It's interesting, I assume many on here could afford to pay for WSJ, but don't, because the WSJ makes up only a small percentage of the content they want to read.
The answer seems obvious - the industry needs an unlimited Spotify model that has the vast majority of content providers, and then pays out to the content providers by total minutes read. Why this hasn't happened yet is very interesting to me.
The existing model for journalism seems to be similiar to if there was a Spotify type service for each record label - and you had to subscribe to 10 labels to listen to the music you wanted to listen to. This model made sense when there was a marginal cost (printing and delivering) - but that cost is basically gone for online readers.
I love good journalism from the WSJ, NYTimes, WashPost, and many others. But no way am I going to subscribe to all of them - even though I want all of the content. Micropayments seem like way too much friction, and a decision (is this article worth it?) that is such a pain for consumers. Why can't they switch to the Spotify model?
Is that a micropayment model though? I can't imagine wanting to be bothered by paying for everything I read. For some reason, paying for stuff, even if only 25c, makes me think "Is it worth it?", and I hate that feeling.
Yes. I get the WSJ paper and online. They generally have deals (right now it's $1/week). The charts and data tables in the paper are probably the closest thing you can get to a business dashboard for the whole world. Fun to read each day to get a sense for everything from tech company valuations to the price of pork. Plus it's fun to have fresh reading material not on a screen. For $1 a week, one of the purchases I get the most value out of. I find it 10-100x more informative than any of the other papers, but I'm numbers oriented and others mileage may vary.
They generally have deals (right now it's $1/week).
I used to subscribe back about 15 years ago when they first started charging. But I don't subscribe any more.
The problem is the bait-and-switch. The intro price eventually goes away. Right now a 1 yr subscription, digital only, is $174. But right next to it on the website there's a bubble that says "over 50% off". So the non-discounted price is $350/yr? More?
I get tired of shit like that. Charge me $50/yr and I'll pay. Keep jacking up my price and make me scrounge for discounts and I'll pass. Homie don't play dat!
I subscribe mostly for the physical paper. I rarely read it online, but it comes in handy for times like this. I think my most recent renewal was $100 for the year. Very small price to pay for top quality writing and news. I'd pay for the NYT as well if they actually delivered to my home.
Can someone provide a link to a non-paywalled version of the article? Or better yet, suggest a way so myself and others can find non-paywalled versions in the future on our own?
Highlight the title, right click, search google for it, and click the wsj result. The wsj website displays articles for people coming in through google. This worked for me at any rate, and I wasn't able to see it by clicking the direct link.
Hit the "web" link above, which will bring up search results, and click over from Google. They can't pull the paywall nonsense when you click from Google, or they'll be delisted for cloaking.
I specifically avoided using a WSJ link on a story that made it to the front page last week because of the paywall, and it was changed to the WSJ link by HN admins because of the "original source" policy. I wasn't particularly thrilled with this because I don't want to encourage paywalls, but apparently they are going to be a part of HN for the foreseeable future. So get familiar with the "web" link - you'll be using it a lot.
"She has also been talking with Jason Blum, ... about a potential documentary that would chronicle her life and career"
This is her priority right now?? For a while it has been clear she is more interested in self aggrandizement than ensuring her technology actually works.
She's quite likely going to be indicted soon. $400 million fraud cases tend to not go unnoticed by the DOJ. Getting her story out may well be her priority.
I suspect the likelihood of receiving an indictment from the DOJ is somewhat linked to the depths of her ties to powerful politicians, present and future.
> Ms. Holmes maintains a heavy security detail. Men with earpieces escort her wherever she goes outside the Palo Alto headquarters. Their code name for her is “Eagle 1,” current and former employees say. Mr. Balwani, until he retired, was “Eagle 2,” they say.
You cannot make this shit up. How full of herself can she possibly get? The Adam McKay movie is going to be particularly fantastic if there are more examples like this.
How common is security detail for CEOs of billion dollar corporations to begin with? It seems to be fairly random.
Steve Jobs drove himself to work. According to Fortune, in 2013 HP spent $1700 on security for Meg Whitman and Amazon spent $1.6M on Jeff Bezos [1]. It's really all over the map. And presumably the costs go up if the company is exposed in scandal and investors are unhappy with the CEO or they begin to receive threats.
