6 ms·

Theranos' Highly-Anticipated Defense of Its Tech Is Called a 'Bait-And-Switch'

79 points by marcusgarvey 10y ago

marcusgarvey 10y ago
Substantive issues aside, Holmes seems to be getting very bad PR advice.
- DavidHm 10y ago
  Which is kinda surprising. With her board of directors stacked with people coming from the politics environment, you would think they can get better PR people.
  - shepardrtc 10y ago
    She may not be heeding their advice.
  - dennisnedry 10y ago
    Typically people from politics don't understand business very well.
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      Typically people from politics don't understand anything very well - except begging for cash from sponsors. Politics is upscale professional pan-handling - which goes a long way to explaining the quality of so many political decisions.
  - wmil 10y ago
    Sr political people don't need complex PR strategies. They have working relationships with the top reporters. If they're unhappy with press coverage they just phone the reporters and try to explain their position.
- rbcgerard 10y ago
  Or her lawyers don't want her making public statements that will prove harmful in future litigation...
- oneplane 10y ago
  And very bad quality control. And an inversion of priorities.
- ryporter 10y ago
  Agreed. The bait-and-switch wasn't at all necessary. It's not like no one would show up if she held a press conference to announce a new product.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  I think she's getting legal advice, not PR advice. This is almost certainly about avoiding criminal charges, and/or jail, not about saving an exposed fraud.
elgabogringo 10y ago
Tigers don't change their stripes.
chollida1 10y ago
> “We hope to achieve FDA market authorizations of these exciting technologies in the coming years,” she said. 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? 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? 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.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > If she wasn't already, she is now a war time CEO. It looks more like she's a post-Hiroshima CEO.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  Perhaps, if the test offers a strategic or tactical advantage. I work in biotech on FDA regulated devices and assays. Just throwing something out there doesn't mean it has sufficient clinical utility to reach volume, and the process is very expensive.
thanatropism 10y ago
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)? 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. 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. 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?
- mc32 10y ago
  I don't have capital, so my opinion is distanced from the point of friction. However, that said, no, I don't think they will affect other female entrepreneurs negatively. Moreover, Mayer, Holmes, etc. will see more opportunities in the future. Once people are on this track it's seldom they fall off completely. Someone will see potential in them. Whether you think they executed well or not, this time round, they have invaluable experience for the next company.
  - jazzyk 10y ago
    >Once people are on this track it's seldom they fall off completely. Yup, and it applies to both genders. I have seen idiots running their companies into the ground only to re-surface a few years later at another company, as CEOs, because: experience. "Once a CEO, always a CEO".
- linuxkerneldev 10y ago
  > if instead of female CEOs we were talking Sri Lankan CEOs, we'd have long arrived at a cliché conclusion I wasn't able to follow this sentence. What is the cliché with Sri Lankan CEOs? I'm not even sure I know of any. I had to look up Sri Lanka to find out that it is not part of India because initially I assumed you were trying to say something about the Indian CEOs we see in the valley.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
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. I don't know how I'd handle the level of scrutiny she's under.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > I don't know how I'd handle the level of scrutiny she's under. I'd hope that you would step down from your post as CEO because you're too damaged to lead the company any further rather than to cling to your CEO position and likely accelerate the sinking of the ship.
- bllguo 10y ago
  To me it looks like she's defrauding investors and intentionally lying about Theranos' status and products. But sure, "soldiering on"...
- jshevek 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you are saying we can respect individual aspects of a person, even if they suffer moral deficiencies... ...or if you are saying you are confident that everything she has said and done was said/done in good faith.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  That they are trying to do something incredibly hard doesn't excuse the fact that they did a shoddy job doing medical tests. It's actually sort of difficult to understand what they thought they would gain by exposing the public to their experimental tests. I've said this before, but it would make a lot more sense to me to establish an exemplary traditional lab and use that for opt-in proofing of your revolutionary tests than it did to establish a shitty corrupt lab and void thousands of test results. It's sort of an indictment of the concept of consumer education that anyone would still trust their health to the results of a test run by this company.
firebones 10y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  Except the FDA has already cleared one Zika assay, and from this tweet at the AACC keynote the Theranos test is 50x less sensitive. And Dennis Lo isn't just some random guy in the audience. https://twitter.com/DrDanHolmes/status/760232173836185600 https://twitter.com/DrDanHolmes/status/760232173836185600 The science is the science. You can't really wage a press war around the facts.
  - Phlarp 10y ago
    Hah, tell that to our current crop of presidential candidates!
  - firebones 10y ago
    Agree with Dr Lo as being the expert--didn't get into that detail in my comment. He was a moderator and it was difficult to tell which parts of the question he read was the original audience question versus his own--but the question was a devastating moment nonetheless, and the Theranos response was weak (something to the effect of "that 50x number isn't comparable/relevant because our measures use the new ranges the CDC gave us". It was more of an "are you lying now, or were you lying in this 2008 paper?" question. Holmes didn't open her mouth at all for that one, and there was an awkward moment of silence and glance over to figure out which employee was going to take that one. I am less optimistic around the FDA's ultimate neutrality when it comes to political pressure. Facts certainly need to win, but Theranos didn't hire a board like they did if they were counting on facts alone to save the day. It's the same playbook from before, now pivoted to public health crises instead of a DoD endgame.
linuxkerneldev 10y ago
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?
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  "The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."
  - bitchypat 10y ago
    They sure turned quickly for Martin Shkreli. His company raised the price of a drug to an absurd level and overnight he became "the most hated man in America". Her company endangered, and likely caused real harm to, numerous patients' health and she gets to keep on selling and is even given a platform by the AACC to due so.
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      I mean, Shkreli turned out to be such a psychopath that he couldn't even pretend not to be a monster for the media or a judge. I see him as the Jeffry Dahmer of that end of the spectrum to be honest, and just... extreme. Holmes seems like a much more composed fraudster.
      - jshevek 10y ago
        If Shkreli was really incapable of pretending not to be a monster, then he is much less of a monster than many who lead pharmaceutical companies. It saddens me that so many people delighted in indulging in a visceral hatred of this one individual, while seeming to be unaware that our entire system is overly influenced by many hundreds or thousands of people with similar values as him. The world would be a better place if the majority of Shkreli haters invested a tiny fraction of that energy into looking at the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, and the abuse of various mechanisms (patents included) to inflate prices and stifle competition. Some of the other scumbags (at other pharmaceutical companies) were probably relieved that so many of us focused on hating Shkreli the person, rather than asking deeper questions about the legal and moral framework in which they all operate. Hate the player and the game. Some of Shkreli's despicable actions were perfectly legal, so we should try to change the rules of the game (legislatively) rather than focusing so much on the character of one bad player.
kqr2 10y ago
The complete video presentation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JRG733ReQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JRG733ReQ Slides: https://www.aacc.org/~/media/files/annual-meeting/2016/theranosaaccpresentation.pdf https://www.aacc.org/~/media/files/annual-meeting/2016/thera...
fredgrott 10y ago
It somewhat indirectly highlights how much of common public understands statistics and their application.

