9 ms·

Theranos reportedly laying off 41% of its workforce

154 points by xyzzy4 10y ago

misotaur 10y ago
That lady CEO belongs in jail or a mental institution.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
TheAdamist 10y ago
The only surprising thing about this news is that its only 41%, i figured it would be closer to 100%
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  Personally, I also thought it was surprising that Theranos still exists.
- jonknee 10y ago
  This comes after October when they had let go half the company (340 people were let go then).
- mathattack 10y ago
  I think the word is out - I've talked to several candidates from there in the past week.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / incorrect due to the low sample size. I can only imagine being one of the researchers or engineers there really believing you would be able to change the world and getting crushing news like this. It would really suck.
  - bsder 10y ago
    > Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / incorrect due to the low sample size. Hardware is hard. Let's go shopping. :) However, that doesn't have to be the end. You can narrow the usage to something like "Use for routine visits to collect data quickly but not for diagnostic reasons". Being able to do a very fast test without drawing much blood for every time you visit the doctor would be useful information over time. There's also a "Hey, that number is a bit high. Let's pull a real amount of blood and see what's going on." I suspect that if you correlate the information over multiple tests it gets much more accurate very quickly. In addition, I suspect that the engineers would have eventually worked out how to correlate things correctly and figured out how much blood was required for what level of certainty. Finally, most people in the biotech sector understand that it's a "pump and dump" scam. You invest, wait for the company to get some good news, and sell to the next layer. Biotech often takes long timescales and different investors toss money in at different points. However, what doomed the company was Elizabeth Holmes lying. I could make other comments, but, really, Theranos would still be fine if she had told the truth. People know that biotech always runs into problems. Always. Your CEO is one of the people who must not lie (your CFO is the other). Your sales people can lie. Your marketing people can lie. Oddly, even your CTO can get away with some things, but normally the CTO is a shining beacon of truth compared to most people in a company. If your CEO always tells the truth, the CEO can say: "We've hit some snags, but the engineers think they can work around them" and people will believe because they want to believe. But once your CEO is known as a liar, you are doomed. However, I expect that Elizabeth Holmes will be back far too soon and will wreak havoc on an even larger scale. She is just Carly Fiorina writ 35 years later. She will fail upward because she is a not-unattractive blonde female with lots of rich family connections.
    - SEJeff 10y ago
      She's rich and will stay independently wealthy for the forseeable future due to this, however her name is heavily tarnished. Even if she does pull off the edison tech, she'll have a hard sell finding investors to the level she did for Theranos again.
    - 10y ago
- theDoug 10y ago
  41% of those remaining. The percentages hurt more with each round.
  - perseusprime11 10y ago
    Any news on Steve Jobs of Medical research?
- openmosix 10y ago
  220 employees left, 155 in today's layoff, 340 cut in October. So, today there are only 30% of the employees who were there in October, or laying off 70% of the workforce.
- uptown 10y ago
  It's possible they used a Theranos Edison machine to calculate their company's odds of survival.
netik 10y ago
I guess my main question here, is if they have been banned by the FDA from doing any testing at all for two years, what exactly is remaining of the business, and why haven't they been completely shuttered? Bloomberg seems to indicate there isn't much left for any employee to do. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/theranos-s-ceo-holmes-banned-from-operating-a-lab-for-two-years https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/theranos-...
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I worked on a project where in the same building a startup was going under. It was totally clear that there was no hope but they kept burning through their VC money instead of closing.
  - ch4s3 10y ago
    Why not? Give your employees a life boat and some time to move on. I know some people who were at Ride well after it was clearly not going to work out. They all had breathing room to find good fits at new companies. Sure it burned a bunch of cash, but it lowered the human cost of the failure.
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      That's a good point and a nice side effect but in general nobody gives a damn about the employees. This is most likely not the real reason.
      - jdmichal 10y ago
        The founders are employees too...
      - ch4s3 10y ago
        I think when the ship is sinking, even the captain(ceo) is trying to buy time to plan a next move.
      - mgraczyk 10y ago
MBCook 10y ago
I can't wait until this whole saga is made into a movie. I also can't believe anyone is willing to give them the time of day with a new product.
- umeshunni 10y ago
  Well, it is being made into a movie: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence-will-star-as-elizabeth-holmes-in-a-movie-about-theranos http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence-wil...
- mifreewil 10y ago
  0 credibility left.
- aceperry 10y ago
  She reminds me so much of Donald Trump, especially Trump University. With all of her sleazy explanations, deflections, and breezy ability to lie. I'm surprised that she was able to carry the company this far. It will be interesting to see how much further the company can continue.
  - vixen99 10y ago
    But not Hillary?
    - vkou 10y ago
      Hillary has a long history of generally non-fraudulent political failures, Trump has a long history of fraudulent business failures.
    - aceperry 10y ago
      No. But if you have any examples of Hillary behaving like Trump, I'd like to hear about it.
      - aaron-lebo 10y ago
aceperry 10y ago
They'll probably have to change the name of the company if they want to get out from under the stink of sleaze.
- minikites 10y ago
  The good ol' Blackwater/XE Services/Academi gambit.
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    How's Accenture doing these days? (Not quite the same I know, but I did just discover today that Arthur Andersen relaunched last year, huh!). In a fit of irony, multiple partners left the smoking ruins of AA to found a firm called, of all things, Accuracy.
    - twic 10y ago
      How far back does the practice of renaming something after an infamous debacle go? If it's smoking ruins you want, then i can recommend Windscale, which was renamed to Sellafield not long after this little bit of excitement in 1957: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
patmcguire 10y ago
This leaves 220 people employees left at Theranos? Why? The company is over. The emperor has no black turtleneck. Move on.
steveax 10y ago
And, related: Trump’s pick for defense secretary has resigned from Theranos’s board [1] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/trumps-pick-for-defense-secretary-stepped-down-from-theranos-board/?utm_term=.5016be822cf8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/trump...
- aceperry 10y ago
  Amazingly, I understand that the board had a lot of big and very well known names.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
StClaire 10y ago
Why do people still work there?
fixxer 10y ago
There were two employees. The percent refers to measurement of labor by weight. They just fired the skinny one.
eachro 10y ago
Why is anyone even still sticking around voluntarily? There is no chance of a lucrative exit and the company will probably die off on its own within 1-2 years.

