Elizabeth Holmes was supposed to be the grrl powered answer to Steve Jobs, black turtleneck and all. At the encouragement of a professor, she dropped out of Stanford University at 19 years old to continue the startup that she (wait for it…) founded in her dorm room. She opened offices in Palo Alto, garnered high profile board members, heavy hitting financial backers, Ted conference appearances and eager media cheer leading as the dollars rolled in and she became America’s youngest female billionaire.
Her stratospheric rise was a shot across the bow to the male dominated tech industry (the medical tech industry, at least) demonstrating that yes, women can do it too and you’d better be ready for us.
The revolutionary product at the core of Theranos (a company name beget from “therapy” and “diagnosis”) was a proprietary blood test method that only required drops of blood through a pin prick at the pharmacy versus big needles and vials full of blood, a doctors visit and a lab order. Results would be delivered within a few hours, versus days, be more affordable, less intimidating and accessible to the masses.
This was the disruptive answer to the $75 billion dollar a year market dominated by lab testing giants Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp.) A deal was struck with Walgreens to offer Theranos tests in select locations, with more on the way.
Then, right before the IPO, the balloon popped. In October, a series of reports emerged ranging from FDA allegations of uncleared medical devices to employee allegations that Theranos isn’t using the technology they claim to have. What happened?
Reality check: she quits school at 19 years old to run a medical technology startup in several areas where PhDs spend decades researching just one aspect of each, and we are supposed to accept the fact that she’s got it all figured out, just like that? Got it.
SocialMatter: “Jobs and Musk were proven innovators who found a new career phase and new pitch for their products. Holmes was an unknown quantity. Holmes’ firm was not proving itself through its work but had collected a lot of interested and interesting allies and investors. No one bothered to look behind the curtain. Elizabeth Holmes was just too perfect for the media to stop. Holmes could have been their Steve Jobs with breasts. She could have been their Sheryl Sandberg with actual tech credentials. instead, Holmes is just another mirage offered up by the media to disappear in the lens of reality.”
* Apparently, her top technical guy was some experienced scientist in the field, who was an early hire in the company and was responsible for actually getting the “revolutionary new technology” built while she was going around celebrity cocktail-parties as the PR person armed with her reality-distortion field.
According to the WSJ article, a couple of years ago that top technical guy left a note saying “It Just Doesn’t Work!” and committed suicide. Naturally, none of the venture-capital firms paid any attention to that minor detail, and continued pouring in their mega-oceans of new funding.
* October article in the WSJ:
“In 2005, Ms. Holmes hired Ian Gibbons, a British biochemist who had researched systems to handle and process tiny quantities of fluids. His collaboration with other Theranos scientists produced 23 patents, according to records filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Ms. Holmes is listed as a co-inventor on 19 of the patents.
The patents show how Ms. Holmes’s original idea morphed into the company’s business model. But progress was slow. Dr. Gibbons “told me nothing was working,” says his widow, Rochelle.
In May 2013, Dr. Gibbons committed suicide. Theranos’s Ms. King says the scientist “was frequently absent from work in the last years of his life, due to health and other problems.” Theranos disputes the claim that its technology was failing.
After Dr. Gibbons’s widow spoke to a Journal reporter, a lawyer representing Theranos sent her a letter threatening to sue her if she continued to make “false statements” about Ms. Holmes and disclose confidential information. Ms. Gibbons owns Theranos shares that she inherited from her husband.”
Geeze, this company is supposedly worth $9 billion!
* The problems of working with “nano” blood samples have been known for years (basically capillary sourced blood isn’t chemically the same as blood from a vein), but it’s a little counter intuitive to an engineering school drop-out like Betsy. Any competent Laboratory Medicine physician could have told them they were doomed years ago. Also the medical testing field is so regulated there’s no real money to be made.
* “Ok, who is this young wunderkind related to?”
Good blood, good bone old money folks. Fleischman’s Yeast money from way back. Her father works for the government in foreign aid and has also worked as a high ranking staffer in the energy industry. Her mother was a Congressional aid in defense and foreign affairs before starting a family. Not super important people themselves, but extremely respectable.
* I like to show this TED Talk parody to kids to hit home the ideas-are-like-belly buttons thing, and to take these Snake Oil Change Agents with a grain of salt.
* It reminds me of the MCI ads in the 1990′s where they claimed they had a great new video conferencing feature. It turns out the idea was invented by their marketing people, sold to to top brass as real, and left to the IT grunts to implement. When the IT grunts told them it wasn’t possible, the IT grunts were the ones responsible somehow.
* Assuming it will take a few years for the investigation and all the details to come to light and then another year or two for Aaron Sorkin to write a screenplay and get it produced, I’d say Jennifer Lawrence (then 30) will have matured into the role.
She will give very conflicted interviews during the press junket, trying to spin the whole affair in a feminist way. Hopefully Sorkin won’t try to pin it all on the suicided stale pale male who failed to make the astounding genius tech grrrl’s dream come true, but Jennifer Lawrence will probably try to.
I hope there’s a gratuitous Quaaludes scene, perhaps involving people jabbing themselves with lancets.
* So, basically, there are billions of dollars to be made from modern Americans aversion to a pin-prick.
May I suggest y’all go and see ‘The Revenant’ to remind yourselves of the way we used to be?
Somewhere, the ghost of Hugh Glass is grunting in disgust.
* There is ONLY ONE REAL reason this company and individual is talked about – and that is because she is a woman. She was made famous because she is a woman, if this was a white man nobody would be talking about it, the people judging her are the people that decided to make her famous because of gender, the one falling to temptation is in fact you.
* There is obviously a calculated strategy to lowering her voice. Apparently, the lower her voice goes, the higher the valuation of her company goes. Too bad it’s privately owned. Looks like it would be a good short.
* Her manner is very affected. This is an actor playing a role, i.e., con job.
Some other superficial observations. Her facial skin is loose and sagging already. I’d be stressed and prematurely aging too if I were taking other people’s money for my bullshit product. I’d be interested to see what a sophisticated interrogator thinks of her presentation. She looks defensive and unsure even though she’s getting a gentle tongue bath from the interviewer. Top executives are forceful, charismatic people but she is doing nothing to capture the room. The haphazard hairdo is really odd as well.
I agree there has to be more to this story. Dad’s a USAID bureaucrat? If I’m George Schultz, you’ll have to do better than that. Who is propping this woman up? Who’s her puppetmaster? She doesn’t strike me as having the moxie to ringlead something like this. Why is she such a heavy hitter despite her utter lack of credentials and institutional memberships?
If this were a public company she would or should have the SEC/DOJ buzzing around her. As it is, she’ll probably just have a few investor lawsuits.
* Hedy Lamarr? She actually did have a new idea for broadcast spectrum, but didn’t have the engineering chops to make it work, so she found someone who did. This being the forties, she was able to put aside her ego, and people weren’t looking for Susan Jobs, as Nick Steves says, and we were able to put her actual talents to work…
* Just yesterday I was describing Hedy Lamarr to a young woman at my current consulting location. I had to refresh my memory of her inventions — she actually had several significant ones — on Wikipedia. Although it was not used until long after WW II, due to technical difficulties with implementation, her idea for synchronized frequency variation is the foundation for most broadband applications today. And Ms. Lamarr was also drop-dead gorgeous. At her first US movie premiere there were audible gasps of admiration from the audience when she first appeared on screen. Judging from the photos here, Ms Holmes wouldn’t cause any necks to turn at the better watering spots I’ve had occasion to visit.
* Race-realist Michael Levin proposed that feminism is the first system of thought that manages to be wrong every single time. No male philosophy can claim that.
