Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

FoxEye said:
It's absolutely amazing that she could become a billionaire whilst leading a company that never actually had a working product.

These are the people we're all told to emulate - to look up to. The wealth creators and entrepreneurs. The people who "made something of themselves".

And she is one of the most successful, becoming the "youngest female self-made billionaire". A real example of what is possible.

Just makes me laugh, is all. All the rest of us nobodies doing a useful job day in day out, and will never be celebrated like this woman was.
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Sadly absolutely spot on.
 
MarcLister said:
In order to try to get a better verdict from the jury? I.e., as a mother they won't convict me?
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I guess there could be three motivations:

1) Pure coincidence (not likely but possible I guess).
2) To try to get a better outcome, either with no conviction or a reduced sentence as she is a mother.
3) She might have known she would be found guilty so took her last chance to have a baby. Even though she won't be there for her child growing up, at least she knows biologically that she had a child. Trying to have a child 20 years later would be tricky at best.
 
I was reading about her Edison instrument but couldn't find much but they claimed over 200 tests on a finger blood kit sample. That immediately seems very outlandish considering the quantity of the blood sample would be quite small, usually then to be aliquoted and possibly spun to plasma and then be consumed on any instrument for analysis.
 
Hades said:
I guess there could be three motivations:

1) Pure coincidence (not likely but possible I guess).
2) To try to get a better outcome, either with no conviction or a reduced sentence as she is a mother.
3) She might have known she would be found guilty so took her last chance to have a baby. Even though she won't be there for her child growing up, at least she knows biologically that she had a child. Trying to have a child 20 years later would be tricky at best.
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All 3 are possible but if number 3 is the answer, how pathetic, to have a child you know you'll miss a lot of their growing up/childhood.

Imagine being her child and finding out that number 2 was the plan all along. You weren't exactly wanted apart from to help get Mummy a better sentence. :rolleyes:
 
Wonder if she'll start using her real voice now.... always seemed a bit mental to me.
 
There must be a bunch of similar silicon valley startups that are as guilty as she was. As far as I can work out, bigging up your product/service up to but hopefully not over the outright fraudulent claims line has been ingrained in the tech startup culture for a while.

I mean look at the gulf between claims & reality when it comes to 'driverless cars' over the past 5 years. How many investors have been sucked in there?
 
Tom_ed1987 said:
There must be a bunch of similar silicon valley startups that are as guilty as she was. As far as I can work out, bigging up your product/service up to but hopefully not over the outright fraudulent claims line has been ingrained in the tech startup culture for a while.

I mean look at the gulf between claims & reality when it comes to 'driverless cars' over the past 5 years. How many investors have been sucked in there?
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The difference is, Theranos were selling tests claiming it was their wonder machine that was doing the tests, whilst in reality they were using conventional 3rd party equipment to do the testing (presumably why she was found not guilty of defrauding patients - they were still getting the results).
 
I think the thing that amazed me the most from reading the book, was when they'd do a demo of the edison blood test machine at their office. Essentially they'd invite all the investors in, take their blood - put it in the edison machine to do the tests, then immediately usher the investors out of the room for an office tour. They'd then secretly take the Edison tester down to the lab, take out the blood samples and run them on a giant Siemens industrial lab testing machine, then send the results back :D

She got what she deserved, but I think the other guy "Sunny" was a really nasty piece of work, and he probably deserved to go down too.

Tom_ed1987 said:
There must be a bunch of similar silicon valley startups that are as guilty as she was
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Yeah I think the whole Silicon Valley ethos of "Fail fast" or "fake it till you make it" is all fine when it's social media apps and emojis. But when it's people's health on the line - it all turns pretty frightening.
 
I love how they knocked up a fake-looking TV/computer game style lab for the Biden visit:

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IIRC she also had her brother and his frat bros on the payroll... employed to do basically nothing - the guy would e-mail himself sports news stories to read so he could pretend he was working at his computer! :D
 
Screeeech said:
Yeah I think the whole Silicon Valley ethos of "Fail fast" or "fake it till you make it" is all fine when it's social media apps and emojis. But when it's people's health on the line - it all turns pretty frightening.
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Aside from that ethos, I don't think this had much to do with Silicon Valley tbh... the big Silicon Valley VC firms all turned her down, aside from two small firms she didn't have much to do with silicon valley types - she did try to get funding from them but they actually asked about the tech and she couldn't provide answers.

Instead it was big PE firms that backed her and old school establishemnet types that mostly formed the advisory board.
 
dowie said:
Aside from that ethos, I don't think this had much to do with Silicon Valley tbh... the big Silicon Valley VC firms all turned her down, aside from two small firms she didn't have much to do with silicon valley types - she did try to get funding from them but they actually asked about the tech and she couldn't provide answers.

Instead it was big PE firms that backed her and old school establishemnet types that mostly formed the advisory board.
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^^ This.

The people who knew better, stayed well clear of her scam. It was the normies who only saw dollar signs that fell for it.
 
FoxEye said:
All the rest of us nobodies doing a useful job day in day out, and will never be celebrated like this woman was.
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we will also likely never be jailed for conning people out of millions. if you're desperate for fame (infamy) it's relatively easy to get your name up in lights for a while.
 
Thekwango said:
we will also likely never be jailed for conning people out of millions. if you're desperate for fame (infamy) it's relatively easy to get your name up in lights for a while.
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That wasn't really the point of my post :D

She's already received tons of acclaim and been hoisted as a role model for people, a "self-made billionaire" success story.

And all the time she was appearing on magazine covers and meeting presidents and literally becoming a billionaire she was in fact doing nothing of value.

It just shows that your worth to society doesn't predict your success, or vice versa.
 
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