The thing is, the primary goal of an investor is not to invest in companies that are honest and actually do what they claim. The goal is to invest in a company that reaches a valuation high enough to let them recoup their investment at a profit.
If that valuation happens through fraud, hype, destroying the environment, whatever, that doesn't really factor in. It probably is the case that successfully doing what the company claims has a positive correlation with higher valuation, but it's not strictly necessary.
The failure mode for the investors in Theranos is not that it was fraudulent. It's that the fraud was discovered before they could cash out. They didn't need to believe that Theranos was honest, they just needed to believe that other later investors would believe they were honest.
Explanation, since this is being downvoted.
Uber might not have lied about their business, but it surely looks like investors never cared about the businesses viability and rather only cared about being able to turn a profit on their investment (which was the point being made by the gp).
To this day, it is still not clear if Uber’s business model is viable. Also not to mention the original CEO/founder’s reputation and attitude, which the investors also didn’t care about until it became too big of a scandal. Additionally, the investors didn’t even care that Uber was technically illegal (same as Airbnb btw).
Some references:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/12/will-ride-hailing-profits-...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-and-lyft-are-staging-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-company-scandals-and-co...
Uber runs the app. People call an Uber and they pay money. Some of that money goes to the driver and some goes to Uber. You’re really saying that Uber can’t collect enough money to run their computers and pay some staff? It just doesn’t make sense. Of course they can.
I worked on the long-term forecasting team while I was there. At least 5-6 years ago, Uber was very, very far from profitable. I can't imagine much has changed enough for it to make them profitable. Maybe with the new CEO things changed but I'm doubtful. That company had a slew of issues.
It was in the order of thousands (I think either $2k or $22k, sorry for the rounding error) per user signup that Uber paid in terms of marketing and advertising - and that was regardless of if they generated any money. It was way more for driver signups since the driving bonuses were pretty sizeable.
The amount of staff Uber has is way too much, in my opinion. Uber's internals are the definition of "over-engineered", to the point things were just too complicated for any single person to really work with, let alone understand to any degree. We had teams internally that were making the same thing but had no idea each other existed - and this happened pretty frequently.
There was a lot of turn and restructuring in upper management, not to mention pulling out of China and then having months in a row with almost daily sexual harassment/discrimination/bad CEO news stories breaking out. So the rest of the company was just kind of left to fend for itself for a long time, just burning even more money despite nothing getting released.
I knew one other engineer that... to this day, I'm not sure he even wrote a single line of code. He was always hanging around other people, wanting to chat. When you'd casually ask "so what are you working on these days?" he'd just shrug and smile. Never got a straight answer out of him. He was higher up in the ranks than I was, younger, assumedly paid more. Couldn't answer basic questions about writing code, but loved to brag about his new designer shoes and stuff. Just an anecdote.
It was insanity. Everyone I personally interacted with hated working there, and it was clear it was way too crowded. That, along with the marketing/ad spend, made me convinced Uber would never be profitable.
If that’s all you are doing, then yeah, that’s probably not profitable because competition would just eat your margins. You’re essentially a broker matching drivers with passengers, and they can use any service they want. They will choose the one with the lowest cost to use and that pays the most to serve i.e. they will use the one that leaves the least amount of profit for the broker.
Therefore Uber has to have some other value add, which will eat into profits (unclear what that could be, I think they were hoping it could be robotaxis); or, they have to spend massively in advertising to maintain mindshare, which will also eat into profits.
This is why they spend so much on advertising and expansion. They want to be the first player in town because when there are more players, it’s a race to the bottom. You can’t take out the advertising and expansion dollars and say they would be profitable without them, because those dollars are staving off competitors for as long as Uber can. Imagine a future where you have an “Expedia” of taxi services, that search dozens of providers and gives you the lowest one. That’s Uber’s future if they stop their spending.
The question of profitability then becomes: how can Uber justify its existence while staving off competitors, and can they manage this before going under? Maybe given an infinite time horizon and infinite VC cash, Uber could be profitable one day, but for now I don’t think it’s clear they are or will be soon.