I would assume numbers like that are hard to compare. Perhaps corporate security spends a substantial effort on the CEO, but the cost ends up in the general security budget. Perhaps the CEO flies private jets primarily for security reasons (I believe this is the case for Warren Buffet), but the cost ends up on the travel budget (and vice versa). The $1700 figure is especially suspect, that will barely pay for locks on the doors, so there's some security expenses "hidden" in other budgets.
I'm not sure if driving is a good proxy for amount of security. Bezos supposedly car pools with his wife and kids in a minivan (source: The Everything Store book).
Marissa Mayer's house always has a couple guys in an SUV parked outside with the engine running. Someone told me there have been credible threats made against her. Maybe that is the key. The Steve Jobs way of doing it makes sense if you assume that a kidnapping would be someone the CEO loves rather than the CEO. But kidnapping has been out of style in the US for decades.
Here's a single data point. I used to work one layer removed from a billionaire (he was my boss's boss). I didn't interact with him much, but I had to do work directly for him regularly, and it sometimes required dropping by his house.
He had at least one armed guard at his house driveway entrance 24/7. I suspect he had at least one other somewhere. But he drove himself to work in a pretty regular car and didn't have guards anywhere but his home that I can tell. We worked in a big building that had cops on the first floor during business hours, so I guess that was covered too.
This guy is very private though, and you wouldn't know he was a billionaire unless you worked with him. There's barely any information on him if you Google him.
I think being around CIA spooks long enough will do this to you. The stories about the insane level of security inside the offices is mind-boggling and can only come from people used to the spy trade.
I half-wonder if there's some government angle to Theranos that hasn't been quite uncovered yet.
Her dad worked for a U.S. govt. foreign agency, and if you look at his bio and all the countries where he was posted, you might infer that he was in the CIA.
thinking as a Russian, i can see how that can be a channeling of [investors'] money to the CIA friends [of the father, of the board members, etc...]. You know a typical cost+ [a lot of '+'s] contract or something like it...
I spoke to a guy who interviewed there a long time ago and he said the crazy level security was in place back then. He called the security guys secret service because he thought it had something to do with her father being a senior state department guy (or something). I don't think that gets you actual secret service. Interesting data point that this was from the beginning
If she could have ensured her technology worked it would certainly be ensuring her technology works. If she was capable of getting suite of blood tests from a drop of blood Theranos really would be worth that venture capital valuation. When your tech doesn't work you can't ensure that it works so self-aggrandizement is your option until the house of cards crumbles.
In addition to the Academy Award-winning director already following her around
"In addition to making frequent media and conference appearances, she hired Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris to film videos of herself and others for Theranos’s website."
(Spoiler alert regarding the HBO documentary series 'The Jinx')
It's interesting that she contacted a producer of 'The Jinx', given that the series was ultimately a vehicle for Robert Durst, a wealthy individual long suspected of multiple murders, to publicly confess to his crimes. I wonder if she's perhaps planning a similar confessional documentary, in the hopes of salvaging some of her reputation.
This constant stream of Theranos might be viewed by some on the surface as beating a dead horse... but every article is new news of their shenanigans. And the most important bit - it seems like nothing has changed. It seems like they are continuing on the same path, as it seems like Elizabeth Holmes is completely out of touch with reality.
Obviously this saga has thus far been negative for many of those involved - but I'm selfishly enjoying following the story. I'm curious to see how this ends. Theranos has hired some very good attorneys and I assume Walgreens and the consumer class actions will be interesting cases.
One question: If Theranos needs to protect itself from a criminal / civil SEC investigation, do the Theranos executives get to use investor funds to defend themselves? If so, who does that help?
I would assume it can use investor funds. Presumably, if a defense is a rational choice compared to a settlement, the use of investor funds helps avoid the loss of even more investor funds.
Companies frequently defend themselves against shareholder lawsuits, and naturally that money would otherwise provide value for the shareholders. Also, if the SEC fines them the (current) investors will basically be punished!
Oh fascinating, I hadn't thought about this before. So if the plaintiffs win a shareholder lawsuit, they're winning money at the expense of all of the other shareholders? And what about a class-action by all of the shareholders (is that even possible)? That'd just be the shareholders suing themselves? I guess that'd just be a forced liquidation/dividend in effect, right?
I'd like to thank the Wall Street Journal for this saga that has filled my heart with ever-lasting schadenfreude. And it keeps getting better!
>Ms. Holmes maintains a heavy security detail. Men with earpieces escort her wherever she goes outside the Palo Alto headquarters. Their code name for her is “Eagle 1,” current and former employees say.
