Jan 6, 2022·edited Jan 6, 2022Liked by Jeff Maurer
My favorite person in the Theranos story is Phyllis Gardner, the Stanford professor who told her it didn’t work and then seethed for years as Holmes became a celebrity. She was in the documentary, all smug and victorious. Here’s an article with some great quotes from her:
Q: As the hype around Theranos grew, did you ever wonder if you were wrong about Holmes?
A: No. I just thought everybody was crazy. I mean, look at the board, that’s insane. That’s not corporate feasance, that’s malfeasance to have a board that knows nothing about any of this. Old men, I’m telling you, the brains go to their groin.
She also said Holmes had a normal voice at the time. Anyway. In my opinion, Theranos could have been a profitable company if Holmes hadn’t been so obsessed with imitating Steve Jobs and Apple. There is a huge market for voluntary medical tests. I’m a neurotic hypochondriac (I literally just made an appointment to get my skin checked for melanoma) and I would love getting my blood tested for random diseases.
But she insisted that the tests had to be performed in a small, sleek, freestanding box that looked like an Apple product, using only a tiny amount of blood. That’s why it didn’t work. Theranos should have been an iPhone app, not a device. Send people to LabCorp for the actual tests, then store and track results (and encourage more tests). They could have made a fortune coordinating unnecessary medical testing at legitimate labs.
But no. It had to be a small box. There was no reason for this except her dumb vision. Such a waste.
Great to see a mention of "Shattered Glass", it's such an underrated film and it's a shame Hayden Christensen is only known as Anakin Skywalker when he gave a great performance. The article it's based on by Buzz Bissinger is also a cracking read.
What I'd love is for "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely to get the "Shattered Glass" treatment. Funnily enough, Stephen Glass and Erdely were in college together. Must have been something in the water.
Having fundraised for a startup before myself, I'd like to add one point - for the most part, the people who are investing in "unicorns" like Theranos are not actually investing their own money. Professional money managers (venture capitalists, private equity funds) aggregate other people's money and those money managers are incentivized to deploy as much capital as possible so that they can charge fees on the money they invested on their clients' behalf. Companies like Theranos are great for VCs: if Theranos doesn't make it then they lost someone else's money - no big deal, but if Theranos becomes some legendary success story a la Uber (a company that still operates at a loss and has every year of its existence) then the VCs are visionary geniuses (*barf*). Heads I win, tails you lose.
Here's an idea. Anyone investing in a startup that promises magic technology should also share rights to the book and movie if/when the fraud is exposed. That way, investors get a return whether the technology works or not.
I remember Fox News and the like fixating on Solyndra so much that it pushed me towards concluding the ARRA wasn't ambitious enough — a big stimulus package with a big lump of green R&D money should be expected to produce more than one failure worthy of cable news!
It's like a slow-motion version of vaccine development for COVID-19, where we have something like 100 vaccine candidates. Do we need all of them? No. Are all of them going to work well? No, and one should've expected as much from the start. Was it nonetheless a good idea to throw a bunch of money at a variety of approaches? Absolutely.
Something swindlers can play upon is a sense that if you don't believe in a project it reflects poorly on your commitment to the cause and your general moral character, which is something I expect to see with some future green grifters. (Oh, you don't believe we can make steak out of worm cum? I guess you just want to let the cows fart up the whole sky and hotbox us all then?)
In the case of Holmes I recall a spate of articles around 2015 with titles like "Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes: Feminist Icon" building a narrative that her detractors were just misogynists who didn't believe in powerful women or want them to succeed, and that Holmes was a brave pioneer fighting an old boys' club. Nevermind that the old boys' club included several of her major backers, as you mention, and nevermind that cases like Theranos just provide rhetorical fodder for exactly those hated misogynists.
Some twenty years ago we had a company around here called "Framfab", a contraction of "Framtid" and "Factory" meaning "The future factory" as in the factory producing the future.