So markets don’t exist? Businesses can’t exist in a market? This is economics 101. No wonder everyone is so off
But Uber doesn't want to be 1 of 1000 taxi players in a crowded market with no margins. They want to be taxi king of the world. How do they stay on top when every local municipality can hire some college kids to make a close facsimile to what Uber does? Sure maybe it's not as good as the Uber offering, but they don't have to support a global taxi empire, so they can offer their service for a lot less than Uber can. If that app takes hold in city X, why are people going to use Uber when they come to town 30% more expensive than your small town provider?
An issue with this line of thought is that you think that they could one day flip a switch and just like that stop expanding or acquiring new customers.
Two problems with that are: 1) most likely if they stop growing, they start shrinking - it’s not like they are the only ones out there doing what they do, and 2) a lot of their marketing and expansion expenses (as corroborated by the sibling comment) don’t go towards acquiring new customers, but rather new drivers, which given their turn over, they can’t stop putting money into.
So basically if they stop spending money on advertising and expansion, they will loose all their drivers and slowly churn customers as well.
Hence, it doesn’t matter if they could technically be profitable without advertising and expansion, because then their business becomes unviable.
Advertising is a core business expense for them needed to run the business.
And maybe Uber has already gotten as big as they will get. It doesn’t change the fact that they don’t need one billion dollars in advertising. And also, what you are asserting is that it’s impossible for a computerized taxi company to exist. So do you think it would be cheaper to have a human dispatcher? Obviously you can run a profitable taxi company. It’s been a thing for a long time and the computers aren’t making it any worse or more expensive I can assure you.
No, it’s a financial/accounting fact expressed by Uber themselves in their filings as a public company.
Having a business model (which is what you are describing), doesn’t make it profitable.
Hertz had a business model too, they owned cars, people rented cars and paid money for that. Are you saying Hertz couldn’t collect enough money to run their operations and pay some staff? Well they couldn’t, and they went bankrupt. They were also in the red for several years before the pandemic hit.
Uber still hasn't turned a profit, and might be able to soon via some creative accounting: https://gizmodo.com/uber-says-its-on-track-to-maybe-make-a-f...
When they first launched UberX in DC, I called them out for a price comparison of Taxi vs UberX that couldn't possibly be true. They quietly changed the blog post and marketing materials shortly after.
Yea that is what we discussing about Theranos. Theranos was an outright fraud. You cannot say the same about Uber whether they inflated or lied about their profits etc. Uber provides a real service and honestly a good one for people. Theranos on the other hand, played with people's lives by lying about their entire business model and product which never worked. Big difference.
I personally don't think it's the right way to do things. Big fraud, small lies (fraud), it's all pretty bad.
I strongly believe that you can challenge the status quo and abide by honesty and rule of law.
More like investors didn't care until they needed liquidity.
Most any company with ML or AI in their branding, running stupid amounts of CNBC ads and repeating their AI name 30 times during the ad.
0. https://www.ft.com/content/d32c8526-f555-11e9-b018-3ef8794b1...
The old political ways are not going anywhere anytime soon. The useful land is politically captured.
Hack the planet; have money = untouchable in our society.
After biological well-being, there isn’t much economic activity needed to sustain the species.
This is why the market went up during the lockdown but do nothing companies worth $75 a year ago are worth <$10 again.
At some point it just becomes keeping the simulation alive for the sake of those that benefit most from the simulation; these gods, then this god, then no god, we create value…
People actually rented WeWork properties and got a valuable service.
The problem was more or less shenanigans on the Exec. side, and unsustainable financial situation.
In that case, the 'consumers' actually end up ahead, with a cheaper services than otherwise, then investors lost.
From my understanding, WeWork was more of a working business that was overvalued and had a lot of self-dealing with the CEO (which I would characterize as embezzling, but may not legally have been.) Theranos invested their money in trying to make an impossible product, lying and failing at it the whole time.
