> I wonder if she's really so different from the average tech CEO/founder

She hired Steve Jobs’ right-hand man. He quit because she was too abusive and too delusional. It’s fair to say she’s fundamentally different from any competent CEO, ignoring the fact that she chose to deploy medical devices to the field.

If anything the Elizabeth Holmes story should be a lesson as to the problems with venerating the average tech CEO and the whole "disruptive" culture. She and her partner Sunny lied, bullied critics and employees, and put people in harms way - all for a technology that was essentially nothing more than the existing standard fare in a pretty box. No different what most of the major tech companies and start-ups do every day. But the standards for the medical industry as significantly higher than in tech thus she and Sunny are being punished.

Maybe instead of trying to lower the standards of the medical industry, we should raise the standards of the tech industry.

>Could you imagine being in her industry, and having the patience to go through years of trials and testing and passing through regulations?

I have worked at two reasonably successful healthcare startups. No 'unicorns', but they paid good salaries, made money, and were purchased for a decent price by bigger players. We waited. In the meantime we sold to researchers and performed LDT's (as Theranos did) to bring in revenue.

You do your work and put in the time. There is no other reasonable option. We didn't require a lying, arrogant CEO to pull it off.

I think you make a good point, and broadly agree with you. I think the problem with Elizabeth Holmes (vs. the traditional tech founder) is that she's in biotech, where the stakes are much higher and the industry is much more controlled. It'd be the same if she was in the aviation space. If she ran a SaaS platform, this wouldn't really be a story - it'd just be a crappy place to work, and a service that's not ever properly implemented, and there might be some level of fraud at a financial level, but nothing as bad as what she did. A business CRM breaking is bad, but not as bad as giving inaccurate medical results to someone leading to a misdiagnosis or worse.

That is the part that is craziest to me. They took a software developer (Sunny Balwani) who had an information systems degree and plopped him down to run a life sciences company like it was nbd.

I think a lot of technology people don't understand the scope of regulatory and medical implications of working in life sciences. It's not just simple as "code it up and flip the switch!" Theranos isn't the only firm I've seen crash and bail due to that cavalier attitude.

Yeah, although they didn't crash and bail but just get penalized a bit, 23 & Me didn't really get that they actually had to obey FDA rules for genetic testing. They literally ignored the FDA's complaints and were eventually stopped from making diagnostic (rather than ancestry) analyses for a while.

There's a big difference between the tests from 23andMe and Theranos. 23andMe produces data that's risk-based (i.e. your risk of developing coronary heart disease) but isn't immediately actionable. Most of what you could do to address the risks reported by 23andMe is stuff you should already be doing -- eating healthy, sleeping more, exercising, quitting smoking/alcohol.

Theranos was doing standard lab tests, like blood electrolytes. Blood electrolytes are highly regulated by the body and are only abnormal in serious medical illness. If your blood sodium level is too low (hyponatremia) that's a medical emergency and you need to be in the ER (hyponatremia can indicate end-organ failure like renal failure, heart failure; it can also indicate serious endocrine abnormalities like SIADH or too much water intake 'frat-boy' syndrome). Uncorrected hyponatremia can lead to permanent neurological disease (classically brainstem herniation).

I think the differences between the two industries are a bit overplayed. It's not like shitty software is any better, any more deserving of existence, than shitty blood testing machines. My best conjecture says she would've made shitty software and played it off using the same hollow puffery.