Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / incorrect due to the low sample size.
I can only imagine being one of the researchers or engineers there really believing you would be able to change the world and getting crushing news like this. It would really suck.
> Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / incorrect due to the low sample size.
Hardware is hard. Let's go shopping. :)
However, that doesn't have to be the end.
You can narrow the usage to something like "Use for routine visits to collect data quickly but not for diagnostic reasons". Being able to do a very fast test without drawing much blood for every time you visit the doctor would be useful information over time. There's also a "Hey, that number is a bit high. Let's pull a real amount of blood and see what's going on." I suspect that if you correlate the information over multiple tests it gets much more accurate very quickly.
In addition, I suspect that the engineers would have eventually worked out how to correlate things correctly and figured out how much blood was required for what level of certainty.
Finally, most people in the biotech sector understand that it's a "pump and dump" scam. You invest, wait for the company to get some good news, and sell to the next layer. Biotech often takes long timescales and different investors toss money in at different points.
However, what doomed the company was Elizabeth Holmes lying. I could make other comments, but, really, Theranos would still be fine if she had told the truth. People know that biotech always runs into problems. Always.
Your CEO is one of the people who must not lie (your CFO is the other). Your sales people can lie. Your marketing people can lie. Oddly, even your CTO can get away with some things, but normally the CTO is a shining beacon of truth compared to most people in a company. If your CEO always tells the truth, the CEO can say: "We've hit some snags, but the engineers think they can work around them" and people will believe because they want to believe.
But once your CEO is known as a liar, you are doomed.
However, I expect that Elizabeth Holmes will be back far too soon and will wreak havoc on an even larger scale. She is just Carly Fiorina writ 35 years later. She will fail upward because she is a not-unattractive blonde female with lots of rich family connections.
She's rich and will stay independently wealthy for the forseeable future due to this, however her name is heavily tarnished. Even if she does pull off the edison tech, she'll have a hard sell finding investors to the level she did for Theranos again.
>>But once your CEO is known as a liar, you are doomed.
I used to think this and then look who we elected. In reality, you just have to keep making up lies on top of lies and somehow things seem to work out for you. Just never admit fault and reflect all your bad qualities on your critics and there is a good chance that at least you will muddle the waters.
> However, I expect that Elizabeth Holmes will be back far too soon and will wreak havoc on an even larger scale.
A larger scale than raising $10b for vaporware? No way. She's the biggest business fraud story of the decade, and in the top 5 for the 21st century thus far. I can't imagine she'll ever raise another penny of VC, for Theranos or anything else. Nor will she have a future in politics - Fiorina may have been controversial and destroyed jobs but she did so in a way that conservatives could frame as being a "pro-business" success. Even if most politicians are fraudsters of one kind or another (and ironically Holmes's skill at fraud, deception, secrecy and doublespeak might predict her being a skilled politician), there's no path to politics for someone whose life story is already so publicly toxic.
What might suck more is trying to get another job with Theranos on your résumé, and having trouble because hiring managers suspect you might have been one of the employees who was involved in fraudulent research practices.
It sucks that the company probably has some decent IP that can change the world, but is (by my outside opinion) so top heavy business-wise that it'll just eventually end up locked away by competitors via some forced sale.
If I had to pivot a miniature lab that fails because of small sample size; I'd think of just making it invivo.
220 employees left, 155 in today's layoff, 340 cut in October. So, today there are only 30% of the employees who were there in October, or laying off 70% of the workforce.
I guess my main question here, is if they have been banned by the FDA from doing any testing at all for two years, what exactly is remaining of the business, and why haven't they been completely shuttered?
Bloomberg seems to indicate there isn't much left for any employee to do.
I worked on a project where in the same building a startup was going under. It was totally clear that there was no hope but they kept burning through their VC money instead of closing.
Why not? Give your employees a life boat and some time to move on. I know some people who were at Ride well after it was clearly not going to work out. They all had breathing room to find good fits at new companies. Sure it burned a bunch of cash, but it lowered the human cost of the failure.
This is a pretty naive viewpoint. In many small startups, the founders and employees are close friends and have long personal histories, not to mention futures together. Founders are typically not stupid, and won't burn bridges just to role-play a capitalist caricature.
At a company that size the founder and investors maybe care about the next one or two levels of management. The rest don't matter. They most likely don't even know people further down.
I think that is fair. When a startup is successful a VC gets paid on 100% of their investment. When a startup is unsuccessful, why should VCs be allowed to cut bait and recoup the remaining investment? VCs get to have their cake and eat it too enough as it is already.
Because they funded the thing and took on far more risk than anyone else? I'd want my money back to; I'm not in the business of paying out white collar welfare.
Nope, they took on less risk than anyone else involved. Money is fungible, and they've likely got a lot of it.
The people there, day after day, they gave their time. That's something we all only have a limited amount of, and that's something you'll never get back.
That's insane. You seriously believe that you took on more risk by accepting a cushy, salaried position, than someone who invested millions of dollars? Their net worth is none of your business. They are quite literally funding every paycheck you get.
No one is 'giving' their time; they're being paid for it. You're not doing anyone any favors. You're performing a task and getting compensated quite well to do so. Such an entitled perspective.
Most startups offer lower salaries and compensate in other ways. This is a risk. If you work at such a startup employees and founders likely take on more risk than your average VC because the VC can hedge their bets. Employees and founders have no way to do this.
Edit: I wouldn't necessarily say each individual employee takes on more risk than the VC. But I would definitely say that, on the whole, they do. A startup that "almost makes it" can be a life & opportunity cost sucking endeavor for employees, VCs don't have to worry about that as much because they have their fingers in a lot of pies.
Most well-funded large startups offer salaries close to market rate. Sure there is the risk that the equity can end up worth $0, but the salaries can easily be >$100,000. Even if theranos employees took a pay cut to work there (compared working at an established company), I am sure they derived extra value from the perks of working there and from working on a mission they believed in (or at least they thought they believed in...).
But net worth has everything to do with risk. A person worth $1 million putting up all $1 million is risking everything he has. A person worth $1 billion probably won't even notice if he loses $1 million. There's almost no risk to him if he loses that money.
It's a question of scope though. The parent to your post is trying to scope the risk to "the risk of losing $1 million", not "the risk of financial hardship." If you can both get on the same page with respect to this, then you won't be talking past each other.
The person you're replying to understands this. They demonstrated that they took the effort to understand the person they're replying to by including the smaller scope in their comments.
GGP is either incapable of comprehending the broader scope for whatever reason, or is deliberately limiting the scope to "win."
No, the entitled perspective here is that simply having money entitles you to the bulk of reward, and that a group of people who will not have negative consequences for a company going under is taking more risk than people who would be losing their income stream, and possibly their health coverage and home.
And damage to their careers, and of course the simple time lost on fraudulent ventures.
Imagine the young, newly-minted PhD looking to strike out in industry and kick-start their career with some real cool engineering. They saddle up with Theranos and sink several years of productive life into a technology that will never work--and that people at the top knew would never work. They'll move on, but at what cost? This is their life and career, not just a bit of cash.
Compare that to a VC losing their investment? That is insulting and wrong on every mark.
>That's insane. You seriously believe that you took on more risk by accepting a cushy, salaried position, than someone who invested millions of dollars? Their net worth is none of your business.
Monetary risk is all about the percentage of net worth at stake.
If I put $100 dollars on a startup I'm not taking a huge risk. And for VCs, their investment is often what $100 dollars are to me.
If it was a fair salary. A lot of places try to pay low and give shares for payout in the future. Many young and techie people go for that if they are enthusiastic about the idea.
At a fair market value -- except if it was an early stage startup it was discounted from market value, with subpar benefits, but with a "tonne" of (now worthless) equity.
It is in many ways personally more rewarding, but taking a job in a startup versus a well-established business is taking a risk, accepting subpar conditions today for a shot at a big prize later on.
Such a narrow definition of risk... Their money is the only risk invested?
What about employees who moved across the country, or who worked for two years of their lives here and lost the opportunity costs of working elsewhere, and now have nothing more than a failed company on their resume?