But I could be wrong, sensationalist news headlines and such.
A company doesn't have to have an exit for early investors to get out. You just need to find a sucker to buy into a round later than you.
How to do that, in the modern context, is pretty clear. Either do it through outright fraud (Theranos, Nikola, MagicLeap), extreme FOMO (MagicLeap), or raising so much that you crush competition despite comically bad fundamentals and never get to unit-profitability (Uber, others).
Just example links, I think I'm not making any outrageous claims but that this has long been established and discussed here too many times:
https://stopswithme.com/exposing-big-tobacco/big-tobacco-fou...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-...
The investors already got theirs many times over.
I think you could also include any company that left what became a "super fund site" (US name, similar in other countries). They cannot have believed creating and leaving all that toxic waste in the ground would be a neutral action.
The canonical example would be Broadcast.com, which made Mark Cuban a billionaire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com
1998 IPO at $1B valuation
1999 bought by Yahoo! for $5.7B
2002 shut down
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupon#Initial_public_offer...
Depends on your definition of "no product at all" but it happens all the time in biotech.
Most biotech companies don't have a product until FDA approval because they can't legally sell anything (unless it's a product other biotech/pharma companies can use for their own R&D).
In other words, many an actually useful/profitable companies was started on an idea that was known to be impossible from the get-go, but they amass enough capital, visibility and momentum that they can later "pivot" to something that actually works.
Whether that scenario falls in the "fraud" bucket is an interesting question.
Only frauds can succeed in a monetary system which is itself founded on fraud. So it makes no sense to do due diligence if you know that the company is all hooked up to the money printers because the business doesn't matter. Only the money printer and the business' connection to it matters; everything else is a nuisance.
The business of almost every company in the tech sector these days is the 'capture the newly printed fiat money business.' Any other narrative is fake and only used to create a facade of legitimacy for the company.
No company will ever admit that their main line of business is 'government contracts', 'government grants', 'laundered credit from shell companies', 'foreign money laundering', etc...
For businesses that want to minimize their reliance on the (trickle-down scraps of) the fraud money business.
IMO, the financial system has already suffered irreparable damage to its reputation. I think there might be calls for asset seizures and redistribution soon. In the US, the BLM movement has already been campaigning for 'financial reparations'. South Africa just passed a law to allow land to be seized by the government without compensation. I think this might become more widespread - Hopefully it will only be restricted to specific assets; I think big corporate stocks are a likely target for expropriation because they have benefited the most from money printing; it will be easy for people to find evidence of wrongdoing and use it as a basis to seize and redistribute shares (or simply nationalize the companies altogether).
My gut feeling is that we're headed to some kind of partial-communist government - First, they will only seize the assets related to big finance, big tech, big pharma since this will have public support. Maybe later once the public has warmed up to the new form of government, the government will be able to make a move on all private property.
Alternatviely, they want to invest in insane companies/founders on the off chance that they actually make it.
>But another theory is: No, those investors really want to be lied to. Those investors are holding a competition of the form “who can sound the most excited and persuasive and crazy when they lie to us,” and they give their money to the winner. They wouldn’t put it quite that way. But what the investors want is a fantasist, a wild-eyed dreamer, a visionary who sees the world not as it is but as it could be. They want someone who looks at $1 million in revenue and sees $10 million. They want someone who looks at some blueprints for an electric truck and sees hundreds rolling off the production line. They want someone who looks at a finger-prick blood test that doesn’t work and sees one that does work. They want someone who believes in something that nobody else believes in, an out-of-consensus visionary who wants to change the world. Obviously obviously obviously they would prefer it if this person’s wild belief comes true, if she succeeds in changing the world. But the first step is to back founders with crazy ideas. And then if one of them works out, that pays for 10 that are just crazy.
