Their malfeasance was worse than that. Their "invention" gave people wrong information about their health, which in some cases put their lives in jeopardy. And they operated in a highly-regulated marketplace and tried to evade government oversight. These two aspects of Theranos put their fraud into a much more serious category than that of a typical narcissist-led SV vaporware company.

That is a good way to describe it.

They also made the technology very secretive. Not even their investors could have access to implementation details.

Very similar to my secret perpetual motion machine.

Based upon what you said, there is just one flaw in your pmm. I know how to fix it. Unfortunately, I can't tell you. The secret is proprietary, and I need to make sure that it doesn't get corrupted, so everyone can use it for free.

My question is: Did they have a prototype or at least a concept?

> Did they have a prototype or at least a concept?

Not one that could do what they promised.

"The indictment alleges that the defendants used a combination of direct communications, marketing materials, statements to the media, financial statements, models, and other information to defraud potential investors. Specifically, the defendants claimed that Theranos developed a revolutionary and proprietary analyzer that the defendants referred to by various names, including as the TSPU, Edison, or minilab. The defendants claimed the analyzer was able to perform a full range of clinical tests using small blood samples drawn from a finger stick. The defendants also represented that the analyzer could produce results that were more accurate and reliable than those yielded by conventional methods—all at a faster speed than previously possible.

The indictment further alleges that Holmes and Balwani knew that many of their representations about the analyzer were false. For example, allegedly, Holmes and Balwani knew that the analyzer, in truth, had accuracy and reliability problems, performed a limited number of tests, was slower than some competing devices, and, in some respects, could not compete with existing, more conventional machines."

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/theranos-founder-and-fo...

They did. They had two devices, the "Edison" and the "MiniLab".

The Edison was intended to run a full panel of blood tests, both chemical and immunological assays, off a finger stick of blood. It was also intended to allow Theranos to function as its own lab.

The Minilab was intended to run a full panel of blood tests I believe off a larger venous sample, and was expected to be marketed to existing labs (at this point, Theranos had been forbidden from operating its own labs).

In its own labs, Theranos made minimal use of the Edison, which was unreliable and supported only a few tests. Rather, they're accused of taking finger-stick draws, diluting them, and then feeding them into hacked-up adapters for COTS lab machines.

Do you believe Theranos could have beee successful company with less delusional management? (Honest question for a HN colleague for whom I have tremendous respect.)

I don't know anything about this space; all I know comes from Carreyrou's book. Somewhere towards the middle, one of his sources observes that it's particularly hard to get a good sample from a finger stick --- something about damaged blood cells --- and you can find recent journal articles online suggesting that finger stick samples are inherently a lot less reliable than venous draws.

So, I sort of doubt it.

Not an expert in this field, but it seems like they could have pivoted to do a smaller sub-set of blood tests, like the immunoassays. Part of the failure was their insistence that they were going to do ALL blood tests through a finger stick. Once they had raised tens of millions of dollars based on taking the entire market, it was probably too late to de-scope the vision without losing their investors.

Could they have successfully run tests on smaller sample sizes? Possibly, but the target market size is small (needing less blood isn't particularly advantageous unless you're dealing with children or babies without much blood in the first place).

The finger-prick-testing was always very likely to fail; the biology just doesn't work out in your favor. However, getting finger-pricks working was the entire basis of their strategy, not the "test using less blood" idea.

Not a domain expert, but as I recall most of the things they want to test for aren't present at a sufficient level in the blood stream to get a statistically significant sample from a few drops.

Blood sugar is a relatively high percentage of your blood stream, which is why strip-based glucose monitors work.

I’ve never seen any evidence the underlying tech ever actually worked.

The answer is no. The answer isn't yes their working devices didn't work.

Yes, they did. Which involved humans walking over the blood sample to a regular lab setup where they would dilute it and use regular machines to output wrong results. Now all they had to do was find a solution to replace the humans, not having to dilute the sample and output correct results. But pesky investigations got in the way.

From "Bad Blood": they had a prototype called Gluebot which used a robot arm to do standard tests involving a pipette autonomously. However, their tests (using blood collected at Walgreens) were done on "hacked" (altered to cope with much smaller amounts of blood -- by increasing dilution) Siemens blood-testing machines.

IIRC from the book, Gluebot was actually the prototype that eventually became the Theranos Edison.

aka a kickstarter

>It's illegal to say "I have a working antimatter drive prototype; give me a million dollars." Holmes and Balwani did the latter.

It's only illegal if you don't actually have one.

In that sentence, "antimatter drive prototype" is defined to mean "a thing you couldn't possibly have," so don't be a pedant.

They said that about heavier than air flight too...

You also have to be aware that you don't have one, for what it's worth.