It was IT, it was AI, it was interactiveimmersiveoneclickawayplugandplayelectroniceverything-buzzword echolalia. It was extremely succesful in one thing and one thing only: increasing its value on the stock market.
Until it went "Pop!" but by then the guys who started it had "diversified their portfolio": read sold off their stocks and options to various county politicians playing stockbrokers with hteir constituents money. Again.
I'd say 90% of anything "climate" today, in the West, is the same thing. No tax subsidies in any way shape or form? No investment. No liability waivers for big biz? No investment. No guaranteed profits no matter what? No investment.
If there actually was real profit to be made from projects actually beneficial/less damaging to the environment than from "race to the bottom", they would be up and running, wouldn't they?
I'll give you an example from my country (Sweden) why I'm so cynical:
In the mid-nineties, four families in a rural area bought a wind power plant big enough to supply all four farms and residences with power to spare. Their goal was to be self-sufficient using wind, the alleged environmentally friendly power source.
They were immediately hit with lawsuits. From the state which was run by a coalition of green and socialist parties. Because people getting ther own power facilities no matter how environmentally sound? Less taxbase. The state's court decided they had to pay taxes based on what they would have earned if they had sold the power to the grid.
The goal is not clean energy: the goal is to keep power production centralised, and thus a source of profit and taxes. And that's why states and businesses co-operate so well.
Theranos' investors included many Republicans, but I think Holmes is/was a Democrat. I seem to recall a plan for a fundraiser at Theranos for Hillary Clinton.
The schadenfreude one gets from reading (in John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood") about all these GOP sh*ts getting bilked by Holmes is quite incredible. That ought not to be a crime, frankly. Falsely diagnosing people *should* be a crime. It's so weird that she got off on the charges that could have affected peoples' lives, but was nailed on some of the lying-to-investors-related charges.
My favorite person in the Theranos story is Phyllis Gardner, the Stanford professor who told her it didn’t work and then seethed for years as Holmes became a celebrity. She was in the documentary, all smug and victorious. Here’s an article with some great quotes from her:
Q: As the hype around Theranos grew, did you ever wonder if you were wrong about Holmes?
A: No. I just thought everybody was crazy. I mean, look at the board, that’s insane. That’s not corporate feasance, that’s malfeasance to have a board that knows nothing about any of this. Old men, I’m telling you, the brains go to their groin.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/03/she-saw-through-elizabeth-holmes-now-stanford-professor-is-star-in-theranos-saga/
She also said Holmes had a normal voice at the time. Anyway. In my opinion, Theranos could have been a profitable company if Holmes hadn’t been so obsessed with imitating Steve Jobs and Apple. There is a huge market for voluntary medical tests. I’m a neurotic hypochondriac (I literally just made an appointment to get my skin checked for melanoma) and I would love getting my blood tested for random diseases.
But she insisted that the tests had to be performed in a small, sleek, freestanding box that looked like an Apple product, using only a tiny amount of blood. That’s why it didn’t work. Theranos should have been an iPhone app, not a device. Send people to LabCorp for the actual tests, then store and track results (and encourage more tests). They could have made a fortune coordinating unnecessary medical testing at legitimate labs.
But no. It had to be a small box. There was no reason for this except her dumb vision. Such a waste.
Great to see a mention of "Shattered Glass", it's such an underrated film and it's a shame Hayden Christensen is only known as Anakin Skywalker when he gave a great performance. The article it's based on by Buzz Bissinger is also a cracking read.
What I'd love is for "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely to get the "Shattered Glass" treatment. Funnily enough, Stephen Glass and Erdely were in college together. Must have been something in the water.
Having fundraised for a startup before myself, I'd like to add one point - for the most part, the people who are investing in "unicorns" like Theranos are not actually investing their own money. Professional money managers (venture capitalists, private equity funds) aggregate other people's money and those money managers are incentivized to deploy as much capital as possible so that they can charge fees on the money they invested on their clients' behalf. Companies like Theranos are great for VCs: if Theranos doesn't make it then they lost someone else's money - no big deal, but if Theranos becomes some legendary success story a la Uber (a company that still operates at a loss and has every year of its existence) then the VCs are visionary geniuses (*barf*). Heads I win, tails you lose.