>This theory is also well supported! Lots of venture capitalists will say it out loud! But also, like, man, look at the entire history of SoftBank Group Corp. Look at how SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son met WeWork’s Adam Neumann, and Neumann pitched him on some vision of office-space-rental changing the world, and Son gave Neumann $3.1 billion. And, famously, “Mr. Neumann has told others that Mr. Son appreciated how he was crazy—but thought that he needed to be crazier.” You don’t say that and then turn around and check every line of the financial projections for exaggerations and unjustified assumptions. If you invest in startups by (1) meeting crazy people and (2) telling them to be crazier, your main investment criterion is not scrupulous accuracy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-31/theran...
These people may be accomplished in their own right, but they know little about business. They are there for lunch, the fat fee, and to pose.
And when a big company has a NUMBER of these types, i.e. two or more, they have an authoritarian/secrecy problem.
How do they get to this position without having been senior execs?
Getting hired onto the board 18 months after retiring from government (possibly the delay was due to being distracted by getting onto military contractor General Dynamics' board) is the other half of the back scratching arrangement that powers the corporate-political machine that rules the country.
As to how they found him in the first place, presumably friends of friends of parents, their siblings, husbands, wives, etc. Her parents were in political circles in DC, they were good friends with CIA agents, father was an Enron VP, mother was a legislative director for some congressman. It's all very incestual in Washinton, kind of like old royalty.
You don't invest in something that's changing the world, you're investing in something that gains value, changing the world is just the narrative to get the sucker downstream to jump on board
EDIT: to add something less controversial, i can recommend the book "the key man" of a similar bluff in the impact investing space
When you're sat on stage next to Bill Clinton people assume someone somewhere has done some due diligence already. Turns out there are a lot more jobs out there to do with marketing, hype, and event planning than there are doing fact checking.
Edit: Come to think of it, Clinton was also a president that didn't start or prolong a pointless war, on the scale of the war on terror, Vietnam or Korea.
In the documentary, they focused a lot on the engineering challenges of the machine they were making. The blood samples would spill, which would gum up the mechanical workings of the machine and make a huge mess and contaminate all the other samples. The documentary claimed that Theranos started doing demos where they would pretend to put the blood samples into the machine, but really take it to a lab bench and run the tests there, and then report the results back.
That implies to me that at least some of their tests were actually possible to do. I left the documentary thinking "someone should simply do this again, solve the mechanical/robotics problem, and not lie about it and this could still be a game changing technology". But then I've seen other sources (like your comment here) claiming that the basic science of what they were trying to do was impossible/fraudulent from the beginning.
Which is true?
1. The basic equipment they built simply didn't work at all
2. Their workaround trick of getting a finger prick blood draw, dilute it with water and run the test on a Qwest machine produced wrong results.
3. The fundamental approach itself was unviable. You can't get reliable results from a finger prick.
Theranos failed on all fronts except being able to attract investments from non experts.
But, the blood chemistry tests - the second, quantitative goal - are far worse. Those are supposed to produce results with error bars, I'd guess at least +/- 10% accuracy is what you want (I'm not a doctor or nurse). But if you have a finger prick, well, what about evaporation of liquid volume? You can see it happening on a really good scale, 10 ul will evaporate away pretty fast. Also, is a finger prick (capillary) going to be like blood from a vein?
The problem is that precision with tiny volumes is possible, but requires massive preparation and dedicated professionals and certainly doesn't scale easily. Any such system would have to be calibrated daily, tested (with known standards), then samples would be run, then you test it again... Let alone cross contamination and about a hundred other problems. Furthermore - 26 different quantitative tests at once???
So, that's the kind of thing I meant when talking about the easier detection goal (where 26 pos/neg 'is the gene there' tests on a single sample might be plausible) vs. the much harder quantitative goal.
But not to the extent of "One drop of blood from your finger can provide accurate tests on 26 different types of tests" Especially when some of those tests are only accurate with a large sample of blood
Long story, but they needed an entire tube of my blood to count 4 particles in the microscope. A drop of blood would not have enough things in it to count. Real life is discrete, and often we need a big sample just to get enough things to count.