79 points by marcusgarvey 10y ago

marcusgarvey 10y ago

Substantive issues aside, Holmes seems to be getting very bad PR advice.

DavidHm 10y ago
Which is kinda surprising. With her board of directors stacked with people coming from the politics environment, you would think they can get better PR people.
- shepardrtc 10y ago
  She may not be heeding their advice.
- dennisnedry 10y ago
  Typically people from politics don't understand business very well.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    Typically people from politics don't understand anything very well - except begging for cash from sponsors. Politics is upscale professional pan-handling - which goes a long way to explaining the quality of so many political decisions.
- wmil 10y ago
  Sr political people don't need complex PR strategies. They have working relationships with the top reporters. If they're unhappy with press coverage they just phone the reporters and try to explain their position.
rbcgerard 10y ago
Or her lawyers don't want her making public statements that will prove harmful in future litigation...
oneplane 10y ago
And very bad quality control. And an inversion of priorities.
ryporter 10y ago
Agreed. The bait-and-switch wasn't at all necessary. It's not like no one would show up if she held a press conference to announce a new product.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
I think she's getting legal advice, not PR advice. This is almost certainly about avoiding criminal charges, and/or jail, not about saving an exposed fraud.

elgabogringo 10y ago

Tigers don't change their stripes.

chollida1 10y ago

> “We hope to achieve FDA market authorizations of these exciting technologies in the coming years,” she said. 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? 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? 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.

ceejayoz 10y ago
> If she wasn't already, she is now a war time CEO. It looks more like she's a post-Hiroshima CEO.
EpicEng 10y ago
Perhaps, if the test offers a strategic or tactical advantage. I work in biotech on FDA regulated devices and assays. Just throwing something out there doesn't mean it has sufficient clinical utility to reach volume, and the process is very expensive.

thanatropism 10y ago

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)? 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. 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. 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?

mc32 10y ago
I don't have capital, so my opinion is distanced from the point of friction. However, that said, no, I don't think they will affect other female entrepreneurs negatively. Moreover, Mayer, Holmes, etc. will see more opportunities in the future. Once people are on this track it's seldom they fall off completely. Someone will see potential in them. Whether you think they executed well or not, this time round, they have invaluable experience for the next company.
- jazzyk 10y ago
  >Once people are on this track it's seldom they fall off completely. Yup, and it applies to both genders. I have seen idiots running their companies into the ground only to re-surface a few years later at another company, as CEOs, because: experience. "Once a CEO, always a CEO".
linuxkerneldev 10y ago
> if instead of female CEOs we were talking Sri Lankan CEOs, we'd have long arrived at a cliché conclusion I wasn't able to follow this sentence. What is the cliché with Sri Lankan CEOs? I'm not even sure I know of any. I had to look up Sri Lanka to find out that it is not part of India because initially I assumed you were trying to say something about the Indian CEOs we see in the valley.

