Theranos blood-test machine demos for VIPs rigged to hide any failures, court told Theranos blood-testing machines, which US prosecutors claim failed over 51 per cent of the time, provided no indication if things went awry during demonstrations for visitors, a court has heard. Seven weeks into the criminal fraud trial of Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, the feds are trying to show that Holmes, …
What struck me about Theranos was who was not investing. It seems like vultures in the biotech industry largely avoided getting heavily entangled. Theranos seemed more like a sophisticated Ponzi scheme; the payoff was always in indefinite future. Sounds good to those unfamiliar with medical testing, analytical chemistry, and related fields. But like any Ponzi scheme it could not continue indefinitely as the number of suckers needed exceeded the supply.
Last week, former Safeway CEO Steven Burd testified that Holmes had brought a Theranos machine with her to a 2011 meeting and he agreed to a finger-prick blood test. The machine reportedly made lots of noise but never produced a result.
Nonetheless, Safeway struck a $85m deal with Theranos to test the machines and spent about $350m preparing its stores to offer rapid blood testing before it became clear Theranos couldn't fulfill its part of the partnership.
How clever. So clever it's even suspicious.
How did they even manage to spend $350m on "making a space in the corner and putting a sign up", and maybe a bit of premature advertising..
Yes I'm sure there's other stuff involved in "preparing their stores to offer rapid blood testing" but the figure sounds fishy to me, as if they are sweeping up other losses into their insurance/damages claim for their own lack of competence.
Yes, theranos were charlatans, but as Pseudo said, you'd have to be pretty incompetent yourself to spaff that much money on the back of their dubious claims..
And Downey subsequently asked Edlin whether he was trying to deceive anyone, to which Edlin replied, "Of course not."
followed by a number of winking emoji's, a couple of gifs of people looking suspiciously innocent/pretending to look innocent, and a large uproarious laughter soundtrack...
If I were to invest millions of dollars in a microfluidics system for in vitro medical diagnostics, I would have insisted to see the details of the working principles like pumping and detection, and trivially: the storage of the reagents.
The investors trusted their gut feelings, it seems, and did not ask the opinion of independent experts. Whatever happens next, serves them right.
Reminds me of when Peter Jones was duped into thinking that a TV takes tens of watts of power in standby and this power-saving gizmo was required to save the planet. They were doing the demo with an obsolete plasma TV that would keep the grid warm in standby for a fast start-up time. No TV still did that by the time of the pitch.
Yes, they need to do something about that.
The steal a bunch of money and spend it to the last cent if necessary defending yourself against charges of stealing - routine is far to common.
The person whose money was allegedly stolen has next to no chance of getting any of it back which is unfair.
Or was that just an assertion by someone who will be tried for the same fraud as Holmes?
Were the data into the database that has been made non accessible?
Of course Edlin won't admit he had deceived investors himself deliberately - that could put him in a far worse position... after all "rigged" demo machines are not so rare, and Magic Leap is not yet in a court....
A working Product? Takes me back to the days when game consoles were occasionally cloned.
One such clone producer demoed a working product at CES, until someone peeked and saw that the "working product" was an empty box with a cable running under the table to the original device.
EDLIN? I was wondering where that name came from.
On several occasions, I came across software/firmware engineers, who would start a project by writing a flashy interface, that made it look like the product was doing something useful. In fact, what I call the "engine room" code was virtually empty, without even some proof of principle code to test the feasibility of the product. All the product behaviour was simulated, i.e. faked.
The trouble is, this mislead the non-technical management into thinking that the product was nearly ready, whereas there was still much work to be done to actually make it work. One guy had done a nice demo for the customer, but then hacked about the code so it no longer "worked", without at least making an archive of the previous demo code. He then went on holiday. While the developer was away, the customer wanted to know about progress, but we could not get anything working, and close examination of the code revealed that no real progress had been made. The customer was not impressed. The developer was sacked, and my colleague rewrote the whole lot.
This flashy demo first approach did seem fairly common at the time (1990s). Maybe it was how people were taught. My colleague and I worked in a totally different way: start with the engine room code, to prove the product is going to work. You can always tart up the interface later. There is always the possibility that the product concept is not feasible, and the sooner you find that out, the less money is wasted.
I am fairly sure there are some startups that are formed primarily to attract funds from investors, rather than to develop and produce something useful, for a profit. Some people have an extraordinary talent for blagging money out of people who should know better. I think most venture capitalists are aware of this. It is just a risk of doing business. What they bet on is a few star performers paying for all the duds. A lot of this probably is not fraudulent, as the Theranos case is alleged to be. It is nonetheless very wasteful.
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