That's why I always though Theranos was a fraud.
"due diligence" processes are in practice a lot less stringent or rigorous than an outsider would expect them to be given the amount of money involved. Companies get bought based on glorified sales pitches and nobody looks too hard at what they're buying is the unfortunate truth of the matter. Investors are no better.
At the stage where you’re selling a company, you’re expected to have sales, metrics, and various track records that can be verified, hence the intensive due diligence. And usually the acquiring company has in-house expertise on the domain, and is capable of doing the due diligence.
Early stage startups have none of that, just an idea, things the team have done before as proof they can execute, and sometimes some social proof like TED talks or high-profile board members.
The challenge of doing due diligence then is that most general VCs that invest across a broad range of domains lack the in-house expertise to fully vet all of them. They can hire SME advisors, or ask around in their network, and should. But it’s possible for things to slip through the cracks sometimes.
Turtles all the way down.
We happend to know one of the newer investors and asked who did technical due dilligence, because from what we could tell the primary product was just a bunch of outdated open source software glued together and general build on 15 year old tech. We got a very angry call from the CEO telling us “to mind our own fucking business”. We don’t work for them anymore.
I'd push back on this a bit - not because it's wrong in the case of Theranos, but because it's often wrong in the general case. A lot of the time 'industry experts' go on about how some new approach is impossible for X reason and they're often wrong.
Tesla is a good example of this (some people are still saying EVs can't work even today).
You really have to get in the weeds yourself to understand whether something is possible or not rather than deferring to others most of the time. I do agree though that her investors didn't do that.
She was also able to get famous people invested and on her board which I think compounded things.
If you look at the investors, with few exceptions, they were _not_ sophisticated VC firms with experience in the area. Most of them were, for want of a better classification, elderly rich people. This should probably, in retrospect, have been a huge red flag.
Gullible or just willing to take a risk on something that may get them a return on their investment before it all collapsed?
Uber was impossible, because it was illegal.
Amazon was impossible, as you couldn't pack and ship stuff that cheaply.
Personal computers were at one point considered ludicrous.
Oversell and underdeliver. Fraud works great until it doesn’t.
-A rocket made of steel
-Landing a rocket anywhere
-Landing a bigger rocket anywhere
-Landing a rocket on solid ground
-Landing a big rocket on the ground
and a lot of smaller things in between.
I read many plausible looking reports on the non-feasability of these things often came with the backing of professors at respected universities and they were all wrong.
Sometimes it goes the other way.
I'd really love that myth of SpaceX doing the impossible with landing rockets to die. Also because they don't have to, they were the first to do so. That alone is really impressive. Whether or not it is profitable is impossible to tell until SpaceX is publishing audited financials.
This is not unique in the industry to some extent but since SpaceX has no published audits competitors claim they overcharge the government.
Tell stakeholders you're working on it. Tell them you're ahead of everyone else. Tell them that the experts are wrong. Tell them it's coming very soon. Update them on the details of your progress. Don't tell them it's done when it's not.
That clear line is simply "are you telling a material lie about the present?" In Theranos' case, there were numerous instances when Holmes lied about the current capabilities of her company and its tech that she knew to be false. That is very different from making overly optimistic assessments about future capabilities.
Would love to hear any stories about a company that "faked it" when talking about their present day capabilities but we're able to "make it" before the fraud was discovered.
The use of exaggeration, vague, misleading and/or conflicting statements, labels, or depictions can really blur that line.
Determining whether a statement is a lie is not always a straightforward and undisputed process.
Tesla has delivered a performant EV that is nice to drive in and is comparable to other luxury vehicles. It's not exactly faking for quite some time.
... is listed today as an option when configuring any vehicle on tesla.com
All those examples (and all of yours) are from computers. Blood tests are different from computers. You cannot assume that, just because great things happened with computers, the same things can happen in all walks of life.
