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> I remember experts telling me in 2009 that SpaceX was fundamentally fucked. That is a very poor analogy to Theranos' situation. In SpaceX's case, there is ob

> I remember experts telling me in 2009 that SpaceX was fundamentally fucked. That is a very poor analogy to Theranos' situation. In SpaceX's case, there is obviously nothing fundamentally impossible about using rockets to get stuff into space - humans have obviously been doing that for quite some time now. I'm guessing the experts you talked to were more making economic arguments, or making arguments that the stuff SpaceX was proposing doing would be too phenomenally difficult before the money ran out. That's very, very different from "physically impossible". Getting accurate quantitative tests from finger pricks is not "technical risk". It is physically impossible because capillary blood is simply not homogeneous enough at the proposed volumes. There was literally nothing of value that came out of any of Theranos' technology - it wasn't just a case of them not reaching sustainability before their runway ran out.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Ex post facto the arguments are obviously different. I have a background in aerospace engineering, and so was able to weigh and dismiss these experts’ conclusions. (They weren’t just economic. But they were biased.) The point is consulting experts isn’t a fool-proof investing strategy. It will produce false negatives around paradigm-changing approaches while potentially bandwagonning on dead ends, e.g. amyloid plaques for Alzheimer’s.
- deleted 2y ago
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- throwup238 2y ago
  > The point is consulting experts isn’t a fool-proof investing strategy. It will produce false negatives around paradigm-changing approaches while potentially bandwagonning on dead ends, e.g. amyloid plaques for Alzheimer’s. The point is that Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all. They really were tech investors bandwagonning on to an obvious dead end! The ones that did consult experts - like the biotech VCs - were smart enough to stay away. Your experience with aerospace and some SpaceX critics is blinding you to the rather obvious Dunning-Kreuger effect going on here (FWLIW I worked on the MSL reentry shielding and Atlas payload fairing before transitioning to clinical trial design at Parexel).
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all What are you basing this on? > Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all This isn't someone consulting experts. It's the experts themselves staying away. My point is that VCs consulting tech experts isn't a great signal per se. I believe it should be done. But I don't have any evidence that it works, given that it's properly ignored almost as frequently as it's followed. (It's difficult from a distance to distinguish something that can't be done from something the person you're talking to can't do or believes they can't.) Outside biotech, which has a parallel funding pipeline, the funds that obsessively consult experts don't do significantly better or worse from those who seem to YOLO it.
    - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      >> Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all > What are you basing this on? The original quote may be a tad hyperbolic, but there was lots of reporting that all of the "smart money" in SV declined to invest. Here is a story about how Google Ventures did the most basic of due diligence and could tell early on it was handwavy bullshit: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maris-explains-why-gv-didnt-invest-in-theranos-2015-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maris-explains-why-gv-d...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Ex post facto the arguments are obviously different. I have a background in aerospace engineering, and so was able to weigh and dismiss these experts’ conclusions. (They weren’t just economic. But they were biased.) The point is consulting experts isn’t a fool-proof investing strategy. It will produce false negatives around paradigm-changing approaches while potentially bandwagonning on dead ends, e.g. amyloid plaques for Alzheimer’s.

deleted 2y ago
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throwup238 2y ago
> The point is consulting experts isn’t a fool-proof investing strategy. It will produce false negatives around paradigm-changing approaches while potentially bandwagonning on dead ends, e.g. amyloid plaques for Alzheimer’s. The point is that Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all. They really were tech investors bandwagonning on to an obvious dead end! The ones that did consult experts - like the biotech VCs - were smart enough to stay away. Your experience with aerospace and some SpaceX critics is blinding you to the rather obvious Dunning-Kreuger effect going on here (FWLIW I worked on the MSL reentry shielding and Atlas payload fairing before transitioning to clinical trial design at Parexel).
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all What are you basing this on? > Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all This isn't someone consulting experts. It's the experts themselves staying away. My point is that VCs consulting tech experts isn't a great signal per se. I believe it should be done. But I don't have any evidence that it works, given that it's properly ignored almost as frequently as it's followed. (It's difficult from a distance to distinguish something that can't be done from something the person you're talking to can't do or believes they can't.) Outside biotech, which has a parallel funding pipeline, the funds that obsessively consult experts don't do significantly better or worse from those who seem to YOLO it.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    >> Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all > What are you basing this on? The original quote may be a tad hyperbolic, but there was lots of reporting that all of the "smart money" in SV declined to invest. Here is a story about how Google Ventures did the most basic of due diligence and could tell early on it was handwavy bullshit: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maris-explains-why-gv-didnt-invest-in-theranos-2015-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maris-explains-why-gv-d...