
The ugly, unethical underside of Silicon Valley - aburan28
http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/28/the-ugly-unethical-underside-of-silicon-valley/
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Mz
_“What if Theranos is the canary in the coal mine?” says Roger McNamee, a
40-year VC veteran and managing director at Elevation Partners. “Everyone is
looking at Theranos as an outlier. We may discover it’s not an outlier at
all.”_

Eh, it seems to be a pretty obvious outlier. It was valued at $10 Billion at
one time, having not shipped a thing. Not too many companies hit that
valuation even with shipping product.

That doesn't mean fraud is not more rampant than we want to believe. But I
think, yes, Theranos is an outlier.

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readhn
Theranos is not an outlier. From my experience in biotech its pretty common
"to stretch" the truth and hide/not mention inconvenient facts. Not many get
to multi billion evaluations but many do get multi million funding this
way.... And then go bust.

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eli_gottlieb
A family member of mine left a biotechnology job for similar reasons: death-
march management, disrespect for scientists, and the obvious fact that the
only purpose of the company was to pile IP into a closet, never to ship a
product.

It was a straight-up exploitative scam, but for people with PhDs.

~~~
readhn
Yep. The patenting process - talk about stretching the truth - a lot of the
stuff is put in there just so other potential companies would be blocked from
doing work in this direction. Not based on solid science and results but just
ideas and speculations of the management. I have seen many cases (in biotech
startups) where good knowledgeable scientists would try to do what is right
and would end up getting fired or forced out of companies. The worst is when
management completely takes over and disregards science for business purposes
- seems like what happened with Theranos.

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readhn
We all know, consciously or subconsciously, what it means. We are nearing
another top, a la early 2000s dot com or real estate of 2006-2007. Everything
is cyclical. Too much of a good thing is bad for all of us. It is time for a
lot of pain soon for all of us. It's overdue.

~~~
godzillabrennus
As long as the federal reserve keeps pumping money into the market with QE
while keeping interest rates low there won't be much incentive for anyone to
stop investing in risky stuff like venture funds.

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randycupertino
"Vinod Khosla did not show up at TechCrunch Disrupt to be harangued by some
smartass, know-nothing journalist."

Thought for sure they were about to bring up his beach house blocking public
access to a public beach.

[http://www.indiawest.com/news/global_indian/california-
start...](http://www.indiawest.com/news/global_indian/california-starts-
eminent-domain-process-to-claim-vinod-
khosla-s/article_9b4fc282-cbad-11e6-968e-7ba1a58a0a08.html)