Here's an idea. Anyone investing in a startup that promises magic technology should also share rights to the book and movie if/when the fraud is exposed. That way, investors get a return whether the technology works or not.
I'm less optimistic about Joe Manchin's attitude to climate spending (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/31/politics-prosecco-democrats-joe-manchin-key-bill) but the main thrust is right. A grand climate R&D program is going to mean shoveling some money at duds, but that doesn't make a grand climate R&D program (or oversight of such a program's spending) any less necessary.
I remember Fox News and the like fixating on Solyndra so much that it pushed me towards concluding the ARRA wasn't ambitious enough — a big stimulus package with a big lump of green R&D money should be expected to produce more than one failure worthy of cable news!
It's like a slow-motion version of vaccine development for COVID-19, where we have something like 100 vaccine candidates. Do we need all of them? No. Are all of them going to work well? No, and one should've expected as much from the start. Was it nonetheless a good idea to throw a bunch of money at a variety of approaches? Absolutely.
Something swindlers can play upon is a sense that if you don't believe in a project it reflects poorly on your commitment to the cause and your general moral character, which is something I expect to see with some future green grifters. (Oh, you don't believe we can make steak out of worm cum? I guess you just want to let the cows fart up the whole sky and hotbox us all then?)
In the case of Holmes I recall a spate of articles around 2015 with titles like "Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes: Feminist Icon" building a narrative that her detractors were just misogynists who didn't believe in powerful women or want them to succeed, and that Holmes was a brave pioneer fighting an old boys' club. Nevermind that the old boys' club included several of her major backers, as you mention, and nevermind that cases like Theranos just provide rhetorical fodder for exactly those hated misogynists.
San Jose 7 is very generous.
Some twenty years ago we had a company around here called "Framfab", a contraction of "Framtid" and "Factory" meaning "The future factory" as in the factory producing the future.
It was IT, it was AI, it was interactiveimmersiveoneclickawayplugandplayelectroniceverything-buzzword echolalia. It was extremely succesful in one thing and one thing only: increasing its value on the stock market.
Until it went "Pop!" but by then the guys who started it had "diversified their portfolio": read sold off their stocks and options to various county politicians playing stockbrokers with hteir constituents money. Again.
I'd say 90% of anything "climate" today, in the West, is the same thing. No tax subsidies in any way shape or form? No investment. No liability waivers for big biz? No investment. No guaranteed profits no matter what? No investment.
If there actually was real profit to be made from projects actually beneficial/less damaging to the environment than from "race to the bottom", they would be up and running, wouldn't they?
I'll give you an example from my country (Sweden) why I'm so cynical:
In the mid-nineties, four families in a rural area bought a wind power plant big enough to supply all four farms and residences with power to spare. Their goal was to be self-sufficient using wind, the alleged environmentally friendly power source.
They were immediately hit with lawsuits. From the state which was run by a coalition of green and socialist parties. Because people getting ther own power facilities no matter how environmentally sound? Less taxbase. The state's court decided they had to pay taxes based on what they would have earned if they had sold the power to the grid.
The goal is not clean energy: the goal is to keep power production centralised, and thus a source of profit and taxes. And that's why states and businesses co-operate so well.
But I'm happily wrong.
Theranos' investors included many Republicans, but I think Holmes is/was a Democrat. I seem to recall a plan for a fundraiser at Theranos for Hillary Clinton.
Here's the link to an article in Vox about that: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/14/11586966/theranos-ceo-elizabeth-holmes-is-holding-a-hillary-fundraiser-with
The schadenfreude one gets from reading (in John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood") about all these GOP sh*ts getting bilked by Holmes is quite incredible. That ought not to be a crime, frankly. Falsely diagnosing people *should* be a crime. It's so weird that she got off on the charges that could have affected peoples' lives, but was nailed on some of the lying-to-investors-related charges.