This is a pretty damning article.
Elizabeth Holmes has been praised as the female Steve Jobs of medicine. She dropped out of Stanford at 19; decided to start her own company. Because she was deathly afraid of needles, she tried to figure out an easier way. She hired some guy who had the idea; leveraged up via VC seed money to an mind boggling $10 billion valuation. A few years ago the guy committed suicide, amidst rumors that their pin prick technology was fucking nonsense.
And now this:
On Theranos Inc.’s website, company founder Elizabeth Holmes holds up a tiny vial to show how the startup’s “breakthrough advancements have made it possible to quickly process the full range of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood.”
The company offers more than 240 tests, ranging from cholesterol to cancer. It claims its technology can work with just a finger prick. Investors have poured more than $400 million into Theranos, valuing it at $9 billion and her majority stake at more than half that. The 31-year-old Ms. Holmes’s bold talk and black turtlenecks draw comparisons to Apple Inc. cofounder Steve Jobs.
But Theranos has struggled behind the scenes to turn the excitement over its technology into reality. At the end of 2014, the lab instrument developed as the linchpin of its strategy handled just a small fraction of the tests then sold to consumers, according to four former employees.
Theranos also hasn’t disclosed publicly that it does the vast majority of its tests with traditional machines bought from companies like Siemens AG.
WTF! Come again?
But Theranos’s outside lawyer, David Boies, acknowledges that the company isn’t yet using the device for all the tests Theranos offers. The transition to doing every test with the device is “a journey,” he says.
A fucking journey?
During the Journal’s reporting, Theranos deleted a sentence on its website that said: “Many of our tests require only a few drops of blood.” It also dropped a reference to collecting “usually only three tiny micro-vials” per sample, “instead of the usual six or more large ones.” Heather King, the company’s general counsel, says the changes were made for “marketing accuracy.”
If it smells like bullshit…
Ms. Holmes, Theranos’s chairman and chief executive, declined interview requests from the Journal for more than five months. Last week, the company said she would be available to comment, but her schedule didn’t allow it before publication of this article.
Shots fired!
It looks like this lauded privately held VC darling is setting up for the much feared “down round.”
Oh, it’s also worth noting, Miss Holmes board of directors average age is 80, including such dignitaries such as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Bill Frist and 7 other political figures, none of which have a medical background, save Frist.
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There is nothing better than schadenfreude. Nothing.
These fucking biotechs are just scams it seems. That said, as we all know as soon as the tide starts going out all of the VCs are just standing there naked left holding their boners.
If Kissinger and George Schultz are involved, you know its just another Nixon-Bush NWO scam.
My mouth fell open when reading that part… Bizarre
This company will be brought public in short order now that all the smart investors know it’s a sham.
Terrific post.
I have always found the fully exposed iris, all the time, to be an accurate marker of sociopathy. Normal folk almost always have the upper portion of their iris covered by the eyelid. Normal people only fully expose their iris, temporarily, when in a heightened emotional state.
She sure does look creepy on the front of that cover.
I think I read somewhere 1 in 24 people are sociopathic.
Be careful out there.
typical for the new economy
I think Henry B is banging her
scam champion of feminists #ironsisters
perhaps Bernard Karl Marx Sanders is correct, in that ‘fraud is a business model on Wall St’ with politicians and ex-politicians greedily lining up their names to get in on the gains and further pump the stock to line their pockets even further at the expense of the dumb-sheep trusting citizen
He’s not a Communist. He’s a socialist. And he’s absolutely correct about this particular matter, as you admit.
This is just like in the dotcom era, when we had bs tech companies, many of which were and always remained without earnings. Now we have to dot biotech era, with bs biotech companies.
Those little finger sized pricks can be nasty.
I thought her responses to Cramer yesterday were a bit evasive, she’s smart though so it’s hard to pin her down. Not sure how much longer she can hold out before this thing bombs.