food store to respect my privacy and be medically competent enough to administer a test like that. What exactly do I have to gain by getting one in the first place? Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this because this is just my viewpoint as an outsider. I would however never get a blood test from Theranos and if I wanted one I would call my practitioner and have them administer one at a doctor's office, not at the local grocery store.

panic 11y ago
Becoming a doctor requires years of education and training and along comes this young woman who just decides "I'm going to change all of this." You don't need to be a doctor to hire doctors. Aren't startups supposed to be all about this kind of disruption by outsiders? People who come along and decide "I'm going to change all of this"?
- n0us 11y ago
  Perhaps not, and perhaps she has a gifted eye for talented medical professionals/chemists and/or is able to put people in place who do but it's still a company being built by someone who doesn't really have the deep domain specific knowledge that would be required to make truly informed decisions. How many tech companies were founded by people with literally zero experience in tech? probably not many except medicine is even harder to learn. While you can spend all day reading Stack Overflow and writing apps to become a reasonable programmer it isn't like you can do the same thing with Web Md and become a reasonable doctor.

xkcd-sucks 11y ago

Why are all these articles about Holmes' personality?

wavefunction 11y ago
What else does a chief-executive have? Number crunching is left to the CFO. Engineering strategy to the CFO. Domain knowledge to the CMO. Operating strategy to the COO. Did I leave anyone out?
- cant_kant 11y ago
  CIO ? My mistake.. ..that role has been outsourced to Bangalore.
  - w1ntermute 11y ago
    The second CFO was supposed to be CTO/CIO.
danso 11y ago
Because she refuses to talk specifics about the technology. And the subtext is that Theranos has been able to attract such a high valuation based on her personality even when the technology isn't apparently there.
- revelation 11y ago
  Also, have you looked at Theranos website? She is just.. everywhere.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    The sound of that is almost hilarious so I took a look. There are two pictures of her in the rotating highlights things and one on the company page. I clicked around on at least 10 other pages or so and didn't find any more pictures. Didn't seem like "everywhere" to me unless I happened to visit the few pages without her photo.

jerryhuang100 11y ago

> Dr. Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader from Tennessee who joined Theranos as a director last year, supports Ms. Holmes and asserts that “the data I have seen speaks.” But he also points out that the Theranos story has taken on the cast of a vicious political campaign and there’s nothing more appealing than watching a front-runner fall from grace. This is ridiculous. A lifetime politician accuses other clinical scientists and medical practitioners questioning Theranos' basic technology and its secrecy as political campaign? That's not how Science and Medicine work. Even that "a front-runner" statement is questionable. Theranos can not even releases its revenue number to be compared to LabCorp or Quest Dx. > In the early 1990s, Mr. Holmes moved the family to Texas where he worked for energy companies, including Tenneco and Enron. (Mr. Holmes has since returned to public service and now works at the United States Agency for International Development.) NOW that gets very interesting! Mr. Holmes [1] was found to be listed as officers in at least four Enron subsidiaries[2,3]. Guess that would be great lessons for some future entrepreneur. Conveniently such Enron experiences are not listed on USAID website [4]. [1] http://individual-contributors.insidegov.com/d/c/Christian-Holmes http://individual-contributors.insidegov.com/d/c/Christian-H... [2] http://www.corporationwiki.com/Texas/Houston/christian-r-holmes/34634412.aspx http://www.corporationwiki.com/Texas/Houston/christian-r-hol... [3] http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~eesi/scs/Holmes.htm http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~eesi/scs/Holmes.htm [4] https://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are/organization/christian-holmes https://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are/organization/christian-holm...

mikesickler 11y ago
As a med student, Bill Frist adopted cats from animal shelters under false pretenses so he could experiment on them, sometimes fatally. Definitely a good fit!
- laarc 11y ago
  An accusation this serious should be accompanied by evidence, or dismissed.
  - RockyMcNuts 11y ago

RockyMcNuts 11y ago

An author of one of the gushing cover stories on how he feels he was misled - http://fortune.com/2015/12/17/how-theranos-misled-me-elizabeth-holmes/ http://fortune.com/2015/12/17/how-theranos-misled-me-elizabe... I know founders sometimes need to create a reality distortion field and sometimes act as if, but as a patient I would also expect transparency to understand exactly what the company is doing and if the tests are accurate. Puffery and misdirection in a business whose key selling point is accuracy is a bit concerning.

hvo 11y ago

If i post an article on Hacker News,it wont make front page.But if someone else posts the very same article many hours later,it will https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764636 Talk of double standard.

