Theranos' response included an all-company meeting where they chanted "Fuck you, Carreyrou"[1] (John Carreyrou, the WSJ reporter who wrote the critical articles), and developeing a video game for employees that involved shooting him[2].
Notice that second article is only a couple months old and reports that some people there still believe the problem was not Theranos' lack of ability to do what it claimed, but that the media reported Theranos couldn't do what it claimed.
This playbook of "the problem isn't that our company is in trouble, it's that the media reported truthfully on our trouble" is still being used today by other darlings of Silicon Valley and HN.
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-the...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-employees-made-space...
Theranos in particular as if they had what they claimed, the media could poop on them forever and once they put out the product it would have changed the medical industry regardless of the media... but nope.
I can't recall of hearing of Theranos before then though, but I'm not in the valley.
Geoff Baird plays in my regular poker game. He's probably one of the smartest people I know and has been regularly denouncing Theranos' methods for several years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808
NO one refuted it.
The issue is not that smart people didn't know, it's so many people can't see the obvious.
Assuming the comment is ordered correctly it's the masses with the problem. Valid concerns were raised, no one could defend them, but the comment was left at the bottom.
HN, like the media has flaws that don't allow it to correct at even a snails pace.
But if you're smart it's not hard to see the truth, hard part is making money, it was fake from the beginning but who would have thought it'd take so many years to fail in RL. Knowing when to bet against it is the hard part.
IE. Magic Leap will fail, who knows when though.
Been saying this since the beginning and just want to go on record with this again now in case this comes up 5 years from now like Theranos did.
Were there? I'm not doubting your claim, just wondering if anyone really spoke up.
Reading about the challenges they would have had to overcome to back up their claims, there were some serious fundamental problems, and those were challenges the industry had been wrangling with when it came to that type of automated testing for ages.... I always wondered how many of their competitors were thinking:
"No way they overcame all that all at once.... straight up not possible."