9 ms·

Theranos Reaches Settlement with Walgreens

88 points by kqr2 9y ago

saagarjha 9y ago
Unrelated, but that website had around 100 words of actual article, and a bunch of unnecessary other information. The date, for example, was repeated twice, and there was a link to Theranos's website (not to mention a short "about" paragraph) on their own website.
- csours 9y ago
  Probably because this is a public relations article, they expect it to be copied a lot.
- ncallaway 9y ago
  It's a press release. The expectation is that this will get picked up and placed into a number of different sources. They don't expect a particularly high volume of traffic visiting this page directly.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  That's exactly how a typical English press release is supposed to be written, including the date (the top date appears to be from Theranos' CMS and the other one is the press release byline). Here's another example, a Caesars press release from today and the Bollinger release that made HN the other day: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/english-releases/mark-frissora-president-and-ceo-of-caesars-entertainment-announces-the-release-of-eighth-annual-citizenship-report-300497095.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/english-releases/mar... http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bollinger-motors-reveals-b1---worlds-first-all-electric-sport-utility-truck-300495264.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bollinger-motors-rev... Notice the "About" graf which closes both of them. Those are standard, and joint press releases will usually have one for each party; the idea is to provide context for a reporter who is handed the press release, and the practice predates the Web and Wikipedia.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
So, for someone not following this particularly closely -- what is next for Theranos? I know settling with Walgreens was a big goal of theirs, but I don't remember if that was the end of their legal troubles. Similarly, they mention their investors, which makes me wonder if they have issues on that front as well. (eg, did they lie when they sold shares?) Even after the settlement though, they probably have a huge pile of cash -- and at least some investors are willing to let them try something with it.
- melling 9y ago
  Does their technology actually work, or will it soon? Doesn't their future depend on shipping what they promised?
  - i_am_nomad 9y ago
    That's the problem - there is no technology.
    - Steko 9y ago
      Luckily for Theranos there is already an decent sized market for pseudo-medicine based around samples so tiny they couldn't possibly work -- homeopathy.
    - yourapostasy 9y ago
      If the investors aren't shutting down Theranos, then there is a possibility their due diligence on Holmes' patents held out hope of patent trolling someone with deep pockets in the future, or some other similar hope pinned upon those patents. My limited layman's understanding of their microfluidics-based claims is they violated currently-known assaying principles. Hope someone with deeper knowledge about this can pipe in, I've only seen some rants from claimed clinicians when they first announced way back, with terms that went way over my head, and they summed up the rant's TL;DR as, if she really figured it out, she'd be publishing and collecting a Nobel or two, as she would've upended a century of what we believe is statistically possible. However, if instead of using their "nanotainer", a fancy name for a very small blood sample container, some future microfluidics implementation used in vivo implanted chips, and can build up a sampling profile over time say, and some of her patents stand smack in the road of that deployment, then they could recoup some of their money.
taneem 9y ago
I suspect we are going to see Theranos pivot to becoming a conventional medical technology company, probably focusing on lab tech for blood work analysis etc. They are likely to disappear from public consciousness until we hear about an acquisition by a Siemens type company. They got here through hype, smoke and mirrors, but they now have the capital, social network and core organizational processes in place to do this and it is a rational path to recouping time and $ investments from everyone involved. However it will be difficult/impossible for this to pivot to happen without Elizabeth Holmes' resignation.
- wmil 9y ago
  Do you know if any of their patents are valuable? I don't know enough about the field to tell. But they've been at this since 2003 and have pages of patents, http://patents.justia.com/assignee/theranos-inc http://patents.justia.com/assignee/theranos-inc It'd be surprising if there was nothing of value.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- pen2l 9y ago
  The main website mentions something about the "minilab", here's video which shows the various components housed inside the Theranos minilab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc A material handling robot, a camera, a centrifuge, a cytometer, etc etc.... it's like a really neat Swiss army toy that would probably be great in the hands of researchers, provided that this hardware has a somewhat open API. Presuming that it more or less works, it's kind of cool, and lots of labs (both proper medical and research labs) would probably be interested in buying such a thing and would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it.
  - dbcooper 9y ago
    It looks like a bunch of stuff put inside a box ... in a render. It doesn't look like any development beyond "we need to show a product idea" went into it. Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should.
jotjotzzz 9y ago
How are they still in existence?
- readhn 9y ago
  Personal connections of the current CEO. "Old boys club" fell head over heels for her.
  - trendia 9y ago
    """One of her earliest investors, Timothy Draper, was an old neighbor from childhood. Another, Don Lucas, was the friend of her father's college classmate. (Lucas brought on Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison, according to The Times.) Holmes' father's family "moved in powerful circles," and he himself is a longtime public servant who held "a number of senior government positions in Washington," Abelson and Creswell report. Her mother was a congressional aide. But despite those Washington connections, The Times report suggests that Theranos' powerful board — which includes two former senators and two former Secretaries of State — is at least in large part a credit to Holmes' power of persuasion. According to the Times, she met George P. Schultz, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State and one of the company's first high-powered board members, at a conference.""" http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-new-york-times-family-2015-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-new...
readhn 9y ago
Theranos is clearly a failure. 14 years of wasting investors money, 700million (?) down the drain, nothing to show for it except bad publicity, FBI and FDA investigations and major compliance issues. At what point do investors pull the plug / fire CEO and move on?
- readhn 9y ago
  686.3million in 9 rounds (!!) to be exact. this is like a bad soap opera. they were seeking to raise additional 200million. These VCs are insane. IF (!!!) this ever worked they would be - 1billion before shipping any product. Whoever puts anymore money into this should ask for at this point majority of the equity no questions asked.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    I think Color was worse, no? (Edit: actually no, they raised "only" 41Mi)
- pcsanwald 9y ago
  It's not clear that investors _can_ fire Holmes.
  - jonnathanson 9y ago
    They probably can't, or it would have happened by now.
- dbcooper 9y ago
  I'm guessing when all claims from creditors/investors have been settled. Liquidation with the remaining capital divided up among them.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
joshmarinacci 9y ago
When I first read this I thought it said "Thanos Reaches Settlement with Walgreens". :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