I'd also like to point out that the WSJ is being quite honorable here in going after Theranos so hard. A ton of the board members are from the Hoover Institution, which has close ties with the Journal. They're making a lot of their own people look bad. And it honestly is pitiful that they sat on this board of a company that they clearly knew absolutely nothing about, beyond Ms. Holme's deceptive pitches.
> On July 1, Democratic members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee called on Theranos to explain how its “policies permitted systematic violations of federal law” and how it is “working with regulators to address these failures.”
How come when I systematically violate federal law regulators seem less willing to work with me to address these failures? Companies are not that big and mystifying. They are just made up of people and should be held accountable. Elizabeth committed felonies and some people almost certainly died as a result.
I live in States long enough to assume that when you put on the board team similar to the one Holmes did, all of sudden you are not investigated, RAIDed, thrown in jail without bond and found guilty for fraud and put behind bars for 25+ years. All of sudden, a House Committee of Commerce have the time and willingness to ask you politely a few questions...
CMMS just slapped Theranos hard. A federal investigation is underway and the SEC is also investigating. I personally do not think Holmes will escape jail time.
In other words, she's at home tonight, safe and warm. The parent post's point was that as an individual one would most certainly be in jail, at least for the night.
>Companies are not that big and mystifying. They are just made up of people and should be held accountable. Elizabeth committed felonies and some people almost certainly died as a result.
Sending people to prison for crimes they commit while being executives - imagine prison overcrowding if US do the same as Iceland - the country of 300K sent 29 bankers to prison as result of 2008 crisis. US is 1000 times bigger.
Prisons are a for-profit industry, and filling prisons with people gets votes. There is absolutely no way that the DOJ is thinking, “I’d like to send these people to jail, but alas, there are aren’t enough jail cells.”
The sad answer is simply that prisons are a kind of security theatre. For that theatre to work, you have to appear to be imprisoning people that voters emotionally identify as threats,
Locking up street criminals, people of colour, and so forth fits in a world where the media and ruling politicians demonize them at every turn.
Yes, security theater...except coincidentally as we in the US massively ramped up our rate of imprisonment. our crime rate went drastically down. For those who don't remember the 70s and 80s it is understandable to wonder why so many people are in jail when there is so little crime. Oddly, removing criminals from society lowers crime in society
I do remember the 70s and 80s, and I also bothered to take enough of an interest in criminal justice to know that crime subsequently decreased in both the US and in Canada, without the rampant increase in incarceration in Canada, or anywhere else.
Oddly, repeating the sound-bites issued by "law and order" politicians does not magically persuade those of us who live outside of the conservative talk radio bubble.
See, I was going to respond to your good point in a thoughtful manner, except you had to follow up with a personal attack. This is why people with different political views can't have reasoned discussion.
It's an expensive to question to answer whether they are worth a second shot at this point.
My money is on no, the brand is tarnished, but some day the idea seems like it will resurface, and when it does whoever shows some more evidence of real technology will be quickly funded.
But was it a good idea? There seems to be serious questions as to whether you can collect just a drop of blood and get accurate test results in the presence of tissue and extracellular fluid.
I've seen a lot of people say that, and I believe them. This idea just occurred to me though... what if you use a gentle vacuum to pull more blood out of the pinprick? I get the impression that you need a lot more volume to even out the variations, but if you collected 5x more, maybe there are a few more tests you could do.
The entire point was to not draw much blood. Even trying to solve the problem by drawing more blood would be a tacit admission of failure and a huge signaling risk.
For Theano sure, but maybe for someone else it could be worth a try. I think the draw was less how much blood needed to be drawn and more how invasive the needle is. You can always hide the blood from view if necessary.
Holmes is, as I understand, not only CEO but also the majority shareholder and holds a class of stock with disproportional voting rights on top of that; so, but for a few layers of legal fiction, Theranos is Holmes.
>"In addition to making frequent media and conference appearances, she hired Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris to film videos of herself and others for Theranos’s website."
the Fog of War was great. What struck me the most was that the interviewer seemed to be shouting across the room. McNamara didn't seem all that bothered either. Also, none of those sycophantic reaction shots of the interviewer benignly nodding, or incredulously furrowing their brow. I wish more journalists would use this system (I didn't know it had a name, thanks for the link).
I really would give anything to see this show become a reality. You're a fantastic writer, your stuff on Medium is superb. If there was a way to invest in a pilot I would hand over as much as I could.