Jobs had follow-through, he had real products that often lived up to his pitching. His salesmanship was merely half the equation. Holmes only had a poor clone of that salesmanship, with none of the product. Had Theranos had real products, the approach she used in trying to quasi copy the Jobs image/presentation, would have served the promotional purpose effectively, as the media loved it.
If she does, whether she'll use the deep voice is a big question.
They don't have the software, the core of the product.
And the fsd beta testers had to sign NDAs.
Radio/Computer dispatch predates Uber. Where Uber got innovative, legally speaking, was making a Black Car service (can't be hailed from the street) just work with scheduling in minutes instead of calling ahead a few hours beforehand.
> Amazon was impossible, as you couldn't pack and ship stuff that cheaply.
Sears did it a hundred year prior here in America.
Personal Computers on the other hand... that's almost all innovation with a dash of unregulated (garage companies, surreptitious deals, etc).
Also I don't think you picked good examples.
Uber wasn't the first taxi app so it was definitely possible (IIRC both mapquest & google maps had a taxi tie-in at one point). Amazon used to charge for shipping so the cost of pack & ship is irrelevant (they weren't doing the current VC model of giving out dollars for 50 cents). See https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det... .
Personal computers were ludicrous at a time when a computer took up more than a whole room. Just like flying cars are ludicrous but technology changes and thats why due diligence matters, is this company developing any technology or are they lieing.
What legally distinguishes taxis and requires medallions in many cities is the ability for passengers to “hail” an unknown taxi from the sidewalk and get a ride. (Uber didn’t start out offering taxis, but now some of the vehicles that they make available are also taxis.)
You cannot “hail” an Uber on the street and get a ride in it (unless that Uber, now, happens to also be a taxi). You had to book trips in advance. The trips might have been booked only a few minutes in advance, but that was the legal distinction between these two classes of transportation.
I am not aware of there being any regulation involved if you wanted to arrange a ride from the Seattle airport to the Space Needle with me as your driver on a certain date for a certain price, for example. Or 10 minutes from now. (Actually that’s a bad example. I believe there are certain areas of the city where drivers have to offer city-regulated fixed price fares either to the airport or from the airport or both, to certain sections of downtown. It’s a relatively small area though; I don’t know if it includes the Space Needle or not.)
In fact, Uber was able to grow so quickly because so many of these “private car for hire” services already existed in major cities. The cars were often owner-operated small businesses, with one car or a small fleet of vehicles and employees (with the owner typically being one of the drivers). They were able to tap into this excess supply and put it to use. At least that was the case in Seattle where I spoke to many Uber drivers during its early years, all of whom had existing businesses and wanted to give me their business card to cut out the middleman (Uber). They used Uber to gain additional business during downtime from their other clients, and often offered their business cards to riders before Uber started cracking down on that [1].
Originally if you had a relationship with a private car service and you were planning trips days ahead, then you could typically get a better price than Uber would offer for market rate pricing (once its low promotional discount pricing eased up) with no advanced planning. (However Uber now appears to offer the ability to schedule rides up to 30 days in advance; I don’t know if this change is the fare or not). Since Uber takes a cut of the transaction you can probably still get better pricing from individual private services. The value that Uber offers for most passengers in the ability to get reliable high quality transportation on demand. (High quality in the sense that poor quality drivers are removed from the platform)
Uber provided legitimate value by connecting the supply of private-cars-for-hire with the passengers who wanted to hire them, creating a sort of marketplace. (Not a true marketplace because Ubers set the price of fares; but I’m marketplace in the sense that drivers and passengers can choose to use the platform to connect and conduct a transaction of driving for hire.) Uber won by providing a superior experience for both parties having a reputation system for both sides with a 5-star score.
How many people reading this have had the experience of ordering a taxi and having it arrive late or not at all? Or have simply been frustrated by the lack of visibility into when it will arrive, or whether it’s even coming, when you need to get to the airport? Or when you get to your destination you learn that “the credit card reader is not working”? (which is illegal in many/most cities). I’ve certainly had all of these experiences in many cities with taxis.
