
Theranos 2006 pitch deck - chirau
https://www.axios.com/theranos-dek-2197546645.html
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danso
I was impressed with how technical it was. I mean, it does all the things that
Edward Tufte hates about PowerPoint, but it's a pretty barebones text dump on
top of a PowerPoint template, with nothing flash other than charts.

This is not to say that the bullet points or charts correlate to the truth.
Just that I was expecting something more slick/simplified to sell a "big idea"
startup. Did investors actually pass this deck to their technical people to
verify/validate any of the technical claims?

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jnaina
To me it looks like obfuscation through technical jargon overload. The
intended audience were prospective investors who have no real understanding of
medical testing market. The pitch deck seems calibrated to dazzle the
uninitiated in a very unassuming way.

~~~
toufka
To a scientist's eyes it looks like a standard science presentation with all
the interesting bits taken out.

It's a great study on the clash of cultures. A standard scientific
presentation will have those exact slides, along with 40 more that explain
each of those 20. It will last an hour, and will be, ultimately, about a
single thesis/topic. To try to evaluate that topic after the hour is
challenging. To rest many millions of dollars of investment on an abbreviated,
shortened version without having the technical foundation to evaluate it just
seems dangerous.

What you see here is an ultra-compressed version of a scientific presentation
without any of the detail or followup. And then mashed between the business
essentials.

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boulos
Always fascinating to see these (assuming it's real, but it's got the right
set of blandness to suggest it is).

Can I suggest that the URL be replaced with a direct link to the PDF
([https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3319335/Theranos-...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3319335/Theranos-
Inc-PPT-IS-Ppt-2.pdf)) as the wrapper "article" is mostly useless?

