Do you really think VCs would invest $400 million & Walgreens & Cleveland Clinic would do deals with this company, that put people's health at risk & create massive liability, without diligence because she is a woman?

Maybe Theranos will fail. Obviously fraud is unacceptable. And the lack of peer review helps no one. But, the idea that she was funded because of her gender is absurd. If anything, given all the data on this topic, she was funded in spite of it- because she was trying something very difficult & potentially revolutionary--not some dumb app.

I hope you'll reconsider your thinking on this. Its hard enough for women to get funded; maybe it's worth giving them the benefit of the doubt when they do.

    > Do you really think VCs would invest $400 million &
    > Walgreens & Cleveland Clinic would do deals with this
    > company, that put people's health at risk & create
    > massive liability, without diligence

One way to help yourself swallow a bad decision is to look at all the other people also making it, and convince yourself that if they're doing it, it must be all right.

Large-scale investors gravitate towards big risk/big reward ventures which require significant capital because it's saves having to make a zillion angel-scale deals. Plus, it seems sexier with extra-awesome brownie points to go after something which may be r/evolutionary.

PS: Color was a snausage clusterfuck of dbag, hubris behaviors that ruined the team (and the venture). Hopefully, that elicited a corrective learning experience.

It's more like starting Intel than Apple.

I do agree with you though that it's probably her sales ability rather than her gender that led to the investments. I think it's likely the investors thought she'd make a great cover story, and that contributed somewhat to her success, but I doubt her gender was anywhere near the defining reason.

She's basically Color's Bill Nguyen. I wish I was as good as these guys at hustling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nguyen

Yet apparently none of that matters because his most recent venture was a flop. What I'd do for that track record!

Lots of billion dollar medical companies have leading politicians on their board. Donald Rumsfeld was on the board for Gilead Sciences. It is vital for these businesses that to be on good terms with the government, as it is the government helps define what is allowed.

Some would argue that this is just a form of corruption which endangers the lives of patients worldwide.

Donald Rumsfeld was a biotech CEO before he got into politics! Why wouldn't you want him on the board of your biotech?

You seem to be twisting the facts here. I would also argue that the most drastic change with the FDA wasn't during the Reagan years, but during the Clinton years and Clinton himself wasn't really leading the effort.

Citation needed.

At the moment, there is just a trophy, retired epidemiologist.

I don't think the makeup of the board is that weird. Yes, it may mean they're shady and are trying to leverage political connections as much as they can. But even if they had a great product, dealing with regulators would still be a huge problem/pain for them, and they would still ideally want a board with lots of politically influential people.

There are many reasons to be wary of Theranos. I don't think the board makeup and Holmes being a dropout are among them.

There's not a single person on the board who is an expert in anything close to their core technology. I can understand wanting some politically influential people, but only politically influential people. How is that not weird?

> You don't know what her coursework was a Stanford. She may well have skipped the intro classes.

I'm fairly certain Stanford some curriculum requirements. Even if they didn't, no matter how smart you are, you can't just hop in and start taking upper level Chemical Engineering classes because you took AP Chem in high school. There's too much prerequisite knowledge that you just won't have.

And you definitely can start taking upper level chemical engineering classes. It's very common in college to ask to pass out of a requirement by taking the final. I passed out of the required intro computer science course in college (and not with AP Computer Science), for example.

Pretty much everyone thinks this board is weird. There have been multiple articles written on how odd it is, and most companies tend to have multiple domain experts on the board. You won't find many companies outside of the defense industry with 7/11 board members who are retired political and military leaders.

For an example of a normal board of directors just look at a competing company's board--quest diagnostics--and notice the number of MDs, PhDs, financial experts, and CEOs of other companies, and the lack of former cabinet secretaries, senators, and retired generals. http://ir.questdiagnostics.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=82068&p=irol-...

>And you definitely can start taking upper level chemical engineering classes.

You can't walk into Stanford and start taking junior and senior level chemical engineering classes as a freshmen, you would have a complete lack of prerequisite knowledge.

>It's very common in college to ask to pass out of a requirement by taking the final.

It is not very common, in fact it's pretty rare these days to find a department that will allow this.

Even if they did allow this, there are stacks of prerequisite chemistry, math, physics, and general engineering classes before a student can even touch classes in the chemical engineering department (other than special classes like freshmen seminars).

It is totally common to skip prereqs. When I say common, I don't mean everyone does it. I mean every year a handful of students do it. In fact, it's probably more common at the top science/engineering colleges (MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, etc.). I mean, every year these schools have a couple of geniuses that won gold medals at the IChO/IMO/IOI/other olympiads, have been taking college (not community college) courses while in high school, and/or did legitimate research while in high school (and I'm not talking about the "research" volunteerships that many high schoolers try to get), etc.

I went to Berkeley, and the EECS department let you skip any prereq by taking the final.