Friend recently told me that when Theranos first hit the news as a darling startup, his MIT Microfluidics PhD friends went to see what the novel science was about. Naturally they read her paper and ... They couldn't find anything new/special in the paper and were left scratching their heads.

Maybe VC stronger connections with scientists, not just technologies when doing due diligence?

By the way this is a non sequitur but I find it poetically ironic that Theranos HQ is located on Page Mill Road where WSJ's Silicon Valley branch used to be located back in the day.

"UCSF charges Theranos more than $300 for a comprehensive metabolic panel, said a person familiar with the matter. Theranos’s website shows that patients who get the same test at one of the company’s blood-draw sites pay just $7.19. A comparison of all the tests done by UCSF for Theranos shows that the company appears to be incurring losses on many of those tests."

If correct, anyone have a legitimate rationale for Theranos doing this?

Theranos operates under the explicit assumption blood Is homogeneous for a large number of markers and that any two nanotainer sized samples will be identical. If they are not, then in principle nanotainers can not work because the sample size is too small.

I am just so amazed Theranos was able to raise so much $$ on basically a wink and a smile without and due diligence by the investors. Everyone was distracted by the blonde blue eyed Stanford dropout in the Steve Jobs outfit! And now Theranos is blowing through investors $$ outsourcing their tests to UCSF because their tech has failed. Hope WSJ keeps kicking the tires on this.

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Paraphrasing Ocar Wilde: "She's not that pretty."

It looks like the WSJ has it in for Theranos. Is there some backstory behind it? Did Elizabeth do something to Murdock?

I can't help but shake the feeling some of the bad vibes in this thread, and at Theranos in general, are people excited about seeing a woman CEO fail publicly because it protects the narrative that women are getting undeserved special privileges in today's society. I feel like similar stories of "fake it til you make it" are often valorized here.

Of course I have no reason for believing that. Hopefully I'm wrong. But my spidey sense is tingling. Am I miscalibrated?