154 points by xyzzy4 10y ago

misotaur 10y ago

That lady CEO belongs in jail or a mental institution.

sctb 10y ago
Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

TheAdamist 10y ago

The only surprising thing about this news is that its only 41%, i figured it would be closer to 100%

TheCoelacanth 10y ago
Personally, I also thought it was surprising that Theranos still exists.
jonknee 10y ago
This comes after October when they had let go half the company (340 people were let go then).
mathattack 10y ago
I think the word is out - I've talked to several candidates from there in the past week.
SEJeff 10y ago
Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / incorrect due to the low sample size. I can only imagine being one of the researchers or engineers there really believing you would be able to change the world and getting crushing news like this. It would really suck.
- bsder 10y ago
  > Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / incorrect due to the low sample size. Hardware is hard. Let's go shopping. :) However, that doesn't have to be the end. You can narrow the usage to something like "Use for routine visits to collect data quickly but not for diagnostic reasons". Being able to do a very fast test without drawing much blood for every time you visit the doctor would be useful information over time. There's also a "Hey, that number is a bit high. Let's pull a real amount of blood and see what's going on." I suspect that if you correlate the information over multiple tests it gets much more accurate very quickly. In addition, I suspect that the engineers would have eventually worked out how to correlate things correctly and figured out how much blood was required for what level of certainty. Finally, most people in the biotech sector understand that it's a "pump and dump" scam. You invest, wait for the company to get some good news, and sell to the next layer. Biotech often takes long timescales and different investors toss money in at different points. However, what doomed the company was Elizabeth Holmes lying. I could make other comments, but, really, Theranos would still be fine if she had told the truth. People know that biotech always runs into problems. Always. Your CEO is one of the people who must not lie (your CFO is the other). Your sales people can lie. Your marketing people can lie. Oddly, even your CTO can get away with some things, but normally the CTO is a shining beacon of truth compared to most people in a company. If your CEO always tells the truth, the CEO can say: "We've hit some snags, but the engineers think they can work around them" and people will believe because they want to believe. But once your CEO is known as a liar, you are doomed. However, I expect that Elizabeth Holmes will be back far too soon and will wreak havoc on an even larger scale. She is just Carly Fiorina writ 35 years later. She will fail upward because she is a not-unattractive blonde female with lots of rich family connections.
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    She's rich and will stay independently wealthy for the forseeable future due to this, however her name is heavily tarnished. Even if she does pull off the edison tech, she'll have a hard sell finding investors to the level she did for Theranos again.
  - 10y ago
theDoug 10y ago
41% of those remaining. The percentages hurt more with each round.
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  Any news on Steve Jobs of Medical research?
openmosix 10y ago
220 employees left, 155 in today's layoff, 340 cut in October. So, today there are only 30% of the employees who were there in October, or laying off 70% of the workforce.
uptown 10y ago
It's possible they used a Theranos Edison machine to calculate their company's odds of survival.