88 points by kqr2 9y ago

Unrelated, but that website had around 100 words of actual article, and a bunch of unnecessary other information. The date, for example, was repeated twice, and there was a link to Theranos's website (not to mention a short "about" paragraph) on their own website.

csours 9y ago
Probably because this is a public relations article, they expect it to be copied a lot.
ncallaway 9y ago
It's a press release. The expectation is that this will get picked up and placed into a number of different sources. They don't expect a particularly high volume of traffic visiting this page directly.
jsmthrowaway 9y ago
That's exactly how a typical English press release is supposed to be written, including the date (the top date appears to be from Theranos' CMS and the other one is the press release byline). Here's another example, a Caesars press release from today and the Bollinger release that made HN the other day: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/english-releases/mark-frissora-president-and-ceo-of-caesars-entertainment-announces-the-release-of-eighth-annual-citizenship-report-300497095.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/english-releases/mar... http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bollinger-motors-reveals-b1---worlds-first-all-electric-sport-utility-truck-300495264.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bollinger-motors-rev... Notice the "About" graf which closes both of them. Those are standard, and joint press releases will usually have one for each party; the idea is to provide context for a reporter who is handed the press release, and the practice predates the Web and Wikipedia.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

So, for someone not following this particularly closely -- what is next for Theranos? I know settling with Walgreens was a big goal of theirs, but I don't remember if that was the end of their legal troubles. Similarly, they mention their investors, which makes me wonder if they have issues on that front as well. (eg, did they lie when they sold shares?) Even after the settlement though, they probably have a huge pile of cash -- and at least some investors are willing to let them try something with it.

