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To be fair, that is how innovation occurs. There are many examples of "ridiculous" ideas that ended being wildly successful. Where would Elon Musk be if he li
by ryporter 10y ago
To be fair, that is how innovation occurs. There are many examples of "ridiculous" ideas that ended being wildly successful. Where would Elon Musk be if he listened to all of the incumbents who said that his ideas would never work? Obviously, the putative innovators massively failed in this case, but I don't think that the outcome proves that their original idea was fatally flawed, or at least that it wasn't worth attempting.
- cel1ne 10y agoTheranos promised a faster, cheaper way of doing something. Tesla built a very expensive sports-car, before they advanced towards cheaper products for the masses.
- ryporter 10y agoI was actually thinking more about SpaceX. They promised technology that was faster (in terms of development speed) and cheaper.
- cel1ne 10y agoIsn't that because they could work outside many bureaucratic regulations and Musk's focus on the essential?
- jakub_h 10y agoRegulations don't prevent you from inventing new things, only from inflicting them onto the whole of the society. But they didn't invent anything useful in the first place, so arguing that regulations were what stopped them is silly.
- cel1ne 10y agoRegulation was a wrong word. Disclaimer: I don't know much about how SpaceX or NASA's finances work. But I assumed that, due to their tighter coupling with a government, NASA has less leeway in their decisions of which technologies to research compared to SpaceX.
- electic 10y agoThey had to raise significant sums of money to advance. Starting a car company is no joke. I would argue that Tesla is still not out of the woods. The most trying times still lay ahead for Tesla. This is why people have laughed for decades at anyone who says, "I want to start a car company." Tesla is still an absurd and absolutely crazy idea that I hope pans out.
- abstrakraft 10y agoElon Musk wasn't playing with people's lives. The FDA exists for a reason.
- ryporter 10y agoThat's not the point. I'm claiming that it was reasonable to attempt to develop the technology in a lab. Obviously they shouldn't have launched it in the state that it was in.
- electic 10y agoYou sure? The two autopilot deaths say otherwise. There has and will always be risk in starting a company. Your products might have flaws and they might kill. Some companies make it through these events...some don't. Innovation is embracing a crazy idea to move humanity forward. However, it also means embracing all the unknowns.
- keymone 10y agotwo autopilot deaths? afaik autopilot failed to react properly to already dangerous situation where it is in no way certain that human would have succeeded. do you know of an event where autopilot deliberately chose to drive into a tree and killed the passengers?
- Ralfp 10y agoOn sidenote it's shame that media (and internet hate crowd) is spinning what happened into proof that Tesla's autopilot is dangerous for you and those dear to you and was constructed to kill you on first opportunity.
- ceejayoz 10y ago> do you know of an event where autopilot deliberately chose to drive into a tree and killed the passengers? There are videos of the Autopilot feature attempting to swerve into oncoming traffic. It does have the potential to kill people, it likely will in wide usage just by raw statistics, and it's likely to eventually fall under regulation of some sort. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad feature, but pushing self-driving car functionality as a "beta" to the public is, by at least some definitions and to some extent, "Elon Musk playing with people's lives".
- manachar 10y agoInnovation requires fraud?
- ryporter 10y agoThat's not at all what I said. My claim is that innovation often involves ignoring all of the incumbents who say that a new way will never work. Obviously you shouldn't inflate the results of your attempt.
- romaniv 10y agoWhat if incumbents provide valid reasons why something wouldn't work?
- kiba 10y agoElon Musk is himself an expert who knew rocketry. He knew his shit. Even then, he almost failed.
- ryporter 10y agoNo, he wasn't an expert when he started down this path. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-learned-rocket-science-for-spacex-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-learned-rocket-...
- kiba 10y agoIt doesn't contradict my argument at all.
- ryporter 10y agoWhat is your argument? Mine is that both Holmes and Musk were not initially experts in their respective fields.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoMusk lives to learn. Holmes apparently - doesn't. In an engineering culture, there's solid respect for reality. In a political culture there's respect for caste, status, and power, but not so much for reality. Political people believe their own PR. They believe all they have to do is throw money at something and bang the table enough and they can get whatever they want. Engineers know it doesn't work like that. Sometimes they throw money at things and bang the table too, but ultimately if reality says "No" - or "Not yet" - they accept that and move on.
- kiba 10y agoAbsolutely. The difference is that Musk actually operate companies that build real things that actually work. If the product don't actually work in the first place, you can't call that innovation and it appears that Holmes failed to do her due diligence.
- jamespo 10y agoElon Musk had pedigree
- legulere 10y ago> the incumbents who said that his ideas would never work which ideas? Is there really that much innovative stuff by elon musk? My impression is, that it was always more about economic feasibility than technical feasibility. Competitors to Tesla and SpaceX existed before those were founded but they lacked the investment.
- givinguflac 10y agoI would say at the very least, the construction of the Model S and the supercharger network are hugely innovative.
- untog 10y agoBut Tesla cars are just that - cars. Nor were they even the first electric cars. Don't get me wrong, they're fantastic and innovative, but the basic technological underpinnings have been long established.