Taxi drivers experienced no real penalties for misbehavior like falsely claiming their credit card reader is not working, or for not maintaining it in working order, or for taking tourists on a “scenic route“ to their destination” (unless a passenger called the taxi company and report them - and who would bother? Plus I don’t necessarily know the local law in the area, like whether the taxi is required to have a working credit card reader; and in the days when Uber was building traction, I might not have had mapping software on my phone so as to know whether the taxi was taking me on an unnecessarily long route.)
Uber provided a legitimately better product experience by solving these problems. You could see your vehicle as it traveled to you, eliminating the uncertainty around whether transportation was coming and an ETA for its arrival. You could enter your destination and Uber would provide turn by turn driving instructions that the driver was expected to follow to get to the destination following a close-to-optimal path. If the transportation provider was rude or provided poor service, then you could give them a bad rating, and poor service providers were be removed from the platform. Similarly bad customers that were drunk and misbehaved and did things like throw up in the vehicle would also receive a poor rating and might find themselves kicked off the platform after repeating that type of behavior.
This reputation system was completely missing from taxis and is one of the reasons why they were so dysfunctional in my opinion.
The vast majority of Uber’s growth and expansion was in the unregulated or lightly regulated area of arranging transportation ahead of time between passenger and driver. So long as the driver has a regular driver license in most cities, rides-for-hire that are arranged in advance not regulated, or are minimally regulated (though Uber/Lyft-targeted regulation have appeared in response to their presence).
[0] Various cities subsequently banned it or limited it after the fact, partially in response to political pressure from things like taxi unions, or other reasons; but the core business model was not originally illegal in typical cities.
[1] IMO, I don’t think it’s necessary for Uber to prevent high-end drivers from offering their professional business card when the trip is complete if they do so in a professional way. What Uber offers is the ability to get a ride at any place at any time; I don’t want to have a stack of business cards from private car services in my wallet that I dial one after the other to see if they are free to pick me up — with the same lack of visibility and accountability that taxis used to have.
A catastrophic vehicle failure at highway speeds could cause death but these kinds of failures are not especially likely, and drivers are expected to be able to reasonably handle circumstances they may encounter. The most dangerous circumstance I can think of off the top of my head that is not whether related would be the explosive decompression of a tire at highway speed, leading to loss of control of the vehicle. While the car might begin to swerve, a driver should react to this and keep the vehicle under control while they navigate to the shoulder. Catastrophic failure of brakes isn’t a common occurrence, and brakes begin to squeak when they are wearing down; the entire brake system would have to fail.
Interestingly, the FAA does make this distinction for pilots licenses: if you are going to fly someone in an aircraft for hire, then a private pilots license (PPL) is not sufficient, and you need a commercial license - even if you’re operating the same aircraft. You can split the costs of travel with someone if you’re both flying to the same destination, but you cannot fly someone else for hire and charge them for everything (in other words, operate a small airline or a charter service).
I can think of a number of good reasons for this: among other things, most adults with driver licenses quickly develop hundreds or thousands of hours behind the wheel of a car, and if the car malfunctions you can simply stop (most of the time — driving in extreme weather conditions being an exception to this). Private pilots engaged in general aviation may take years to reach 1000 hours flying an aircraft, whereas a professional pilot probably flies 1000 hours each year; and has a rigorously routine re-training and certification schedule (from what I understand) because an aircraft malfunction in the air is a very serious situation. Plus the amount of information that pilots need to know in order to fly safely is substantially greater than what drivers need to know; the maneuvers that pilots need to execute are much more cognitively and mechanically intensive, and the concurrent task workload is much higher.
A private pilot engaged in general aviation is the one taking on the risk of an accident, along with anyone they bring along (e.g. friends/family). When a (non-pilot) passenger pays someone else to fly them, they have little understanding of the risks involved in the activity - whereas most adults know how to drive or could easily get a license; and even if they don’t, they understand the risks of road travel - whereas non-pilots have few understanding of the risks of air travel.