melling 9y ago
Does their technology actually work, or will it soon? Doesn't their future depend on shipping what they promised?
- i_am_nomad 9y ago
  That's the problem - there is no technology.
  - Steko 9y ago
    Luckily for Theranos there is already an decent sized market for pseudo-medicine based around samples so tiny they couldn't possibly work -- homeopathy.
  - yourapostasy 9y ago
    If the investors aren't shutting down Theranos, then there is a possibility their due diligence on Holmes' patents held out hope of patent trolling someone with deep pockets in the future, or some other similar hope pinned upon those patents. My limited layman's understanding of their microfluidics-based claims is they violated currently-known assaying principles. Hope someone with deeper knowledge about this can pipe in, I've only seen some rants from claimed clinicians when they first announced way back, with terms that went way over my head, and they summed up the rant's TL;DR as, if she really figured it out, she'd be publishing and collecting a Nobel or two, as she would've upended a century of what we believe is statistically possible. However, if instead of using their "nanotainer", a fancy name for a very small blood sample container, some future microfluidics implementation used in vivo implanted chips, and can build up a sampling profile over time say, and some of her patents stand smack in the road of that deployment, then they could recoup some of their money.

taneem 9y ago

I suspect we are going to see Theranos pivot to becoming a conventional medical technology company, probably focusing on lab tech for blood work analysis etc. They are likely to disappear from public consciousness until we hear about an acquisition by a Siemens type company. They got here through hype, smoke and mirrors, but they now have the capital, social network and core organizational processes in place to do this and it is a rational path to recouping time and $ investments from everyone involved. However it will be difficult/impossible for this to pivot to happen without Elizabeth Holmes' resignation.

wmil 9y ago
Do you know if any of their patents are valuable? I don't know enough about the field to tell. But they've been at this since 2003 and have pages of patents, http://patents.justia.com/assignee/theranos-inc http://patents.justia.com/assignee/theranos-inc It'd be surprising if there was nothing of value.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
pen2l 9y ago
The main website mentions something about the "minilab", here's video which shows the various components housed inside the Theranos minilab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc A material handling robot, a camera, a centrifuge, a cytometer, etc etc.... it's like a really neat Swiss army toy that would probably be great in the hands of researchers, provided that this hardware has a somewhat open API. Presuming that it more or less works, it's kind of cool, and lots of labs (both proper medical and research labs) would probably be interested in buying such a thing and would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it.
- dbcooper 9y ago
  It looks like a bunch of stuff put inside a box ... in a render. It doesn't look like any development beyond "we need to show a product idea" went into it. Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should.

jotjotzzz 9y ago

How are they still in existence?

readhn 9y ago
Personal connections of the current CEO. "Old boys club" fell head over heels for her.
- trendia 9y ago
  """One of her earliest investors, Timothy Draper, was an old neighbor from childhood. Another, Don Lucas, was the friend of her father's college classmate. (Lucas brought on Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison, according to The Times.) Holmes' father's family "moved in powerful circles," and he himself is a longtime public servant who held "a number of senior government positions in Washington," Abelson and Creswell report. Her mother was a congressional aide. But despite those Washington connections, The Times report suggests that Theranos' powerful board — which includes two former senators and two former Secretaries of State — is at least in large part a credit to Holmes' power of persuasion. According to the Times, she met George P. Schultz, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State and one of the company's first high-powered board members, at a conference.""" http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-new-york-times-family-2015-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-new...

readhn 9y ago

Theranos is clearly a failure. 14 years of wasting investors money, 700million (?) down the drain, nothing to show for it except bad publicity, FBI and FDA investigations and major compliance issues. At what point do investors pull the plug / fire CEO and move on?

readhn 9y ago
686.3million in 9 rounds (!!) to be exact. this is like a bad soap opera. they were seeking to raise additional 200million. These VCs are insane. IF (!!!) this ever worked they would be - 1billion before shipping any product. Whoever puts anymore money into this should ask for at this point majority of the equity no questions asked.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  I think Color was worse, no? (Edit: actually no, they raised "only" 41Mi)
pcsanwald 9y ago
It's not clear that investors _can_ fire Holmes.
- jonnathanson 9y ago
  They probably can't, or it would have happened by now.
dbcooper 9y ago
I'm guessing when all claims from creditors/investors have been settled. Liquidation with the remaining capital divided up among them.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

joshmarinacci 9y ago

When I first read this I thought it said "Thanos Reaches Settlement with Walgreens". :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]