lmitchell 11y ago
Or you just posted mid-afternoon in the Americas and fairly late evening in Europe, instead of hitting American prime time right on the nose... :)

mikexstudios 11y ago

The images in this article are awful: generic shots and captions of a machine shop; a (possibly empty) black box that's supposed to be a testing machine. Where are the actual machines doing the tests? Where's the science?

aheilbut 11y ago
It's so bizarre that it must be intentional.
Naritai 11y ago
The main topic of the article is about how Theranos won't share any info about the science or about the machines. So that's probably all the NYT has to work with.
foobarian 11y ago
The photo of a couple adjacent "machinist" stations was puzzling. They were pegboards with some carpenter tools like a cordless drill, hammers, wrenches, etc. Not very confidence inspiring.

Gatsky 11y ago

In my opinion, Holmes is a fanatic. This is subtly different from being fanatical or obsessive about certain things, which is probably a good or even necessary characteristic for a founder. She seem to just be a fanatic. She has found a mission, and is pursuing it without any second thoughts. Never mind whether anybody else thinks that the mission is actually that important... Fanatics have the ability to impress those close to them, because of their overriding zeal. From a distance though, they seem crazy and somewhat deficient human beings. I'm not sure that fanatics do science well, or handle other people's money that well either....

bbarn 11y ago

This company exists because she is a she. A man of similar privileged upbringing starting a company based on vaporware would not be nearly as interesting as an apparently unemotional woman seems to be to the industry. She's so mysterious, doesn't have a boyfriend! So dedicated, must be right! Just proof that gender bias exists from the bottom to the top, and our media hype machine plays on it just as well as those evil white men with the money do.

nova22033 11y ago
>A man of similar privileged upbringing starting a company based on vaporware Bill Gates had a privileged upbringing...
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  And Microsoft 12 years after its founding was much, much more successful than Theranos is.
LargeCompanies 11y ago
Huh... a man who is born with a silver spoon in their mouth would not be able to achieve something similar? He may not be able to get the press she gets, but with his parents' and their networks' money he would be able to do a great deal. Im not sure why she is so highlighted .. she grew up wealthy and getting investment from her parents' network Im sure wasn't a hard thing to do vs. the majority of us who have no such luck, rather we work hard/harder to make it.

cft 11y ago

I actually wonder if this is an early signal that there maybe corruption inside the FDA. The goal of recruiting a BoD of this level of influence but of irrelevant skills was an attempt to control the outcome of the FDA approval process, regardless of whether the tests actually work or not. The purpose of NYT article seems to be to message that while Holmes may get removed from the CEO, the shareholders are still hoping to retain the value.

late2part 11y ago
When you hear hoofbeats, you don't think zebra. I'm no fan of Theranos, but the more plausible explanation is that she's blue bood family w/ connections, and they're pulling those in because they can. I don't accept as supported the assertion that influential accomplished people on your BOD means you're out to corruptly influence process (any more than general business).

bane 11y ago

Theory: They had some early tech that looked promising in some specific clinical circumstances that through dumb luck were the ones that were tested early on. Holmes, as an almost engineer with no particular experience in anything, thinks medicine is just like engineering. It didn't work in the general case or was less accurate than acceptable for medicine, and so now Theranos is basically just doing normal lab tests, but subsidizing the costs with VC money and trying to make it up at scale or a breakthrough in the original technological approach at some point in the future. Holmes is spinning a convoluted web of misdirection, nonspecific, fractured answers and non-answers until either or both of those things happen. The questions are easy to answer and wouldn't give away any trade secrets, but she pretty systematically refuses to give simple direct answers to very simply questions. If answering these simple questions, like how many tests they can run using their tech, would give away trade secrets then their tech isn't likely very interesting. The copy coming out of the company insists they are able to do the things they claim, but it doesn't appear they have any particularly commercial ready technology to go to market with. Holmes is caught in a bit of a bind, she used her family's powerful connections to raise absurd amounts of money on nothing at all and now has to deliver or face the wrath of those same powerful connections. She's also managed to fill the board up with big names through her family connections who have absolutely no medical background at all (except for Dr. Foege) in an effort to give some kind of legitimacy. Here's an example of her answering simple questions to get a feel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8qgmGtRMsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8qgmGtRMsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs-oj7U-bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs-oj7U-bo Here's an example of how she answers things, (exact quote) "So we have developed hundreds of tests over the course of the last 12 years that can run on a tiny sample using proprietary Theranos technology..." The critical missing components to this statement: a) To what accuracy compared to traditional tests? b) All of the tests on one sample, or one test per nanotainer sample? c) Are all of those tests current tests that Theranos would run on a sample? (R&D could be generated 10 tests a week, but 90% of those tests could be poor, or could not be clinically useful) She then goes on about taking the data they've generated for their FDA submission and putting it into the public domain and being a leader in transparency. She goes on to talk about all the various technologies Theranos has developed, but it's only the nanotainer tube that's being tested and blah blah blah it's all very complicated and none of the answers clarify or complete any other answer - it's like getting a good image from a shattered mirror. Simple yes/no answers turn into minutes of non-answers. This isn't difficult, but she makes it absolutely excruciating. Here's an exceprt from her bio from theranos.com "Theranos' breakthrough advancements have made it possible to quickly process the full range of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood - instead of numerous tubes - and at unprecedented low costs, and are now directly accessible to people and their physicians through Theranos Wellness Centers opening nationwide." Except not a single part of this has been demonstrated to be true in any way.

