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Has anyone dug through the old HN posts about Theranos? I remember people being highly skeptical. How close were they?

• stefan_ 7y ago
  Ehh, nah: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9823638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9823638
  • barrkel 7y ago
    This guy dropped by to lay down the truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=medman77 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=medman77 His one and only comment. I wonder who he was.
    • rco8786 7y ago
      That’s actually kind of wild. This person nailed it to a T, and as their only comment of all time.
      • manquer 7y ago
        While hindsight is 20/20, most of their stuff he is talking about was visible to see , it is just that because VCs were putting money we all thought they must have done due diligence better than us armchair commentators, same with Wework . Ultimately until shit hits the fan, everyone would naturally trust the guy backing his belief with cash better than anyone else‘s analysis. If there was market to short startups perhaps it could be different
        • dekhn 7y ago
          The VC I worked with at the time definitely did their due diligence, but it wasn't easy. When Theranos visited their office, they refused to sign an NDA, which immediately made the VCs suspicious. So they sent an employee to Walgreens to get the THeranos test and noticed that it included a full blood draw (when it should have just been the "nanotainer" or whatever). At that point they believed that Theranos was using their competitor's machines to implement the tests beause their tech didn't work yet.
          • manquer 7y ago
            The ones you worked for defn didn’t put money , I am not sure the ones who did put money did any due diligence, if they did and knowingly put money they are no different from homes they were trying scam the next bigger guy then
      • Fnoord 7y ago
        The comment was made about 4 months after Ian Gibbons committed suicide [1] (which I suppose caught some bad publicity). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gibbons_(biochemist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gibbons_(biochemist)
• Traster 7y ago
  Lots of people were saying "Isn't it weird that this company has tonnes of highly connected military men on their board but almost no doctors?"
  • LanceH 7y ago
    I know that set alarm bells off -- that the whole board looks like that. It looked like a complete appeal to influence rather than getting board members from companies that supply the military with medical. The other narrative raising alarms was that she was a woman CEO. It is then a matter of deciding if it is just a success story that the media wants to tell, or a story being pushed for more hype. Once I (and friends/coworkers) looked at it with skepticism, there just wasn't anything of substance there. I read a doctor saying you can't do that much with that little blood. I'm not saying I called it. I'm saying someone else called it back then, I believed them and these seemingly unique red flags all played out like the paranoid would believe.