ryanmarsh 10y ago

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. I don't know how I'd handle the level of scrutiny she's under.

jacquesm 10y ago
> I don't know how I'd handle the level of scrutiny she's under. I'd hope that you would step down from your post as CEO because you're too damaged to lead the company any further rather than to cling to your CEO position and likely accelerate the sinking of the ship.
bllguo 10y ago
To me it looks like she's defrauding investors and intentionally lying about Theranos' status and products. But sure, "soldiering on"...
jshevek 10y ago
I'm not sure if you are saying we can respect individual aspects of a person, even if they suffer moral deficiencies... ...or if you are saying you are confident that everything she has said and done was said/done in good faith.
maxerickson 10y ago
That they are trying to do something incredibly hard doesn't excuse the fact that they did a shoddy job doing medical tests. It's actually sort of difficult to understand what they thought they would gain by exposing the public to their experimental tests. I've said this before, but it would make a lot more sense to me to establish an exemplary traditional lab and use that for opt-in proofing of your revolutionary tests than it did to establish a shitty corrupt lab and void thousands of test results. It's sort of an indictment of the concept of consumer education that anyone would still trust their health to the results of a test run by this company.

firebones 10y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

joezydeco 10y ago
Except the FDA has already cleared one Zika assay, and from this tweet at the AACC keynote the Theranos test is 50x less sensitive. And Dennis Lo isn't just some random guy in the audience. https://twitter.com/DrDanHolmes/status/760232173836185600 https://twitter.com/DrDanHolmes/status/760232173836185600 The science is the science. You can't really wage a press war around the facts.
- Phlarp 10y ago
  Hah, tell that to our current crop of presidential candidates!
- firebones 10y ago
  Agree with Dr Lo as being the expert--didn't get into that detail in my comment. He was a moderator and it was difficult to tell which parts of the question he read was the original audience question versus his own--but the question was a devastating moment nonetheless, and the Theranos response was weak (something to the effect of "that 50x number isn't comparable/relevant because our measures use the new ranges the CDC gave us". It was more of an "are you lying now, or were you lying in this 2008 paper?" question. Holmes didn't open her mouth at all for that one, and there was an awkward moment of silence and glance over to figure out which employee was going to take that one. I am less optimistic around the FDA's ultimate neutrality when it comes to political pressure. Facts certainly need to win, but Theranos didn't hire a board like they did if they were counting on facts alone to save the day. It's the same playbook from before, now pivoted to public health crises instead of a DoD endgame.

linuxkerneldev 10y ago

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?

Aelinsaar 10y ago
"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."
- bitchypat 10y ago
  They sure turned quickly for Martin Shkreli. His company raised the price of a drug to an absurd level and overnight he became "the most hated man in America". Her company endangered, and likely caused real harm to, numerous patients' health and she gets to keep on selling and is even given a platform by the AACC to due so.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    I mean, Shkreli turned out to be such a psychopath that he couldn't even pretend not to be a monster for the media or a judge. I see him as the Jeffry Dahmer of that end of the spectrum to be honest, and just... extreme. Holmes seems like a much more composed fraudster.
    - jshevek 10y ago
      If Shkreli was really incapable of pretending not to be a monster, then he is much less of a monster than many who lead pharmaceutical companies. It saddens me that so many people delighted in indulging in a visceral hatred of this one individual, while seeming to be unaware that our entire system is overly influenced by many hundreds or thousands of people with similar values as him. The world would be a better place if the majority of Shkreli haters invested a tiny fraction of that energy into looking at the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, and the abuse of various mechanisms (patents included) to inflate prices and stifle competition. Some of the other scumbags (at other pharmaceutical companies) were probably relieved that so many of us focused on hating Shkreli the person, rather than asking deeper questions about the legal and moral framework in which they all operate. Hate the player and the game. Some of Shkreli's despicable actions were perfectly legal, so we should try to change the rules of the game (legislatively) rather than focusing so much on the character of one bad player.

kqr2 10y ago

The complete video presentation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JRG733ReQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JRG733ReQ Slides: https://www.aacc.org/~/media/files/annual-meeting/2016/theranosaaccpresentation.pdf https://www.aacc.org/~/media/files/annual-meeting/2016/thera...

fredgrott 10y ago

It somewhat indirectly highlights how much of common public understands statistics and their application.