robbiep 11y ago

There is so much ... hype around this technology. But some of their use cases aren't all that useful, and their technology (while supposing to be cheaper) is often done on handheld units at the moment in isolated regions. Let me explain: Use cases outlined in this article that have minimal real medical benefit, but sound great: - Home blood testing (why? there are only 2 types of people who may find this useful: patients on Warfarin, and patients on dialysis. Dialysis patients (if not on home dialysis) get tested 3 times a week when they go to dialysis. INR is usually stable once established, ceteris paribus) - Field blood testing (Mostly pointless. Clinical signs are much more useful in a casualty situation. Arterial blood gasses are useful in resus rooms in emergency departments but in the field you want to keep them breathing, not go reversing exotic blood gas abnormalities) For the majority of tests (EUC, CMP, LFT, FBC, Coagulation studies) in rural/isolated places, the i-stat machine is used in australia. This is priced ok... around $40 per cartridge for around 6-10 results. The i-stat works with not much more than a couple of drops of blood as well, although it needs to be drawn from a vein, not a finger-prick. Other tests, like lipids, or antibody markers, etc, are rarer and much more expensive. It would be great to have them cheap (but again, we don't really know how cheap theranos is saying tests are going to be) which may make them more common, but again there just isn't much benefit in taking them regularly. Theranos may well be a white elephant. which is unfortunate. The promised technology (fingerprint testing) would be great. But I can't comprehend how they could go for 12 years without a product. And as a doctor, I would be very suprised if the technology works as advertised. There is unfortunately too much hype surrounding this product for me to believe that we will get what has been promoted, but you never know and I would love to be pleasantly surprised. I wonder how popular this viewpoint will be here on HN - the home of lifehacking and microanalysis of bodyfunction (often without the corresponding knowledge to go with it, but prefaced with a view that 'more data will always be better').

laarc 11y ago
I was hoping the product would pivot to passive blood pressure monitoring. I want my blood pressure to be recorded every few seconds, logged and cross-referenced against what I did, ate, and drank. For correlation purposes, knowing those things can be as simple as snapping a photo. Smart people apparently claim that blood pressure is one of the most reliable indicators of how long you'll live. If so, then it's always seemed strange it's (almost) never measured.

Asparagirl 11y ago

Have you guys seen Elizabeth Holmes' Twitter favorites? 99% of them are faves for someone saying how inspiring she is. How she breaks glass ceilings. How she's doing something significant. How the press just wants to build people up to then tear people down. How she should run for president. How her speeches were transformative. How she has vision. Her bio. Her story. Videos of her. Press puff pieces about her. Her face. Her. I've never seen anyone on Twitter use faves in quite this way. It's not faves about anyone else's content or jokes. It's not faves about Theranos, either. It's all. about. her. https://www.twitter.com/eholmes2003/favorites https://www.twitter.com/eholmes2003/favorites #narcissism

bane 11y ago
That's pretty weird. I didn't believe you until I checked it out myself. I wonder how much of Theranos is a long-play effort to create a "brand" around Holmes? Perhaps years later, long after Theranos is dust, she'll point to it as a huge success that made her into the billionaire she became.

swingbridge 11y ago

It's really put up or shut up time for this company. There's been so much hype around this, but things are starting to smell funny.

tronreg 11y ago

Is Elizabeth Holmes breaking the law?

FussyZeus 11y ago

This company is 12 years old and has never once made an honest dime. How the hell is she or it succeeding in any capacity?