- mikeash 10y agoI'd say Tesla's main innovation was on the business end: they realized that batteries are expensive, so EVs must be expensive, and trying to cut corners everywhere else to bring the price down just results in a crappy car people don't want to buy. Instead, make it a great car that's really expensive, but so good that it justifies the high price. Any incumbent could have done this, they just... didn't.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> I would say at the very least, the construction of the Model S and the supercharger network are hugely innovative. Sure, but not something that critics said was technically impossible (not likely to be viable as a business model, sure, but that's a different class of complaint.)
- jakub_h 10y agoDepends on what you consider innovation. It's not straight invention when you put useful pieces together, but then again, that describes a lot of useful engineering these days. The inventive parts are already coming, though.
- draker 10y agoI think the difference is that Musk basically wanted to make a mass produced electric car. While it is difficult I would say much of this is due to the infrastructure and capital requirements to get to this point. No one doubted that an electric supercar could be made, rather that it would be very difficult to achieve scale. Had Theranos opted for a mass produced microfluidics chip and instrument based on existing chemistries people would have said it would be difficult to compete with the large industry players (Bio-Rad, Roche, Thermo Fisher etc). This would be deemed difficult or "ridiculous" for reasons relating to capital, infrastructure and potential market share rather than the actual science and functionality of the system. This is where Theranos differs from Tesla, not only trying to achieve scale but do so with a unproven scientific method. It's a shame that Theranos has played out like this because a system that uses a small amount of blood is a great end goal but should have been a 10-15-20 year goal; just as Musk didn't intend to produce a $30,000 mass market car from the beginning. If Theranos built their own instrument based on existing qPCR research/design and used existing chemistry they could get "in the door" and begin really understanding the market. They would need to differentiate but could do so by attempting build a single benchtop automated unit that removed the need for manual sample preparation. While their solution may be a premium offering and a smaller market this would lead them towards their ultimate goal. Over time they could begin to look into chemistries, chip designs and instruments that would bring them closer to their ultimate goal of low cost and low blood requirement testing.
- corecoder 10y agoInnovation is not the point; there's nothing wrong in building early stage prototypes, even incomplete or mostly non working ones. But you should not sell them as production ready, nor employ them in providing a service sold as production ready. For instance, Elon Musk hasn't yet opened a travel agency selling hyperloop tickets.
- rdlecler1 10y agoThe original idea was flawed. The reason so much blood needs to be drawn is because small samples too heterogeneous. Unless you change the properties of blood no test will fix that. Many many people knew this which shows that investors failed to perform some fairly basic due diligence and instead invested in gut and founder charisma. That may be okay when you're betting on a social network, but charisma can't overcome intrinsic empirical limitation.
- nkrisc 10y agoThere was no doubt his electric cars would work - electric cars had long existed - there was doubt he could make a successful business out of it.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Where would Elon Musk be if he listened to all of the incumbents who said that his ideas would never work? There were no scientific and few engineering objections to most of Musk's projects, mostly social/business objections that the time window was uncertain, the risks were high, and it would be difficult to build a viable business to bridge the gap it would take to get to the objectives. There's a difference between projects not making sense to the risk tolerances of current incumbents and projects operating in an area where the science is well-established and demonstrates clear reasons why what is proposed cannot work.
- marvin 10y ago..and when characterizing Musk's projects, don't forget that there were (and are) _plenty_ of naysayers. Likely even a majority, given that even Musk himself e.g. thought that SpaceX was unlikely to succeed.
- maxerickson 10y agoTesla can be looked at as a play against battery cost and energy density, both of which have vaguely predictable trajectories: http://i.imgur.com/NjvUGXh.png http://i.imgur.com/NjvUGXh.png Deciding to build a company that aggressively rides the edges of those curves is a lot different than building a company around a completely new technology that aims to beat anything in existence by a huge multiple (which is the claim for Theranos, that they would do accurate tests with vastly smaller amounts of blood).
- novembermike 10y agoElon Musk is an Nth mover (where N is high) in almost everything he's done. Electric cars are not a new concept (they actually predate ICE cars in some ways). Rockets are not a new concept. Paypal was kind of innovative conceptually at the time but in a boring way.
- 1024core 10y ago> To be fair, that is how innovation occurs. There are many examples of "ridiculous" ideas that ended being wildly successful. I don't mean to draw parallels, but I remember when Jobs announced the iPhone, everyone was very skeptical. Some called it the "Jesus Phone". I heard that when the iPhone was finally launched, Blackberry engineers went out and bought a few to see how he had done it. Of course, just because there are skeptics it does not mean that the product is good. E.g., all the "perpetual motion" machines out there...
- emiliobumachar 10y agoThe bulk of criticism of Theranos is not for seeking a hugely ambitious goal and failing. It's for hiding the failure and pushing the failed technology to patients outside the scope of an experiment.
- Piloti 10y agoYeah, but here's the problem: if you're working in healthcare and your "ridiculous" idea turns out not to work, you have a duty of care to your customers to admit it and close down. Not turn up on TechCrunch Disrupt in a black turtleneck talking about the power of innovation and try to do a deal to put your bogus tech on sale in every supermarket.