>We accept full responsibility for the issues at our laboratory in Newark, California, and have already worked to undertake comprehensive remedial actions,” including, it added, shutting down that lab, adding new medical experts and lab staff
I wonder what kind of medical expert would risk their reputation to go work for Theranos at this point? From where I sit there's no amount they could pay me that would be worth risking my professional reputation.
My favorite anecdote from this excellent piece, where Ms. Holmes is supposed to be presenting a slide deck of clinical results proving the effectiveness of Theranos' technology to employees, is re: NASA.
> Ms. Holmes has told employees that she plans on rehearsing her AACC presentation with them several times before the conference. When asked by an employee if the June presentation was the first of these rehearsals, she said no.
> Since most of the data from the new studies wasn’t in yet, the preliminary slide deck she showed focused instead on a timeline of the company’s 13-year history, according to the attendee.
> As employees listened in silence, she showed slides about the several generations of blood-reading devices Theranos has developed and past partnerships it has had with pharmaceutical companies, the person said.
> One slide featured the NASA logo, which struck some employees as odd because no relationship they knew of had developed following a demonstration Theranos had made of its device to representatives of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration several years ago. A spokesman for NASA said he didn’t know what relationship, if any, the agency has with Theranos.
They did a presentation = there probably was letter of intend = cooperation, boom logo lands on the website. This is standard trick of scams promising product real soon
Every article about Theranos seems to end in criticism of Holmes, but if the apparent situation is true – that the technology just doesn't really work – it seems her actions are pretty much to be expected. Most of what she has done would be to buy more time to try and figure out the technology (which makes sense), and to try to save some face, which is understandable.
Theranos needs to show the scientific community that blood oozing from an open wound (a finger prick), contaminated by tissues and surface bacteria, is clinically comparable to blood extracted directly from a vein. They also need to prove that analyzing a diluted, contaminated blood sample with the Siemens instrument produces an accurate result.
Perhaps Theranos hasn't published any research on the scientific foundations of their technology because they have nothing of value to show us.
This is the dirty secret that nobody here wants to admit: the entire startup system that so many here benefit from incentivizes digging yourself deeper. Folks want to blame Elizabeth Holmes for taking seriously all the startup mantras. "Shoot for the moon" and "Fake it until you make it" and "Startups are about people, not ____" and "Use your resources".
Sure, startups are supposed to "fail fast" too, but whenever a startup actually voluntarily returns money to investors early it's the talk of the town. Nobody ever expected that from a startup with as much capital as Theranos got.
Serious question - with so much bad press about the way their company is doing things (mostly unethical), why haven't their work force collapsed? I would imagine most of their engineers, scientist etc would be leaving the company every day.
Sure, but the real talent at the company surely wouldn't have much trouble finding work somewhere else, especially given the amount of stories out there saying that they've been kept in the dark the whole time. The question is why would these people stay on this sinking ship
It's hard to say without at least having knowledge of the industry as it's naive to expect that it's the same job market as with the programmers.
While it all looks ridiculous from the outside (and media makes it easy to see Theranos as a bunch of idiots), maybe some smart people inside think that they still can pull it off? That maybe the odds of success are large enough, even still low in absolute terms, to take the risk to hit the jackpot?
Or maybe simply it's not that easy to find a new job in such a niche area.
OK, i get that the CEO was an inexperienced kid (at best), or a deluded megalomaniac-egomaniac person who couldn't even finish college , yet thought that by following the 10000 hour rule and wearing turtlenecks will turn her to the next Napoleon bonaparte (at worst).
What about the other employees/investors/board members? Are they hiding, or prefer to kill the sacrificial lamb instead?
can we stop and ask what the hell does that tell us about the nature of employment?
The labor force does not consist of perfectly-informed or perfectly-rational actors. The system is incentivized to keep it that way, and to make us think this isn't already an open-secret.
We already know about the nature of employment. The interesting question are: what should change? And which mechanisms that should be used to facilitate that change?
138 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadThe answer seems obvious - the industry needs an unlimited Spotify model that has the vast majority of content providers, and then pays out to the content providers by total minutes read. Why this hasn't happened yet is very interesting to me.
The existing model for journalism seems to be similiar to if there was a Spotify type service for each record label - and you had to subscribe to 10 labels to listen to the music you wanted to listen to. This model made sense when there was a marginal cost (printing and delivering) - but that cost is basically gone for online readers.
I love good journalism from the WSJ, NYTimes, WashPost, and many others. But no way am I going to subscribe to all of them - even though I want all of the content. Micropayments seem like way too much friction, and a decision (is this article worth it?) that is such a pain for consumers. Why can't they switch to the Spotify model?