netik 10y ago

I guess my main question here, is if they have been banned by the FDA from doing any testing at all for two years, what exactly is remaining of the business, and why haven't they been completely shuttered? Bloomberg seems to indicate there isn't much left for any employee to do. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/theranos-s-ceo-holmes-banned-from-operating-a-lab-for-two-years https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/theranos-...

maxxxxx 10y ago
I worked on a project where in the same building a startup was going under. It was totally clear that there was no hope but they kept burning through their VC money instead of closing.
- ch4s3 10y ago
  Why not? Give your employees a life boat and some time to move on. I know some people who were at Ride well after it was clearly not going to work out. They all had breathing room to find good fits at new companies. Sure it burned a bunch of cash, but it lowered the human cost of the failure.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    That's a good point and a nice side effect but in general nobody gives a damn about the employees. This is most likely not the real reason.
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      The founders are employees too...
    - ch4s3 10y ago
      I think when the ship is sinking, even the captain(ceo) is trying to buy time to plan a next move.
    - mgraczyk 10y ago

MBCook 10y ago

I can't wait until this whole saga is made into a movie. I also can't believe anyone is willing to give them the time of day with a new product.

umeshunni 10y ago
Well, it is being made into a movie: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence-will-star-as-elizabeth-holmes-in-a-movie-about-theranos http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence-wil...
mifreewil 10y ago
0 credibility left.
aceperry 10y ago
She reminds me so much of Donald Trump, especially Trump University. With all of her sleazy explanations, deflections, and breezy ability to lie. I'm surprised that she was able to carry the company this far. It will be interesting to see how much further the company can continue.
- vixen99 10y ago
  But not Hillary?
  - vkou 10y ago
    Hillary has a long history of generally non-fraudulent political failures, Trump has a long history of fraudulent business failures.
  - aceperry 10y ago
    No. But if you have any examples of Hillary behaving like Trump, I'd like to hear about it.
    - aaron-lebo 10y ago

aceperry 10y ago

They'll probably have to change the name of the company if they want to get out from under the stink of sleaze.

minikites 10y ago
The good ol' Blackwater/XE Services/Academi gambit.
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  How's Accenture doing these days? (Not quite the same I know, but I did just discover today that Arthur Andersen relaunched last year, huh!). In a fit of irony, multiple partners left the smoking ruins of AA to found a firm called, of all things, Accuracy.
  - twic 10y ago
    How far back does the practice of renaming something after an infamous debacle go? If it's smoking ruins you want, then i can recommend Windscale, which was renamed to Sellafield not long after this little bit of excitement in 1957: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

patmcguire 10y ago

This leaves 220 people employees left at Theranos? Why? The company is over. The emperor has no black turtleneck. Move on.

steveax 10y ago

And, related: Trump’s pick for defense secretary has resigned from Theranos’s board [1] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/trumps-pick-for-defense-secretary-stepped-down-from-theranos-board/?utm_term=.5016be822cf8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/trump...

aceperry 10y ago
Amazingly, I understand that the board had a lot of big and very well known names.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

StClaire 10y ago

Why do people still work there?

fixxer 10y ago

There were two employees. The percent refers to measurement of labor by weight. They just fired the skinny one.

eachro 10y ago

Why is anyone even still sticking around voluntarily? There is no chance of a lucrative exit and the company will probably die off on its own within 1-2 years.