Now, it might be harder to distinguish someone who can do it well and who'll do it poorly, but that's another issue.
What's interesting with Theranos is the composition of it's board... It's exclusively older men with little to no expertise on the subject matter (Channing Robertson might be an exception to the latter rule). Not a single rising female Silicon Valley executive or professor was invited to join, which is surprising considering how much she was advocating for more women in SV.
Maybe she knew that female executives and founders wouldn't have the same reaction to a wide eyed conventionally attractive 19 years old blonde as the 40+ years old men she was used to "deal" with...
I mean, we all know how Marissa Mayer got the job...
Honestly, how? Charm is one thing but some people might consider other more physical means. I'm not familiar with any story but I never payed much attention to Marissa Mayer's carrier to be frank.
(b) The original idea was that a patient would have one of these things _in their house_; a patient can't reasonably do a venous blood draw on themselves, but they can do a finger prick. There are some real working tests that work this way for this reason; HIV self-tests are normally finger-prick tests, say.
But by the time they'd repositioned as "the machines are in a pharmacy, or maybe a central lab", yeah, it made no sense anymore.
I mean, if I could walk into a Walgreens, choose from a menu of lots of different tests at transparent, low prices (IIRC a lot of their prices were great), get a normal, standard venous blood draw, and then have that draw analyzed while I finishes shopping at Walgreens so I could get my results in 15-20 minutes, I think that would be a fantastic experience.
Is there some reason the above is not possible or viable?
Also, the former seems to be a harder problem to solve than the latter.
Context: I was approached by a recruiter and I couldn't understand how Theranos distinguished itself from other labs or get any data when I tried to do diligence on their claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/opinion/elizabeth-holmes-...
Are there some tests that need extremely large amounts of blood that the patient cannot provide? Or is the point to improve the patient's experience?
When I give blood for testing, there is no difference in my experience as a patient, however many vials are taken, it just takes a bit longer. What am I missing?
Coronavirus (COVID-19): Press Conference with Michael Mina, 02/24/21
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/coronavirus-covid...
You have confused gullibility with willful ignorance.
EDIT: Oh yes, I 100% agree [1] that her outsized personal charisma was a large part of it!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674285
EDIT2: You're right, I got the MeToo timeline wrong. I seem to have remembered anti-sexism momentum building up long before 2017 but yea the actual hashtag and Weinstein stuff was in the news long after the company rose.
By the time MeToo started, Theranos had been sued by investors, Walgreens, and CMS. Additionally, Holmes was banned from running labs and Theranos had failed many inspections with severe penalties. Theranos was all but dead by the time MeToo took off.
What really happened (according to my recollection of reading Bad Blood) is that Holmes never really connected with the medical community. Anyone with any domain expertise knew her tech claims were impossible. She used her personal connections to generals, politicians, and wealthy individuals to spin this web of lies and keep raising money. Most of the Silicon Valley Investor elite had nothing to do with Theranos.
I really dislike your interpretation of events. Not only because it makes no sense with the actual history but you play on stereotypes & generalizations to make a point. Tech certainly needs more female founders but you're not helping by twisting what really happened.
1) https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-me-too-timeline...
2) https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/tech/elizabeth-holmes-therano...
Working with such small volumes to obtain quantitive estimates of blood chemistry is so implausible, as you are introducing uncontrollable variability - micro-evaporation, even tissue localization issues, I mean all the trained blood chemistry specialists knew this. I worked a little with DNA microfluidics, and it works because it's not quantitative.
Now, what they could have done is just stuck to pos/neg tests, i.e. 'are you infected with this virus or not' which is a lot more plausible as you don't have to meet a quantitative goal, just a detection goal. Also, one-stop STD screening for HIV / herpes / etc. is possible too (I suggested this and someone responded, 'new company name: ClapTrap").
It's really kind of sad, as Theranos might have been able to pull that off (although new management would probably be required), and then they'd have been positioned to do all the COVID testing (which was a major problem in the initial US response).
What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird.