Fascinating that the only communications with Tyler Schultz, which was the main insider confronting the fraud, had all of ~4 exchanges with her. All in the same day.
Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.
Its all on 4/11/2014.
Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.
Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.
I read the book (Bad Blood) and watched the mini-series (The Dropout) -- both absolutely great! and yet I still don't completely understand how Sunny & Holmes were able to fool experts inside their own company for so long.
Fooling the public is easy. But how do you fool the people working on the machines and trying to get actual results out of them? Sure, dividing the work into micro-tasks help, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion/excitement/respect for authority, etc. But still?!?
Sunny's response to Tyler's email, the one full of sincere concern for the well-being of the company:
Tyler.
We saw your email to Elizabeth.
Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.
> Theranos is a revolutionary business, founded and led by a remarkable engineer and businesswoman - joined by a team of professionals who have, at their core, embraced her mission to serve humanity through innovation in health care.
In the "Notes" app on the iphone, there is a note which says "msg me on X". Back then, it was Twitter. Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
It's so strange to see this here. I remember when this site was nothing but foaming-at-the-mouth fawning adoration of Elizabeth Holmes long after her scams were exposed.
My first memory of her being mentioned on this site was the dawning skepticism followed by the big expose. But it's possible I missed the fawning because it didn't sound as interesting
I recall there were plenty of people on here going into bat for Theranos way after others were calling it fraud.
The thing is, she expertly rode a belief system that was already prevalent: that SV was going to change the world and that SV and what was happening there was different. Plenty of WeWork fans as well. Plenty of fans of firms that actually did something as well, but most of those "did something"s were a website.
I think there was a lot of resentment here because of how easily it appeared she was raising money and how quickly the company grew at first without having a working product and a murmur from experts that their miniaturization play may not be able to work at all.
A lot of the comments on that thread are about how the board is full of military/CIA it smells like a cover company. It had Henry Kissinger on it of all people.
Did we ever find out what all those people were doing at Theranos? I really haven’t kept up to date.
I have a theory! They saw all the other security state people involved, and figured this was something it would be a good career move to support without knowing exactly why.
"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!
One of the unspoken secrets of research is that a lot of people are doing it to keep themselves in a job. It is perfectly possible to do research for years which goes nowhere, just goes over old ground etc. As long as the money rolls in, someone's making a living and not necessarily dishonestly if they're at the lower levels.
Whoa. With a lidar scan of my house, a drone-captured point cloud of my neighborhood, and a backup of my icloud, I could create an immersive 3D snapshot of my life. And then what if other people did the same and we networked them together, so that we can actually interact in the snapshot. It'd be like second life except actually cloned from real lives. weird
I had a thought the other day that you could probably divide up the world into cubic miles and with a few thousand codex subscriptions make a high fidelity blender model of the entire world based on google maps, street view, and tagged location photos.
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Microsoft has done that to some extent with Flight Simulator using older machine learning techniques. Wouldn't call most of the world high fidelity yet but I'm sure they could get there with generative AI models. I'm also sure the anti-AI screeching in the gaming community would be heard for miles.
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s world map covers the entire Earth at approximately 1:1 scale: about 510 million square kilometres of surface, including roughly 149 million km² of land
If only google could use their AI to generate a wiremesh model out of their google maps streetview data, and make it public. And then another model to generate texture.
I need to delete that key again. I keep recreating it with the same value, but nothing seems to work. I want to use this key with the value but in a way that nobody else knows the value. Sigh. Security is difficult.
Unfortunately the OS itself won't be the be-all / end-all, crossplatform (web) apps and a lack of care for optimization are the other major issue. I just timed how long it takes to open the 'calendar' tab in Teams - 8.5 seconds. MacOS' own calendar app takes <2 seconds (unrepresentative test due to factors) and does not show a screen with a spinner.
For those who are curious, Elizabeth Holmes was originally charged to serve for 11 years and 3 months. However, now her projected release date is just right around the corner - 2030. That's just 6 years and 9 months. A little more than half of her original serving period.
A lot of prisoners get released after about half their sentence when they become eligible for parole, so 12 years is really 6 (and life is really 20) in a lot of cases. Fraud is a white collar crime and basically everyone gets out on parole first or second try.
The only ones who don't are murderers, gang members, drug dealers or whistleblowers. The American legal system judges crimes on how far from "normal behavior" they are, not how much harm they cause.
I don’t know about this particular case, but sentences are usually reduced to 3/4 or 2/3 depending on a bunch of factors referred to as good behavior. Unless a judge or a law explicitly disallows that depending on the crime or the sentencing. The amount varies by state or court type and judges usually account for that when deciding on the sentencing
Federal criminal convicts usually serve 85-90% with good behavior, at least for men. The minimum is 85%. There is no federal parole. I think she's getting out early for a different reason.
It is a bit hilarious that most of the "apps" open faster in a fake desktop simulated inside the browser than it actually does natively on my Macbook Pro
You know, for a single pretty rare case of fraud in tech, as opposed to the industries where fraud is common, this gets brought up an excessive amount a decade later.
* It was off-the-charts brazen, and amazing that so many prestigious people got behind it, and that it took so long for anyone blow the whistle/notice that the impossible product didn't in fact exist.
* Sexism.
If you want me to believe #2, I would like to hear what you think are the more comparable cases which don't get bought up as much as this one.
The "tech" sector label is a fraud in its own right.
It makes sense to have a separate label for companies that develop software. They have a unique investment appeal because their cost of production doesn't increase with units sold, so higher PE ratio if growing.
For "some reason" Netflix isn't priced as a media company. Tesla isn't priced as manufacturing.
Where’s the party? I just built something similar to your product for an SF-based non-profit (fully self-hosted on site) and it’s been extremely useful. Would love to get tips on how we can improve our setup.
- Create a series of increasingly surreal reality TV shows that blur the distinctions between how we see ourselves and how we present to the world as characters.
- Convince a reality-distorting corporate sociopath that my experience making these shows makes me the ideal person to tell her misunderstood story to the world in a breakthrough documentary film.
- Use an advance screening of the film to generate publicity for this previously obscure AI document management startup.
Not that it matters or anyone cares, but it's so obvious Balwani was manipulating her emotionally. There are so many instances where he says "Love you", or "love" or "I am in love with your beauty", while she is more direct like "I love you", "I am in love with you" etc.
hmm..perhaps I was biased because I watched a couple of documentaries, a tv film and read the book by John Carreyrou "Bad Blood", so my eyes were primed to look for this pattern.
But he was definitely manipulative in this regard.
In my genearl observations of office desks/cubicles around me I have noticed that the only people with carefully stacked books, often more than one or two, were the ones who didn't really read.
As someone who only knows Theranos by the creepy lady and that they did some scam this is very interesting. Only critique is that it calls Twitter X, which isn't historically accurate.
EDIT: uhh I thought the movie signup thing was a gag, didn't know it was real. Sorry I guess.
Why are people giving her anymore attention and time? Yawn. I don't get it. The story has been told, there is nothing new here besides some weird shots of her wide eyed like she always has been. Am I the only person who isn't impressed?
Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.
Its all on 4/11/2014.
Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.
Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.
Fooling the public is easy. But how do you fool the people working on the machines and trying to get actual results out of them? Sure, dividing the work into micro-tasks help, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion/excitement/respect for authority, etc. But still?!?
Tyler.
We saw your email to Elizabeth.
Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.
See my comments in red below.
This is a good reminder that arguments on morality and wisdom are used and abused.
https://www.spacejam.com/
https://github.com/sv1sjp/flash-swf-to-html5-toolkit
> Theranos is a revolutionary business, founded and led by a remarkable engineer and businesswoman - joined by a team of professionals who have, at their core, embraced her mission to serve humanity through innovation in health care.
I would love to have the machine "function" up to a point (except, actually doing the analysis results in a "NotImplementedException" of some kind.à
I also initially looked around the desk for a physical cartridge, such was the effectiveness of the rest of the “game”.
(for some of us)
like come on... it was so good before
Their name is probably Claude.
The thing is, she expertly rode a belief system that was already prevalent: that SV was going to change the world and that SV and what was happening there was different. Plenty of WeWork fans as well. Plenty of fans of firms that actually did something as well, but most of those "did something"s were a website.
Crazy how my gut feeling was more than vindicated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349
Did we ever find out what all those people were doing at Theranos? I really haven’t kept up to date.
"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!
eg. https://www.nianticspatial.com/products/capture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-S-x0b9TrE
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
(Borges)
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Ref: https://flyawaysimulation.com/ask/answers/microsoft-flight-s...
I wasted a lot of hours in it when I was a teen.
Although I bet Lizzie used a Pro..
The only ones who don't are murderers, gang members, drug dealers or whistleblowers. The American legal system judges crimes on how far from "normal behavior" they are, not how much harm they cause.
*yes i know, not apples to apples.
* It was off-the-charts brazen, and amazing that so many prestigious people got behind it, and that it took so long for anyone blow the whistle/notice that the impossible product didn't in fact exist.
* Sexism.
If you want me to believe #2, I would like to hear what you think are the more comparable cases which don't get bought up as much as this one.
It makes sense to have a separate label for companies that develop software. They have a unique investment appeal because their cost of production doesn't increase with units sold, so higher PE ratio if growing.
For "some reason" Netflix isn't priced as a media company. Tesla isn't priced as manufacturing.
plus, we used our APIs to parse all the theranos PDFs to power the experience
hope our content marketing made your day a bit more fun!
You do have to get your word out somehow
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013534
- Create a series of increasingly surreal reality TV shows that blur the distinctions between how we see ourselves and how we present to the world as characters.
- Convince a reality-distorting corporate sociopath that my experience making these shows makes me the ideal person to tell her misunderstood story to the world in a breakthrough documentary film.
- Use an advance screening of the film to generate publicity for this previously obscure AI document management startup.
All of this must be a marketing campaign for the movie.
But he was definitely manipulative in this regard.
And by love I of course mean: I love, LOVE, LOVE, [repeat ad nauseam]
Nails on a chalkboard.
It is obviously not as interesting as jmail.world, but, give her time
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932236
LOL
Excellent work! All the best for the documentary launch!
The share button let me download it.
> No health data.
:)
EDIT: uhh I thought the movie signup thing was a gag, didn't know it was real. Sorry I guess.