3 ms·
Your whole description of raising money, gauging customer interest, etc. is not really applicable here. Interest did not need to be gauged, they were claiming t
by woah 11y ago
Your whole description of raising money, gauging customer interest, etc. is not really applicable here. Interest did not need to be gauged, they were claiming to have a technology that was fundamentally better than the existing tech. This is not a case of "do people want to use my new todo app?".
The use of competitor equipment in this case was a tacit admission of their failure to deliver. The business proposition was "we have blood tests that are superior in every way", not "we want to open blood testing centers in Walmart".
How much VC funding do you think they would have gotten on a pitch of opening retail blood testing centers with conventional equipment? It sounds like a boring, low margin business that no VC would want a part of.
- pj_mukh 11y agoMost smart "hard tech companies" play with go to market strategies. If they don't, they should. Theranos was actually doing that right. If they were unsure of their tech (or worse were trying to swindle the market), why bother going to market with $400M in the bank? This points to sincere market experimentation. Whether it is appropriate for a biotech company to do so (with actual health information on the line) is another matter. At best, the FDA should have space for this kind of beta testing (clearly marked, always cross-checked etc.).