From an ethical standpoint, I think they should've just wound down the company. If there are parts of the business that still have value, sell them. Otherwise, give employees decent severance and try to help them find new jobs. Return any remaining money to investors.

Nah, it would have been this:

"Our foray into nanotainer tech was too early for the market. However, we've established that there is a market for disruptive tech in the stodgy lab biz. In terms of leadership, we're moving on from Ms. Holmes who saw this from the start, and she's agreed that the best for the stakeholders is to step aside due to the misunderstanding around her tech, but the company itself will persevere in breaking the stranglehold Big Lab has on healthcare costs, while Ms Holmes moves to an role in charge of disruptive R&D use of nanotainer and other disruptive tech in the lab/testing biz."

Damn that's full buzzword compliant.

You should work for Monsanto (a sustainable agriculture company) :-)

You mean Bayer, a "we pretty much just make asprin, don't worry about it" company.

This reminds me once again to re-watch "Thank You For Smoking".

Eh, no, but actually owning the wrongdoing would be a start.

Theranos fradulently conducted their business on a wide scale over a long period. Literally nothing they've said in public since the revelations (which just keep getting worse) have ever truthfully addressed the matter.

But regardless of the scale of wrongdoing, the bare minimum expected of both companies and individuals when they've done wrong is:

- An acknowledgment and admission of the wrongdoing, without equivocation or deflection. No "it was wrong but..." or any such thing. Own the wrongdoing, it's the least you can do to respect the people who you've done wrong by.

- Demonstration of self-awareness and introspection as to what led to the wrongdoing. Again, without equivocation or deflection. Neither corporation nor individual can be trusted not to commit the same wrong if they can't openly demonstrate why they did it.

- A plan to both prevent reoccurrence of the wrongdoing and, if applicable, a plan to make whole those who were harmed in the original wrongdoing. This doesn't need to be monetary, but may be (especially when businesses are involved).

These are the bare minimum prerequisites before anyone can be granted even the tiniest shred of credibility back.

This statement (like all other statements by Theranos) demonstrates literally no component of the above, so yeah, we'll keep (rightfully) raking them over the coals until they do.

"We are closing our clinical labs."

or to mirror the original statement "We have been forced to close our clinical labs."

It's not that they need to grovel, it's that the phrase "we decided" is not an accurate representation of the situation.

Sure they decided. They could fight back with legal challenges. They could spin off the labs into an independently run entity. There are lots of choices besides shutting them down.

"Due to regulatory pressure, we have decided to..."

"We decided to" devoid of any qualifiers makes it sound like it was a decision made with full autonomy, and not a decision made because you were backed into a corner.

Are your inferences really the important thing? Does it ultimately matter to anyone on any timeframe beyond a two minute hate?

The typical press release doesn't matter at all to most people at a timeframe beyond two minutes.

But to the extent that it does, it should be based on an accurate representation of reality and not misdirection.

Technically, it was Theranos that was after our blood.

No, they really only rolled dice to determine their results anyway, so there was in fact no blood needed.

Beyond not wrestling the letter of the language of the letter to Theranos's best but inaccurate presentation, I would suggest Elizabeth Holmes live the next half-decade with a much lower profile. Step away from the medical devices industry, and upper management in general, either to study or work in a different field/within a different authority structure. If she has any aspirations towards family and children, now would be the time to pursue those particular goals. She is visibly intelligent and ambitious, and I would be very interested to see her return after an extended recollection of her prowess, tempered by some character-building not profit motive oriented experiences. Given the evidence thus far, I fear for her further march into a high-time preference mode, and ultimately burn-out.

Almost every day we have people who ran startups that didn't work out who end up here posting legitimate and honest thoughts about what went wrong and how they can move forward.

Contrast that with this, where instead of owning literally any responsibility for the farce that their product was, she continues to go on this same distortion tactic: Never say anything that's actually a lie, just say a whole lot of things that aren't the truth.

The only thing she seems to have learned is a lot of regulation that her company ran into, and how to work around it.

Every single one of those founders who come on HN and give honest opinions also wrote press releases just like this.

You have not heard from Elisabeth Holmes because of this, you've heard from the CEO of Theranos, whose name is Elisabeth Holmes. I don't know what she has/hasn't learned, but the audience for this was not HN, and she's not giving her personal experience in this letter.

Writing for yourself is completely different than writing for a company, but you know that. Come on, we can do better.