It seems from those comments there that a lot of people on here were quite sceptical to their methods from the start.
There are a lump of people who appear excited in general, sure, but the people who appear to have know-how in the area are more subdued and questioning, even then. There are a fair few comments calling it garbage.
It's cynicism, but that's hard not to contract these days. If you've been around the Internet long enough and know something about anything even remotely scientific or technical, you quickly learn that:
- You can't trust scientific press releases at face value.
- You can't trust companies not to oversell themselves, in particular startups like this, you never take them at face value.
People are much less cynical when a company is open about what it's going to do and how, talking science and engineering instead of marketing & PR bullshit.
Isn't that the good thing though? I know some people dislike the negativity but as long as it's constructive criticism I think it's valuable. I'll take "I think this is a bad idea because of X" over "omg this is so cool!". Of course "I think this is great because of X" is also nice.
In this particular case I think the criticism was warranted, even if you try to only consider what was known at the time. "We are a new startup led by an inexperienced yougester and we have a product that does everything better and cheaper than the industry standard but we won't peer review" seems like a huge red flag. The Forbes fluff piece with strange and rather dubious claims regarding the level of skills of the founder adds a second layer of redflagging on top of that.
Where? The only thing even remotely negative I see in the top comments is questioning why they had so many big names on the board that had nothing to do with startups, biotechnology or medicine.
In hindsight it seems like a way to keep the government away by trying to bribe people in it.
There are a lump of people who appear excited in general, sure, but the people who appear to have know-how in the area are more subdued and questioning, even then. There are a fair few comments calling it garbage.
Many people seem to have called it.