
DFJ's Draper: There's Nothing Wrong with Theranos [video] - uptown
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-06-23/dfj-s-draper-there-s-nothing-wrong-with-theranos
======
dimdimdim
Unbelievable - even if he said Theranos is trying to get their shit together
and there have been some mistakes, it would make sense. To say its just a
smear campaign is ridiculous - what about the thousands of results they
withdrew as they admitted it was wrong?

[http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years-
of...](http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years-of-edison-
blood-test-results-1463616976-lMyQjAxMTI2NTEzOTcxODkxWj)

It's even more ridiculous to call her one of the greatest female
entrepreneurs!

I had a lot of respect for Draper but this is so disappointing. Just to make
sure their investment does not hit a big ZERO value, they seem to be siding
with an entrepreneur who has wronged everyone! What a shame!

~~~
xiaoma
>"I had a lot of respect for Draper but this is so disappointing."

Didn't you ever read _Founders at Work_ and what DFJ did to the Hotmail guys?

~~~
dimdimdim
No, but can you give a gist?

~~~
phonon
[http://imgur.com/YgR3UG2](http://imgur.com/YgR3UG2)

~~~
dimdimdim
thanks!

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w1ntermute
The rights to the Theranos movie (Adam McKay, JLaw) have been picked up by
Legendary Pictures[0]. Looks like the tentative title is _Bad Blood_. Too bad
they didn't go with the HN-recommended title, _Unicorn Blood_ [1].

0: [http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/06/jennifer-
lawrenc...](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence-
theranos-elizabeth-holmes)

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11876937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11876937)

~~~
dmix
From the Vanity Fair link:

> “They basically tell the story of how Elizabeth Holmes created these
> fraudulent blood-testing machines, raised $9 billion through venture
> capitalists in Silicon Valley, and refuses to admit they don’t work even
> when it is obvious the testing is inaccurate,” says a studio source familiar
> with how the project was pitched.

This old hat: they were _valued_ at $9 billion by VCs while _raising_ $400
million in 2014.

------
joezydeco
Their top spokeswoman just resigned today:

[http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Theranos-
spokesw...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Theranos-spokeswoman-
Brooke-Buchanan-to-exit-8323546.php)

~~~
w1ntermute
Full text: [https://notehub.org/iugbf](https://notehub.org/iugbf)

------
stanfordkid
Tim Draper is, quite frankly, the Trump of Venture Capital. He's a great,
nurturing guy though in terms of personality and affect.

~~~
dimdimdim
I love his song though:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTrz6lMQGAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTrz6lMQGAs)
:)

------
dimdimdim
Something seems awfully wrong with HNs rating system - somehow this story is
plummeting way soon down the list :)

Seems like a Google - Hilary thing :)

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exolymph
Can you put [video] in the title?

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yueq
stockholm syndrome?

~~~
joezydeco
sunk-cost fallacy.

------
projectramo
And you know what: we can't dismiss him.

The interesting thing here is that we can't just say that's not true.

I am not making a larger point about solipsism or our inability to know
reality. I mean the much narrower point of not being able to tell -- from the
press -- whether a company actually has a technology that works.

Think about the implications that has for investing in public stocks.

Let's ignore the cases of fraud like Enron etc., and focus on an ordinary
company that honestly reports what it is doing.

EDIT: I have followed the Theranos story, so I know about the legal actions
etc.

What I can't tell is if there is poor science at the heart of it, or it is a
case of poor scaling and application of good science.

~~~
conistonwater
> _I mean the much narrower point of not being able to tell -- from the press
> -- whether a company actually has a technology that works._

There has always been a simple solution to this: it is the company's _own job_
to clearly demonstrate that it has a working technology.

If you view it that way, then the press's inability to prove it one way or the
other doesn't matter because the responsibility lies with the company. In
fact, Theranos was quite unusual among lab companies from the beginning in
that it didn't follow the path other companies followed in showing they had a
working technology. Anything less than a clear proof by the company, and the
subsequent confusion is the company's own fault.

~~~
projectramo
To demonstrate it to whom?

------
grandalf
Theranos technology is more like typical startup tech. How many bugs did
Facebook's feed algorithm suffer before it finally got stable? How many pages
of sub-optimal search results has Google returned? How many major security
bugs have been found in Windows, Chrome, Linux, etc?

Healthcare is one area where many people (particularly Americans) have the
absurd idea that everything has to work perfectly.

Think of the level of indignation people feel when a surgeon who spent 15
years beyond college doing advanced training (for little pay) makes a small
mistake that costs someone's life. Or an OB misjudges something and ends up in
a major lawsuit.

But for other jobs, mistakes are a part of life. In software we are proud to
decrease our bugs through testing and improved techniques and processes, but
nobody expects perfection. Even mass market products like TurboTax ship with
tons of bugs. Lawyers routinely let innocent people wind up in jail out of
pure incompetence.

We need to get over it. Theranos is doing something very smart and while it
needs some additional refinement, it is pretty clear that doing large scale
blood testing/monitoring is the future of diagnostic medicine.

The irrationality we have about healthcare being perfect is a) false (mistakes
get swept under the rug all the time) and b) counterproductive because it
gives us a sense of mastery over our destiny that we simply do not (yet) have.

Let's also not forget that medicine is plagued by a very irrational risk
aversion, which is why many useful treatments are available around the world
but not in the US.

~~~
dimdimdim
Not when your bug can kill a person or damage his organs due to wrong
medication give because of a wrong test result.

[http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years-
of...](http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years-of-edison-
blood-test-results-1463616976-lMyQjAxMTI2NTEzOTcxODkxWj)

There is a reason Healthcare is regulated and required multiple degrees of
testing before it can be released to the general public -- imagine every new
"health startup" pushing new drugs and then saying they'll "fix a bug" when a
couple of folks die. The comparison is immature.

~~~
grandalf
> The comparison is immature

Quite the opposite. Health regulations suffer from a number of perverse
incentives that economists have studied extensively:

Drugs are needlessly delayed in getting to market. Doctors and patients are
perfectly capable of assessing the risk/reward of an unproven treatment by
looking at scientific studies. The FDA adds a layer of false-security... in
spite of its sluggish process, the FDA is often quite wrong and drugs that
were approved get taken off the market. For other drugs, they are delayed for
several years and much harm is caused. Economists have studied this and found
that regulators cause much needless suffering and death by being excessively
risk-averse.

Consider too illegal drugs. Our regulators criminalize many substances,
resulting in black market behavior and significant crime and other negative
effects. Here too, backward regulations cause much unnecessary suffering,
death (and crime too).

For people who do not understand healthcare, the world appears quite black and
white. In reality no treatment works all of the time, and no test is without
its share of inaccurate results. Doctors are equipped with enough Bayesian
reasoning ability to use the available information wisely.

Also, a physician should not base any decisions on a single blood test result.
That is not the proper way to use such tests. If it were, doctors and medical
training would not be necessary. Most tests have a significant probability of
false positive and false negative results, so docs are trained to consider the
results only in the context of other diagnostic clues.

