"Holmes — who dropped out of Stanford University at 19 to found Theranos — and Balwani face maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and a $2.75 million fine, plus possible restitution, the Department of Justice has said.
Members of her legal team in the criminal case did not respond to questions about whether Holmes has been paying them."
Civil case lawyers not being paid. Criminal lawyers may be getting paid. Priorities.
Scumbags never change. Did her attorneys honestly think Holmes would balk at stiffing them when she already proved willing and able to shaft Theranos' investors and employees?
The outcome is what matters in this case, far more than scruples. Presuming she wants to minimise her penalty, she will pay whatever it costs to make that happen.
If she's not paying, it must surely be because she's broke, rather than out of some perverse thrill of screwing people over and also getting a more severe penalty.
> If she's not paying, it must surely be because she's broke, rather than out of some perverse thrill of screwing people over and also getting a more severe penalty.
Precisely. The "rational" time to screw the lawyers is once the trial is over, not before.
* Not actually rational because life is a multi-round game.
What happens if the attorneys quit, and Holmes can't afford more private lawyers? Would a public defender represent her? That'd be quite the case to pull, I'd imagine. On cases where full teams of lawyers and paralegals are needed, practically speaking, I'd be curious what sort of resources a public defender might be afforded.
Public defenders don't represent defendants in civil cases. If Ms. Holmes can no longer afford an attorney then she'll have to appear pro se (or find pro bono representation).
Perhaps it is time that we permanently retire the misguided Silicon Valley maxim "fake it till you make it". And along with that, maybe revisit the wisdom of others such as "fail fast".
I’m not sure, I think “fail fast” could have benefited Theranos if they had seen the early failure of their machines and iterated on them rather than attempted to cover up the fact that they didn’t work.
What's wrong with "fail fast"? An honest Theranos that failed far sooner would've done little harm. "Fail fast" is about trying new things quickly and, here's the key, getting out when they start looking bad.
Totally agree - Theranos went on for something like a decade without any evidence they had made any sort of process breakthrough or innovation. The whole company was built on lies and bullshit. The co-founder dude who put up the initial money made that money by speculating on the dot com boom of 1999/2000 and getting out before it bust.
I don't know but people have made that saying with probably one data point and people like us want some one shot solution to every problem we have in life and that's why such quotes gather momentum. In reality these do not have any substance at all. You fail fast or fail slow, each have its advantages and disadvantages, sometimes severe, I wouldn't want to hurry and fail in my nuclear energy startup. So please take everything with huge grain of salt when it comes to preaching from the (confirmation) biased peoples.
Nothing inherently. Except that most great discoveries/inventions were made by people who were convinced about the fundamental validity of their idea and persevered over many iterations (rather than pivoting). Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments. To me, fail-fast is a very VC-centric philosophy. It's perfectly valid if your end goal is return on investment. But if your goal is to "build something", perseverance is generally a better strategy.
If your goal as a society or whatever is to "build something" having many members who persevere is better. But on an individual basis, it usually isn't, because you'll probably fail. There's a tension between individual rationality and group rationality.
> Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments.
But he did try a lot of different filament materials. It would've been really dumb to think he was going to somehow get cotton or whatever wrong material correct if he just stuck with it. Instead he had procedures and a framework to try a lot of candidates and iterate quickly.
I get this argument might not be exactly fair because I can twist it to nearly anything. But that's how maxims like "fail fast" or "haste makes waste" or "a stitch in time..." works. They still have value
The problem with "Fail fast" as with many of these slogans is that people don't mean them. You can trust me, because my ethos is fail fast, so you know that this project must be good because I wouldn't be working on it if it weren't. It's a virtue signal. You could easily reframe "Fail Fast" as "Give up easily"- and no one thinks that's a really good thing. Similarly "Move fast and break things" could easily be restated as "Don't think about the consequences of your actions".
These are not actually good strategies, they're virtue signals that founders use to tell investors that we've got the "Silicon Valley" ethos that bought you Facebook/Google/etc.
Most people don't succeed, so in trying to replicate success, the key must be something non-obvious and counter-intuitive.
So people are always going to look for possibilities that are superficially and obviously terrible approaches, but which look like they might be the secret of success if you squint the right way.
It's not merely that these particular slogans are bad and should be eliminated, it's that the nature of the game leads people to look for and invent such things, and if we all agreed not to ever say these things again, new ones would arise. I don't think there is a general solution.
Imagine those numbers for any other thing. We'd have the military out on the streets to stop the slaughter, the HQs of those evil forces raided, their finances cutt of and their 'leaders' brought to a court of justice facing multiple life sentences.
It's one thing to "fake it till you make it" with some silly web app. It's another thing entirely when you're taking a ton of investor's money to develop a product that impacts people's health (and then you lie to everyone about the fact that it has no chance of working).
Theranos was a supposed Silicon Valley "darling" that couldn't actually convince any Silicon Valley VC firms to invest in it. It was given its credibility and lofty valuation by Betsy DeVos, The Waltons, Rupert Murdoch, The Cox Family, Carlos Slim, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis and more.
I'd personally call that a Silicon Valley success story.
> couldn't actually convince any Silicon Valley VC firms to invest in it
There were three in fact.
Tim Draper invested the first money into Theranos due to a family connection to Holmes. His firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, put early money into them. ATA Ventures and Tako Ventures (Larry Ellison) also invested into them.
The culture of "fake it till you make it" is sustained by the inability to tell real from fake; scammers are sustained by those who believe. Bad politicians are sustained by "bad" voters. Bad business practices are sustained by undiscerning customers. Advertising is sustained by people who modify purchasing behavior based on ads.
IMO, it boils down to greed and stupid-ish money. VC in itself is inherently risky business, and everyone involved know that it's a 1 in every XX funded startup success story.
Because you have wildly successful companies like FANG, investors get all crazy and irrational when they see startups with the momentum and PR like Theranos had. Even if they're tech or scientific literate, they may suspend their disbelief, just in case the startup is a financial hit.
I have little sympathy for investors that decide to invest in things thy don't know about, but eve less for investors that knowingly invest in unsound tech, just for a big IPO payout - but then cry fraud when it all falls apart.
The "fake it till you make it" image is unfortunately needed to get the big bucks. In order to get funded, you need to act as if you're going to change the world, and convince investors that your product is going to be one of the leading, if not _the_ leading products in the market - doesn't mater if your startup is legit or bogus.
This culture unfortunately makes it easy for fraudsters to blend in - but they're just playing the game as designed.
It boils down to investors wanting 100x - 1000x returns on relatively small investments. And you don't get that kinds of returns unless the company / startup is of national or global size. To tackle and grow something to that size, you need to convince someone that you're capable of doing so.
No-one invests in people that appear to be doubting or lacking confidence. They root for young "super genius" founders that tick off all the right boxes
Check the screenshot. That’s the user experience when I clicked this link.
But beyond the UX, and the stupidity of saying “private browsing is reserved for our logged in users”, think of the hypocrisy here: they want us to support freedom of the press and anonymous sources but don’t allow us to read anonymously.
The New York Times does the same thing now, too. A scary dark pattern. I wish Incognito mode was less detectable, though I’m not exactly sure how that would work.
Qubes OS and running the browser in a disposable VM works.
It should be possible to set up a lighter container with a browser whose data is completely wiped after the session competes for people who don't need or don't want to go all the way to use Qubes OS as their primate system.
Surely someone must have built this already? If not, it would be an interesting project.
Qubes OS is excellent for things like that, but not really something most people are willing to use. I love Qubes OS; especially being able to have a disposable Windows 7 template VM I can game with that has a PCI passthrough for my spare graphics card. Though, it's a bit heavy for my daily driver laptop.
Also, re: your browser idea - checkout the sibling comment to yours on using Chrome with a temporary data directory.
> they want us to support freedom of the press and anonymous sources but don’t allow us to read anonymously.
It's not that they don't want people to read anonymously, it's that they don't want people to read without paying. If there were an easy and anonymous way to pay for reading publications like the NYTimes, I'd bet the NYT would support it.
Okay, okay ... I know NYTimes is a big corporation, and like any other, they love sucking up as much data they can about their users, so they probably won't do this. However, without an easy and anonymous payment system, NYTimes still has moral cover for their behavior. The bottom line is that people should pay for what they read and providers should not require more than that. There's plenty of technology that can handle this relationship, it's just that most people don't.
It can unfairly reflect poorly on their client and bias the jury. In a case like this it should pretty much be a rubber stamp process from what I've read.
IIRC, when some of DOJs lawyers wanted out of defending the border detention camp "no toothbrush required" cases, it's also because it's a PITA for the Court to ramp up a new legal team in the middle of a massive case
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News and stop using this site for political and ideological battle? You've unfortunately done quite a bit of both, and we ban accounts that do them repeatedly. The reason is that they both go against intellectual curiosity, which is the purpose of this site.
Meantime the number 3 article on the home page is a NYT Op Ed using charts with non linear axes to make charts look scary to push their predetermined left leaning narrative.
69 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadMembers of her legal team in the criminal case did not respond to questions about whether Holmes has been paying them."
Civil case lawyers not being paid. Criminal lawyers may be getting paid. Priorities.
Occam's razor compels us to presume she's just broke.
If she's not paying, it must surely be because she's broke, rather than out of some perverse thrill of screwing people over and also getting a more severe penalty.
Precisely. The "rational" time to screw the lawyers is once the trial is over, not before.
* Not actually rational because life is a multi-round game.
But he did try a lot of different filament materials. It would've been really dumb to think he was going to somehow get cotton or whatever wrong material correct if he just stuck with it. Instead he had procedures and a framework to try a lot of candidates and iterate quickly.
I get this argument might not be exactly fair because I can twist it to nearly anything. But that's how maxims like "fail fast" or "haste makes waste" or "a stitch in time..." works. They still have value
These are not actually good strategies, they're virtue signals that founders use to tell investors that we've got the "Silicon Valley" ethos that bought you Facebook/Google/etc.
So people are always going to look for possibilities that are superficially and obviously terrible approaches, but which look like they might be the secret of success if you squint the right way.
It's not merely that these particular slogans are bad and should be eliminated, it's that the nature of the game leads people to look for and invent such things, and if we all agreed not to ever say these things again, new ones would arise. I don't think there is a general solution.
People still laud Uber for illegal behaviour.
Maybe we should retire driving? 40,000 dead every single year in the USA, and over 2 million injured or disabled. According to your logic?
I wish this made the headlines more. But it doesn't because it isn't new, exciting or controversial :(
Maybe it needs a better name, like HeartBleed?
Also "fake it till you make it" wouldn't work very well for driving either.
So yeah. Let's reduce driving. Good call.
I'd personally call that a Silicon Valley success story.
There were three in fact.
Tim Draper invested the first money into Theranos due to a family connection to Holmes. His firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, put early money into them. ATA Ventures and Tako Ventures (Larry Ellison) also invested into them.
Because you have wildly successful companies like FANG, investors get all crazy and irrational when they see startups with the momentum and PR like Theranos had. Even if they're tech or scientific literate, they may suspend their disbelief, just in case the startup is a financial hit.
I have little sympathy for investors that decide to invest in things thy don't know about, but eve less for investors that knowingly invest in unsound tech, just for a big IPO payout - but then cry fraud when it all falls apart.
The "fake it till you make it" image is unfortunately needed to get the big bucks. In order to get funded, you need to act as if you're going to change the world, and convince investors that your product is going to be one of the leading, if not _the_ leading products in the market - doesn't mater if your startup is legit or bogus.
This culture unfortunately makes it easy for fraudsters to blend in - but they're just playing the game as designed.
It boils down to investors wanting 100x - 1000x returns on relatively small investments. And you don't get that kinds of returns unless the company / startup is of national or global size. To tackle and grow something to that size, you need to convince someone that you're capable of doing so.
No-one invests in people that appear to be doubting or lacking confidence. They root for young "super genius" founders that tick off all the right boxes
But beyond the UX, and the stupidity of saying “private browsing is reserved for our logged in users”, think of the hypocrisy here: they want us to support freedom of the press and anonymous sources but don’t allow us to read anonymously.
It should be possible to set up a lighter container with a browser whose data is completely wiped after the session competes for people who don't need or don't want to go all the way to use Qubes OS as their primate system.
Surely someone must have built this already? If not, it would be an interesting project.
Also, re: your browser idea - checkout the sibling comment to yours on using Chrome with a temporary data directory.
It's not that they don't want people to read anonymously, it's that they don't want people to read without paying. If there were an easy and anonymous way to pay for reading publications like the NYTimes, I'd bet the NYT would support it.
Okay, okay ... I know NYTimes is a big corporation, and like any other, they love sucking up as much data they can about their users, so they probably won't do this. However, without an easy and anonymous payment system, NYTimes still has moral cover for their behavior. The bottom line is that people should pay for what they read and providers should not require more than that. There's plenty of technology that can handle this relationship, it's just that most people don't.
The NYT could make ad money without the tracking, because content relevant ads have always been more productive and the NYT knows their content.
They just want the data.
Because they haven't been paid in a year and don't expect to ever see a dime, given the state of her finances.
Although I guess Elizabeth Holmes has swindled smarter people.
It's just unbelievable what happend with Theranos and how a person like Elizabeth Holmes could do what she did.
1. https://www.thedailybeast.com/michael-avenatti-suing-stormy-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The NYT Op Ed department is largely despised by leftists.