I used to subscribe back about 15 years ago when they first started charging. But I don't subscribe any more.
The problem is the bait-and-switch. The intro price eventually goes away. Right now a 1 yr subscription, digital only, is $174. But right next to it on the website there's a bubble that says "over 50% off". So the non-discounted price is $350/yr? More?
I get tired of shit like that. Charge me $50/yr and I'll pay. Keep jacking up my price and make me scrounge for discounts and I'll pass. Homie don't play dat!
Edit: for the future, you can just type "archive.is/" infront of the url.
I specifically avoided using a WSJ link on a story that made it to the front page last week because of the paywall, and it was changed to the WSJ link by HN admins because of the "original source" policy. I wasn't particularly thrilled with this because I don't want to encourage paywalls, but apparently they are going to be a part of HN for the foreseeable future. So get familiar with the "web" link - you'll be using it a lot.
1. Google the title
2. Select the result directly from Google News
3. Right click on the article link, copies the link, put it in the browser. In the end, the link looks like this:
http://news.google.be/news/url?sr=1&sa=t&ct2=us%2F0_0_s_0_0_...
and if you really can't see it:
https://bpaste.net/raw/0865ee15318e
For WSJ I open a clean browser (empty cache, no cookies, no nothing) then hit the "web" link.
This is her priority right now?? For a while it has been clear she is more interested in self aggrandizement than ensuring her technology actually works.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/9/11896534/jennifer-lawrence-...
The board will be very happy to find a scape-goat and get out with their own hides in one piece, and they're all past masters at playing that game.
You cannot make this shit up. How full of herself can she possibly get? The Adam McKay movie is going to be particularly fantastic if there are more examples like this.
Steve Jobs drove himself to work. According to Fortune, in 2013 HP spent $1700 on security for Meg Whitman and Amazon spent $1.6M on Jeff Bezos [1]. It's really all over the map. And presumably the costs go up if the company is exposed in scandal and investors are unhappy with the CEO or they begin to receive threats.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/01/07/ceo-security-jeff-bezos/
He had at least one armed guard at his house driveway entrance 24/7. I suspect he had at least one other somewhere. But he drove himself to work in a pretty regular car and didn't have guards anywhere but his home that I can tell. We worked in a big building that had cops on the first floor during business hours, so I guess that was covered too.
This guy is very private though, and you wouldn't know he was a billionaire unless you worked with him. There's barely any information on him if you Google him.
I'd say that a big security detail is the most defensible decision she's made so far...
I half-wonder if there's some government angle to Theranos that hasn't been quite uncovered yet.
> Holmes worked in the field with USAID missions in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Egypt, Yemen, Ghana, Haiti, Liberia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
> Holmes served in the U.S. Army, Second Lieutenant, Civil Affairs, receiving the U.S. Army Soldier’s Medal for Heroism.
thinking as a Russian, i can see how that can be a channeling of [investors'] money to the CIA friends [of the father, of the board members, etc...]. You know a typical cost+ [a lot of '+'s] contract or something like it...
Which one of those things is better for her career, do you think?
"In addition to making frequent media and conference appearances, she hired Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris to film videos of herself and others for Theranos’s website."
It's interesting that she contacted a producer of 'The Jinx', given that the series was ultimately a vehicle for Robert Durst, a wealthy individual long suspected of multiple murders, to publicly confess to his crimes. I wonder if she's perhaps planning a similar confessional documentary, in the hopes of salvaging some of her reputation.
Obviously this saga has thus far been negative for many of those involved - but I'm selfishly enjoying following the story. I'm curious to see how this ends. Theranos has hired some very good attorneys and I assume Walgreens and the consumer class actions will be interesting cases.
One question: If Theranos needs to protect itself from a criminal / civil SEC investigation, do the Theranos executives get to use investor funds to defend themselves? If so, who does that help?
Is this investor money being used to defend against a suit about defrauding investors?
>Ms. Holmes maintains a heavy security detail. Men with earpieces escort her wherever she goes outside the Palo Alto headquarters. Their code name for her is “Eagle 1,” current and former employees say.
I'd also like to point out that the WSJ is being quite honorable here in going after Theranos so hard. A ton of the board members are from the Hoover Institution, which has close ties with the Journal. They're making a lot of their own people look bad. And it honestly is pitiful that they sat on this board of a company that they clearly knew absolutely nothing about, beyond Ms. Holme's deceptive pitches.
How come when I systematically violate federal law regulators seem less willing to work with me to address these failures? Companies are not that big and mystifying. They are just made up of people and should be held accountable. Elizabeth committed felonies and some people almost certainly died as a result.
Corrupted capitalism at its best!
Absolutely you won't see her in jail, ever.
Come to live in America for few years.. watch some politics you will learn how they do it.
Sending people to prison for crimes they commit while being executives - imagine prison overcrowding if US do the same as Iceland - the country of 300K sent 29 bankers to prison as result of 2008 crisis. US is 1000 times bigger.
Why bother having a justice system in the first place? Hell, why bother having a society at all...
The sad answer is simply that prisons are a kind of security theatre. For that theatre to work, you have to appear to be imprisoning people that voters emotionally identify as threats,
Locking up street criminals, people of colour, and so forth fits in a world where the media and ruling politicians demonize them at every turn.
Locking up business executives doesn’t.
Oddly, repeating the sound-bites issued by "law and order" politicians does not magically persuade those of us who live outside of the conservative talk radio bubble.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juhATwufdbc
Maybe replace the CEO or something. The core idea of the technology still seems like a good one. It just needs rigorous testing and consent.
It's an expensive to question to answer whether they are worth a second shot at this point.
My money is on no, the brand is tarnished, but some day the idea seems like it will resurface, and when it does whoever shows some more evidence of real technology will be quickly funded.
Holmes is, as I understand, not only CEO but also the majority shareholder and holds a class of stock with disproportional voting rights on top of that; so, but for a few layers of legal fiction, Theranos is Holmes.
I had to look this up:
https://www.theranos.com/news/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2ZlOSdKjqY
He made her eyes looks like a weirdo on cocaine and steroids.... surprisingly it brought memories of this dude:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74KOFZYOWM
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-wea...
http://www.pricks.com
I wonder what kind of medical expert would risk their reputation to go work for Theranos at this point? From where I sit there's no amount they could pay me that would be worth risking my professional reputation.
> Ms. Holmes has told employees that she plans on rehearsing her AACC presentation with them several times before the conference. When asked by an employee if the June presentation was the first of these rehearsals, she said no.
> Since most of the data from the new studies wasn’t in yet, the preliminary slide deck she showed focused instead on a timeline of the company’s 13-year history, according to the attendee.
> As employees listened in silence, she showed slides about the several generations of blood-reading devices Theranos has developed and past partnerships it has had with pharmaceutical companies, the person said.
> One slide featured the NASA logo, which struck some employees as odd because no relationship they knew of had developed following a demonstration Theranos had made of its device to representatives of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration several years ago. A spokesman for NASA said he didn’t know what relationship, if any, the agency has with Theranos.
Perhaps Theranos hasn't published any research on the scientific foundations of their technology because they have nothing of value to show us.
Sure, startups are supposed to "fail fast" too, but whenever a startup actually voluntarily returns money to investors early it's the talk of the town. Nobody ever expected that from a startup with as much capital as Theranos got.
While it all looks ridiculous from the outside (and media makes it easy to see Theranos as a bunch of idiots), maybe some smart people inside think that they still can pull it off? That maybe the odds of success are large enough, even still low in absolute terms, to take the risk to hit the jackpot?
Or maybe simply it's not that easy to find a new job in such a niche area.
Do you want fries with that?
What about the other employees/investors/board members? Are they hiding, or prefer to kill the sacrificial lamb instead?
Maybe the extreme, cult-like nature of Theranos is going to be the next story to drop. Or maybe their tech will actually work. Who knows.
- that an entire industry has been doing it wrong
- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup
- that once you have enough success you can just rewrite the laws that were slowing you down
- that no one knows what they're doing anyway, major projects are 100% guesswork, and you should just "fake it till you make it"
- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice
- that you can outsmart an industry before even passing or placing out of sophomore level classes
- that any self-doubt must be Impostor Syndrome, and so it's not worth your time to even check if that doubt has a factual basis
Well, I mean, of course, besides the HN comment section.
can we stop and ask what the hell does that tell us about the nature of employment?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOanjl2g_14
"i was astonished by what they did there"
The labor force does not consist of perfectly-informed or perfectly-rational actors. The system is incentivized to keep it that way, and to make us think this isn't already an open-secret.
We already know about the nature of employment. The interesting question are: what should change? And which mechanisms that should be used to facilitate that change?