So, I assume the company paid for you to make that move, right? Yes, you took on some risk by moving cross country, but you likely did so because the work was interested and/or the compensation was worth it. Let's not pretend that you didn't get anything out of the deal.
So, it fails, as startups often do, and you find another job. During your time there you pocked over 200k + benefits. What a rough life. What did you lose exactly?
You think that the startup employee, who's placed a bet on their own personal value, doesn't deserve sympathy, but the VC, who gets to hedge their bets, does?
I didn't say that. I said the VC is putting more skin in the game. Sucks for both, but were paid quite well for what we do and can walk away whenever we like.
Is "were" supposed to be "we're"? If it is, who's "we"? Not all startups pay "quite well" and there are varying levels of risk employees take. Some are certainly more extreme than others.
I think skin in the game is proportional to net worth... as a percentage of net worth, I'd bet employees put more skin in the game.
If some unfortunate VC tied 100% of their assets in this, which was tied to 100% of some direct persons money, then that'd suck for sure. Not likely though.
>I didn't say that. I said the VC is putting more skin in the game.
No, they don't. They are putting more money in the game, but way less skin -- since with "skin" we usually refer to actual personal consequences (it doesn't get any more personal that our own literal skin).
Both parties, investors and employees, should get sympathy and remediation. Employees have been paid a salary all along, but should still get a proper severance if the company is shut down. Investors who gave Theranos >$300M in 2015 also have a right to get some of their investment back if the company is hopeless. The investors are shareholders in the company and the board and CEO need to consider their interests along with the employees' interests.
Hahahahaha! Oh boy, that piece of Ayn Rand junk propaganda never gets old.
Yeah, they took on so much "risk" compared to everyone else. I wonder what are they going to do when the investment fails. Are they gonna be able to get health insurance? Not default on mortgage payments? Justify holes in the resume timeline to potential employers? Put food on the table for the kids, and a roof above their heads? Send their kids to college? These are tough to do when you're "risking" so much.
Poor things, they live so close to the edge, it breaks my heart.
I don't buy that. Given that the VCs are not investing their own money, they have huge portfolios with many investments, and I'm investing something I can never get back: My time and energy, I'd say they're taking nowhere near the risk anyone else is.
IANAL but continuing to operate a failed enterprise with no intention, let alone hope, of actually turning it into a successful business sounds like fraud if you're doing it with other people's money.
I don't think it's necessarily so. I presume there's a goodwill benefit to giving employees a bit of rope to bridge to the next phase of their life. An employee that moves to another company in the VC network will feel better and perform better... Or if they seek funding for their own company the freedom to fail without worrying about egregious losd probably results in better performance too.
I'm not saying it's not a charitable thing to do, I'm saying that (it sounds to me like) it's fraud.
Just because something has good intentions behind it doesn't make it more or less illegal. It might help at your sentencing when you tell the judge you were thinking about your employees families and not just lining your own pockets but it doesn't making it less of a crime. Just like stealing a loaf of bread is still stealing even if you're destitute.
> continuing to operate a failed enterprise with no intention, let alone hope, of actually turning it into a successful business sounds like fraud if you're doing it with other people's money.
How is this not "heads I win, tails you lose"?
The investor exchanged $ for % of the company. At the time of the $ for % trade, the founder probably had every intention of succeeding beyond everyone's wildest dreams. The seller's intent was never fraudulent, and buyer's remorse isn't fraud.
More to the point, keeping the company in-tact for as long as possible in hope of an aqui-hire is a justifiable end-game for a company in failure mode. If the VC wanted control over the failure mode end-game, they should've written that into the "$ for %" contract.
PG even has an essay encouraging founders to adopt this mindset: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!"
If the founder legitimately believes that the company will go under and there's no chance of an aqui-hire or similar out, then maybe possibly it's fraud. But calling it fraud when a business fails and a founder makes a judgement call to "not stop typing"? Seems like "I get your money if you win, and sue you if you lose".
> Because the investor will not have 100% recovery rate.
Says who? At which point in time is it "obvious" that there's "no intention, let alone hope, of actually turning it into a successful business"?
If you and I judge that point in time to be different, does that constitute fraud on the part of the person who's being less conservative? What if that person the investor? Presumably the founder also owns part of the company...
Futhermore, even "unsuccessful" ventures can have a greater than 100% recovery rate from a given point in time. An aqui-hire that loses investor money isn't a "successful" businesses, but it can end up losing a lot less cash than a company that folds a month or two before the deal is cut.
What if you force my hand and we fold but leaked confidential documents from BigCorp. indicate that if we had waited three weeks my company would've been aqui-hired for 1500% of the value of the liquidated assets? Does that make you guilty of fraud? And if not, then why is it fraud when you turn the tables?
Basically, it's really difficult for me to imagine any scenario in which the facts and intentions of all actors are clear enough to trigger koolba's scenario. And even then, it's still possible for a failed business to make it over the 100% recovery rate at the point in time when the investor things the plug should be pulled.
Because it is their company. They own it. They can do whatever they want with THEIR investment, including firing the CEO and putting someone else in charge to give back their money.
Or, much more likely, they only own a part of it. Maybe even a minority of it.
> including firing the CEO
Maybe the can. And if they can, and they think that's the best course of action, then they should definitely do that. It's a must cleaner solution that waiting and then crying "fraud" over a difference of opinion on the future of the company.
Because the point of a business is the make a return on an investment. If it's clear that a return is not possible then the business serves no purpose and should be shut down in an orderly manner including appropriate severance for employees.
The inherent privilege of capital. Not a legal export, but I'd imagine its hard to regulate companies that are going under, since there won't soon be anything left to sue.
They don't really have any. It's likely that they're focusing their last bits of investor money back onto their hardware testing platforms, expecting to go back to market in two years and then ramp staffing back up as needed.
I've worked at a couple startups where the company was more-than-done out of business and we spent our last 6-12 months negotiating with creditors and trying to get rid of hardware, software, and various worthless IP.
But that takes a tiny skeleton crew, so maybe there's that.
Or, perhaps you're right and they're going to see if they can wait out the 2 year ban. Most likely they will change the name of the company to hide the bad reputation and then re-release the hardware testing platforms.
1 - they think they will need more than 2 years to be in a stage where they run tests. And I'd bet they can test in the meantime, just not do human diagnostic tests, ie no treatment decisions based on the test.
2 - they will sell the lab devices and so won't do any testing themselves
They were debarred by CMS, not FDA, since CMS regulates clinical labs (mostly). They can still theoretically sell medical devices that are cleared/approved by FDA.
They weren't banned by FDA, they were banned by CMS. And the ban was on conducting tests only. They're still allowed to develop test equipment to sell to other companies that will actually perform the tests. But the scrutiny they will get from FDA let alone any potential customer will be intense. No one in the diagnostics world will trust anything Holmes makes. Theranos is a dead company walking, provided Holmes remains in charge.
She reminds me so much of Donald Trump, especially Trump University. With all of her sleazy explanations, deflections, and breezy ability to lie. I'm surprised that she was able to carry the company this far. It will be interesting to see how much further the company can continue.
If you watch that with no bias for or against Clinton, it's hard to see that as anything other than a series of lies that she kept repeating well after she was called out on them.
This is way off topic at this point, but I would say lying to make yourself look better (and it was a lie) is fundamentally different from defrauding people with a product that doesn't work/doesn't exist.
They're both bad, but they're not directly comparable.
That's fair, though you could also say that a politician's product is their persona and ability to lead. Making up stuff about your past to appeal to people is defrauding them with something that doesn't work/exist as advertised.
It also makes one wonder if someone is willing to lie about something so small and easily debunked, what else have they lied about?
They're on the same spectrum, no doubt. One is more indirect and (usually) smaller, though if we found out a politician had lied about very serious credentials it could indeed cause a lot of harm.
That one lie, which she apologized for, doesn't compare to the constant lying that Trump engages in. And Trump almost never apologizes or admits that he lies. There is not much equivalence in my mind between the lying that Hillary Clinton or even most other politicians make when compared to Trump. That's how I see Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos. I'm just astounded by Holmes' and Trump's audacity to constantly spout such shameless and easily disproven lies. They are pathological liars. I can't say that about too many other people, and Hillary Clinton doesn't belong in the same class as Trump.
Whether the email issue mattered or not, she also lied repeatedly about that: about the number of emails, the number of devices, etc.
I can take this further afield and show you lie after recorded lie of hers, but it's not much use. I suspect they and many politicians are pathological liars, some just have more tact.
EDIT: due to downvotes I'll respond to you here
Uh, Trump's a liar, obviously. You can start with his false memories about of 9/11 and continue onward. He's an obvious pathological liar to me, but to so is Clinton. The only way people see otherwise is due to bias.
The fact that criticism of an obviously horrible candidate leads people to assume you support another horrible politician is to me a sign of how bad politics are these days (I guess they have always been this way, we're just aware of the happenings as they happen).
I don't think you can measure levels of dishonesty. When it is known, there is true and false and nothing in between. Making excuses for the lies of politicians is a sure race to the bottom.
It's strange to me to see Hillary Clinton compared to Trump as equivalent in terms of honesty. I don't buy that. In fact, I would rate Trump and people like Elizabeth Holmes as being far more dishonest than your everyday politician or average person. I tend to think of them as being pathological liars, and I don't put Clinton or most other politicians in the same league as Trump. Maybe I shouldn't have used Trump as an example, even though I think he's the clearest example today, because of the incredibly divisive and polarizing elections we've experienced. Some people can't seem to see or think straight when it comes to Trump or Clinton.
I'm sure you can show me Clinton's lies, but I have to wonder if you can do the same with Trump. And I have to wonder if you even think Trump is more honest than Clinton.
Right, there are literally dozens of examples of Trump in the last twelve months where he has said something, and not something vague, but specific, concrete statements, recorded on video, and in some cases not 24 hours later saying "I didn't say that. That's a lie. I never said that."
I've always imagined that they thought they were close and it made a good story (and is a great product idea) so the company just kept growing and getting investment.
But at some point it became clear that it didn't work and either it was an 'emperor's new clothes' situation and they bought their own hype, hubris that they would come through before they were caught, or they were just desperately putting on a facade hoping that they would get it fixed before it all fell apart.
At this point I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever find out exactly which of those situations applied.
I'm assuming they didn't set out to defraud people or cause problems, they ended up in over their heads.
How far back does the practice of renaming something after an infamous debacle go? If it's smoking ruins you want, then i can recommend Windscale, which was renamed to Sellafield not long after this little bit of excitement in 1957:
Why is anyone even still sticking around voluntarily? There is no chance of a lucrative exit and the company will probably die off on its own within 1-2 years.
103 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can only imagine being one of the researchers or engineers there really believing you would be able to change the world and getting crushing news like this. It would really suck.
Hardware is hard. Let's go shopping. :)
However, that doesn't have to be the end.
You can narrow the usage to something like "Use for routine visits to collect data quickly but not for diagnostic reasons". Being able to do a very fast test without drawing much blood for every time you visit the doctor would be useful information over time. There's also a "Hey, that number is a bit high. Let's pull a real amount of blood and see what's going on." I suspect that if you correlate the information over multiple tests it gets much more accurate very quickly.
In addition, I suspect that the engineers would have eventually worked out how to correlate things correctly and figured out how much blood was required for what level of certainty.
Finally, most people in the biotech sector understand that it's a "pump and dump" scam. You invest, wait for the company to get some good news, and sell to the next layer. Biotech often takes long timescales and different investors toss money in at different points.
However, what doomed the company was Elizabeth Holmes lying. I could make other comments, but, really, Theranos would still be fine if she had told the truth. People know that biotech always runs into problems. Always.
Your CEO is one of the people who must not lie (your CFO is the other). Your sales people can lie. Your marketing people can lie. Oddly, even your CTO can get away with some things, but normally the CTO is a shining beacon of truth compared to most people in a company. If your CEO always tells the truth, the CEO can say: "We've hit some snags, but the engineers think they can work around them" and people will believe because they want to believe.
But once your CEO is known as a liar, you are doomed.
However, I expect that Elizabeth Holmes will be back far too soon and will wreak havoc on an even larger scale. She is just Carly Fiorina writ 35 years later. She will fail upward because she is a not-unattractive blonde female with lots of rich family connections.
I used to think this and then look who we elected. In reality, you just have to keep making up lies on top of lies and somehow things seem to work out for you. Just never admit fault and reflect all your bad qualities on your critics and there is a good chance that at least you will muddle the waters.
A larger scale than raising $10b for vaporware? No way. She's the biggest business fraud story of the decade, and in the top 5 for the 21st century thus far. I can't imagine she'll ever raise another penny of VC, for Theranos or anything else. Nor will she have a future in politics - Fiorina may have been controversial and destroyed jobs but she did so in a way that conservatives could frame as being a "pro-business" success. Even if most politicians are fraudsters of one kind or another (and ironically Holmes's skill at fraud, deception, secrecy and doublespeak might predict her being a skilled politician), there's no path to politics for someone whose life story is already so publicly toxic.
If I had to pivot a miniature lab that fails because of small sample size; I'd think of just making it invivo.
Bloomberg seems to indicate there isn't much left for any employee to do.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/theranos-...
The people there, day after day, they gave their time. That's something we all only have a limited amount of, and that's something you'll never get back.
No one is 'giving' their time; they're being paid for it. You're not doing anyone any favors. You're performing a task and getting compensated quite well to do so. Such an entitled perspective.
Edit: I wouldn't necessarily say each individual employee takes on more risk than the VC. But I would definitely say that, on the whole, they do. A startup that "almost makes it" can be a life & opportunity cost sucking endeavor for employees, VCs don't have to worry about that as much because they have their fingers in a lot of pies.
But net worth has everything to do with risk. A person worth $1 million putting up all $1 million is risking everything he has. A person worth $1 billion probably won't even notice if he loses $1 million. There's almost no risk to him if he loses that money.
GGP is either incapable of comprehending the broader scope for whatever reason, or is deliberately limiting the scope to "win."
Imagine the young, newly-minted PhD looking to strike out in industry and kick-start their career with some real cool engineering. They saddle up with Theranos and sink several years of productive life into a technology that will never work--and that people at the top knew would never work. They'll move on, but at what cost? This is their life and career, not just a bit of cash.
Compare that to a VC losing their investment? That is insulting and wrong on every mark.
Monetary risk is all about the percentage of net worth at stake.
If I put $100 dollars on a startup I'm not taking a huge risk. And for VCs, their investment is often what $100 dollars are to me.
It is in many ways personally more rewarding, but taking a job in a startup versus a well-established business is taking a risk, accepting subpar conditions today for a shot at a big prize later on.
The employees were/are highly paid and not assuming any real risk.
What about employees who moved across the country, or who worked for two years of their lives here and lost the opportunity costs of working elsewhere, and now have nothing more than a failed company on their resume?
So, it fails, as startups often do, and you find another job. During your time there you pocked over 200k + benefits. What a rough life. What did you lose exactly?
You think that the startup employee, who's placed a bet on their own personal value, doesn't deserve sympathy, but the VC, who gets to hedge their bets, does?
If some unfortunate VC tied 100% of their assets in this, which was tied to 100% of some direct persons money, then that'd suck for sure. Not likely though.
No, they don't. They are putting more money in the game, but way less skin -- since with "skin" we usually refer to actual personal consequences (it doesn't get any more personal that our own literal skin).
And aren't VCs well compensated as well? In many cases taking the bulk of reward despite not doing any of the work?
Hahahahaha! Oh boy, that piece of Ayn Rand junk propaganda never gets old.
Yeah, they took on so much "risk" compared to everyone else. I wonder what are they going to do when the investment fails. Are they gonna be able to get health insurance? Not default on mortgage payments? Justify holes in the resume timeline to potential employers? Put food on the table for the kids, and a roof above their heads? Send their kids to college? These are tough to do when you're "risking" so much.
Poor things, they live so close to the edge, it breaks my heart.
Just because something has good intentions behind it doesn't make it more or less illegal. It might help at your sentencing when you tell the judge you were thinking about your employees families and not just lining your own pockets but it doesn't making it less of a crime. Just like stealing a loaf of bread is still stealing even if you're destitute.
How is this not "heads I win, tails you lose"?
The investor exchanged $ for % of the company. At the time of the $ for % trade, the founder probably had every intention of succeeding beyond everyone's wildest dreams. The seller's intent was never fraudulent, and buyer's remorse isn't fraud.
More to the point, keeping the company in-tact for as long as possible in hope of an aqui-hire is a justifiable end-game for a company in failure mode. If the VC wanted control over the failure mode end-game, they should've written that into the "$ for %" contract.
PG even has an essay encouraging founders to adopt this mindset: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!"
If the founder legitimately believes that the company will go under and there's no chance of an aqui-hire or similar out, then maybe possibly it's fraud. But calling it fraud when a business fails and a founder makes a judgement call to "not stop typing"? Seems like "I get your money if you win, and sue you if you lose".
Because the investor will not have 100% recovery rate.
Says who? At which point in time is it "obvious" that there's "no intention, let alone hope, of actually turning it into a successful business"?
If you and I judge that point in time to be different, does that constitute fraud on the part of the person who's being less conservative? What if that person the investor? Presumably the founder also owns part of the company...
Futhermore, even "unsuccessful" ventures can have a greater than 100% recovery rate from a given point in time. An aqui-hire that loses investor money isn't a "successful" businesses, but it can end up losing a lot less cash than a company that folds a month or two before the deal is cut.
What if you force my hand and we fold but leaked confidential documents from BigCorp. indicate that if we had waited three weeks my company would've been aqui-hired for 1500% of the value of the liquidated assets? Does that make you guilty of fraud? And if not, then why is it fraud when you turn the tables?
Basically, it's really difficult for me to imagine any scenario in which the facts and intentions of all actors are clear enough to trigger koolba's scenario. And even then, it's still possible for a failed business to make it over the 100% recovery rate at the point in time when the investor things the plug should be pulled.
Or, much more likely, they only own a part of it. Maybe even a minority of it.
> including firing the CEO
Maybe the can. And if they can, and they think that's the best course of action, then they should definitely do that. It's a must cleaner solution that waiting and then crying "fraud" over a difference of opinion on the future of the company.
But that takes a tiny skeleton crew, so maybe there's that.
Or, perhaps you're right and they're going to see if they can wait out the 2 year ban. Most likely they will change the name of the company to hide the bad reputation and then re-release the hardware testing platforms.
2 - they will sell the lab devices and so won't do any testing themselves
I also can't believe anyone is willing to give them the time of day with a new product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BfNqhV5hg4
You asked.
If you watch that with no bias for or against Clinton, it's hard to see that as anything other than a series of lies that she kept repeating well after she was called out on them.
They're both bad, but they're not directly comparable.
It also makes one wonder if someone is willing to lie about something so small and easily debunked, what else have they lied about?
I can take this further afield and show you lie after recorded lie of hers, but it's not much use. I suspect they and many politicians are pathological liars, some just have more tact.
EDIT: due to downvotes I'll respond to you here
Uh, Trump's a liar, obviously. You can start with his false memories about of 9/11 and continue onward. He's an obvious pathological liar to me, but to so is Clinton. The only way people see otherwise is due to bias.
The fact that criticism of an obviously horrible candidate leads people to assume you support another horrible politician is to me a sign of how bad politics are these days (I guess they have always been this way, we're just aware of the happenings as they happen).
I don't think you can measure levels of dishonesty. When it is known, there is true and false and nothing in between. Making excuses for the lies of politicians is a sure race to the bottom.
I'm sure you can show me Clinton's lies, but I have to wonder if you can do the same with Trump. And I have to wonder if you even think Trump is more honest than Clinton.
But at some point it became clear that it didn't work and either it was an 'emperor's new clothes' situation and they bought their own hype, hubris that they would come through before they were caught, or they were just desperately putting on a facade hoping that they would get it fixed before it all fell apart.
At this point I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever find out exactly which of those situations applied.
I'm assuming they didn't set out to defraud people or cause problems, they ended up in over their heads.
In a fit of irony, multiple partners left the smoking ruins of AA to found a firm called, of all things, Accuracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/trump...