Many people were skeptical, even right here on HN. Sometimes, their voices are drowned out by those that like to accuse the skeptical of being pessimistic. Optimism can be inherently unscientific--it can often be a manifestation of what we want rather than what is scientifically likely. To me, the battle has always been between optimism and realism.
It doesn't feel that much more skeptical than typical HN threads about new companies. And skepticism/confusion was going to be more prevalent given how few HN users (relatively speaking) are in the health field.
Funny enough, if you scroll down far enough, you run into a comment that sounds like it came from a prophet. Or someone experienced in the field:
> The company is all hot air. They have a board full of retired military figure heads that have no experience in medical devices or retail services. Additionally, they do not have any products to show. Look at their patents. They are all very general and broad. There has been NO FDA CLEARANCE for anything they are doing, which raises legal questions. Speaking of legal, search for lawsuits they are involved in. Their core technology is not even theirs. They stole it from someone else.
That the board was heavy DC/military was well-known, or at least public. But I don't think it was well known that Theranos was heavily reliant on using other technology.
Sadly, that Theranos critique came from a one-use throwaway account. So likely an insider (or jealous competitor)?
Filing 'broad' patents is pretty typical. I see that they have 119 patents under the Theranos name. To think of all the work and cooperation that obtaining those patents required, is pretty mind-boggling if in fact it was all bogus. If this is the massive fraud that is being alleged by journalists (and the SEC), then it would require a massive conspiracy to effectuate it. To only hold the CEO accountable in a case like this seems to be lacking resolution. There are other bad actors here that need to be held accountable, much as in Enron. I'm sure many (guilty & innocent) employees are paying a financial price but it appears that more could be done on the consequences side of things.
I'm not there comment you referene, but for around three or four years I have been using theranos' board as a teaching tool in undergraduate entrepreneurship courses.
Once you've got a company with no product and you're committing fraud to stay alive, what would the point be of staffing a board to tell you to kill yourself? What would you get out of that?
Do you think Theranos just didn't realize anything was wrong because the board didn't tell them?
The reason Theranos was always a fraud is it is well known (as in for decades) that you can’t get reliable sampling from a finger prick sample even with a perfect detector.
The reason why is that the blood from a finger prick is a random mixture of veinous and arterial blood with a variable amount of cell debris and contamination from what is on the skin. Not even Kissinger (sorry I mean Lucifer) could give you an accurate diagnosis based on finger prick.
I don't think it's primarily about optimism vs realism.
Those are attitudes, and I think the matter is more epistemological - about what valid conclusions we can draw based on the known details.
For example, if we have incomplete information and we can't draw clear conclusions from it, rather than thinking of what sort of attitude we should take towards it (or optimistic vs cynical) -- what we think is likely the case -- our first step should be to admit the incomplete information and be agnostic about what's actually the truth of the matter.
If there are particular reasons for thinking one option (eg fraud) is likely then you can list first reasons and the facts that support them. Doing so doesn't and shouldn't have to involve an attitude like realism or cynicism.
