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> Elizabeth Holmes made representations which she knew to be false to secure investments. Lot of companies do that atleast with software. Didnt Bill Gates tel

by sumedh 5y ago

> Elizabeth Holmes made representations which she knew to be false to secure investments. Lot of companies do that atleast with software. Didnt Bill Gates tell IBM that they have an OS when they didnt and then bought an OS from someone else?

projektfu 5y ago
Being on the purchasing end of things, I see it pretty commonly with software. While it's being sold, they tell you that it does things. During installation, they tell you those things are having the bugs ironed out and will be available soon. After installation and a few months of use, they ask you to participate in a focus group about how the features should look when they get around to starting them. However, the software people rarely try to gaslight you into believing that the features actually do exist and you don't need them anyway. At least, in my experience. And, when pressed by customers, they usually fess up that the features are still "under development". Listening to the "The Dropout" podcast, the thing that is striking is that Theranos had a bunch of things they said to investors and customers (Walgreens, Safeway) that they would not fess up to in deposition before the SEC. All of a sudden, the genius founder can't remember hardly anything of what happened in the last 10 years. I don't doubt that Holmes wanted it to work. I think she thought that in the first few years, her R&D lab would actually be producing a machine that did what they claimed, and that they'd just be running the tests in house until the FDA approval came to sell them to everyone and his dog. But it seems she and the other brass didn't want to ever hear that they were not succeeding. And so they had to lie. I was pretty disappointed because the articles about it made it seem like she had made or been part of a breakthrough in her undergraduate research to dramatically reduce the sample size. Imagine the applications in veterinary medicine! But this was not the case, she took existing tech and then started raising investment on the promise that it could be extended by sufficiently smart people, and then sold an image of herself as a prodigy to keep the ball rolling, while immunizing herself to the reality of the actual performance of the machines.
andi999 5y ago
The big difference is that they knew they could make it fast. It is like you are a carpenter and say you have a table in stock which you didn't build yet. The big difference is she didn't have anything and no viable path to deliver it. A fundamental step had to be made which wasn't there. It is like promising anti gravity flight. If you have a functioning anti gravity Prototyp you can probably make a plane with enough engineering. If you don't it will not happen no matter how much money you pour in.

by sumedh 5y ago

projektfu 5y ago

Being on the purchasing end of things, I see it pretty commonly with software. While it's being sold, they tell you that it does things. During installation, they tell you those things are having the bugs ironed out and will be available soon. After installation and a few months of use, they ask you to participate in a focus group about how the features should look when they get around to starting them. However, the software people rarely try to gaslight you into believing that the features actually do exist and you don't need them anyway. At least, in my experience. And, when pressed by customers, they usually fess up that the features are still "under development". Listening to the "The Dropout" podcast, the thing that is striking is that Theranos had a bunch of things they said to investors and customers (Walgreens, Safeway) that they would not fess up to in deposition before the SEC. All of a sudden, the genius founder can't remember hardly anything of what happened in the last 10 years. I don't doubt that Holmes wanted it to work. I think she thought that in the first few years, her R&D lab would actually be producing a machine that did what they claimed, and that they'd just be running the tests in house until the FDA approval came to sell them to everyone and his dog. But it seems she and the other brass didn't want to ever hear that they were not succeeding. And so they had to lie. I was pretty disappointed because the articles about it made it seem like she had made or been part of a breakthrough in her undergraduate research to dramatically reduce the sample size. Imagine the applications in veterinary medicine! But this was not the case, she took existing tech and then started raising investment on the promise that it could be extended by sufficiently smart people, and then sold an image of herself as a prodigy to keep the ball rolling, while immunizing herself to the reality of the actual performance of the machines.

andi999 5y ago

The big difference is that they knew they could make it fast. It is like you are a carpenter and say you have a table in stock which you didn't build yet. The big difference is she didn't have anything and no viable path to deliver it. A fundamental step had to be made which wasn't there. It is like promising anti gravity flight. If you have a functioning anti gravity Prototyp you can probably make a plane with enough engineering. If you don't it will not happen no matter how much money you pour in.