- focus is on Balwani, the COO who drove to work in cars with vanity plates on his sports cars that read DAZKPTL and VDIVICI
- Balwani and Holmes met in Beijing as part of a Stanford course in China, she was young and bullied by the other students and Balwani took her under his wing
- apparently Holmes and Balwani were dating, she fired him, they aren't together and because of the ongoing criminal probe have been instructed not to speak with each other
- Balwani had a small war against Glassdoor reviews including having HR post fake ones and pressuring Glassdoor into taking down overly negative ones
- Holmes' weirdly low voice was an act! She's been caught using her normal register.
- They invited VP Biden to tour a fake lab.
Man the onion layers of weirdness just never stop peeling away about this company.
Had the other signals not been there I'd say, whatever, they want to appear more powerful by using "top 10 tips and tricks of persuasion". However given the other controversy and shadiness it just adds to the pile.
They kind of glossed over it, but they were romantically involved? Apart from the age difference which is creepy enough, how was this kosher given she was his superior?
> Holmes' weirdly low voice was an act! She's been caught using her normal register.
I dunno, there's no actual evidence of that though? He just mentioned an anecdote from one employee.
It seems a bit far fetched... How would the overhead of such an act be worth it? And in 10+ years she never slipped up on video? And what about everyone that knows her in real life?
How would the overhead of such an act be worth it? And in 10+ years she never slipped up on video? And what about everyone that knows her in real life?
I actually know someone who does this (disclaimer: an ex-boyfriend of my wife). He's a scrawny little guy, arms like noodles but he puts on this big... booming... voice. He's done it for so long that I guess it's become a habit but far from having the desired effect people just snigger about it behind his back. I guess there was a book or a "guru" at some point that advised this in order to seem more leader-y.
> In 1999, he joined CommerceBid.com as its president and No. 2 executive; it was developing a software program for companies to pit their suppliers against one another for contracts in live online auctions. Business-to-business e-commerce had become hot, and in November 1999, the sector leader—the similarly named Commerce One—acquired the startup for $232 million in cash and stock, though it had just three clients testing its software.
Why aren’t we allowed to criticize these lunatics before their companies fall apart?
It was obvious to many commenters on HN that these people were crooks long before the media caught up. But comments critical of them were often flagged or deleted. Musk’s house of cards receives the same preferential treatment.
How many lives does a wacky billionaire get to destroy before HN stops running interference?
How much blood does a god need to bleed before we stop worshipping them?
The answer, of course, is hindsight bias. It says more about our inability to understand the probabilistic nature of the future than any sort of commentary about the downfall of civilized society.
Call to mind the Michael Dell letter about Apple.
Think in terms of your confidence about the current environment, right now. Would you bet something invaluable -- your children's lives, let's say -- that e.g. Uber will not be worth $10b on public markets in 5 years?
If not, we have to ack there's uncertainty in the moment. It's only after the fact that the probability density function collapses to 1, and we forget about the other options.
It's maybe hindsight that allows us to know whether the schemes of a huckster are going to fail, but it's not hard to see people who are hucksters. They make big promises and don't meet them, and when that happens they just make another promise (usually including excuses or distractions from why they were previously wrong), and people worship them for that. These people are either liars or just wrong most of the time, but people don't seem to care. It's not that it isn't obvious, it's that people don't want to admit what's right there.
Maybe it is from growing up in an environment where I've seen people who love power and control (even if that's only over a very small amount of people), it desn't shock me that ramps up with increasing power and fame.
There are a lot of people on the scene today which are obvious hucksters, but nobody is going to admit that (and some won't) until their lies actually ruin things. Again, see Draper whom even knowing what he does is willing to lie or be delusional about what happened there.
Consider that there's lots and lots of people who are willing to actually give up their lives for weird cult leaders. If that's the case (and those lies are very obvious to all but a small few), there's so much room on the other side of that where you can be equally as manipulative and fraudulent but because it's only business or politics and not religion, people aren't willing to apply the same standard and say, yeah, that guy is a liar who likes people talking about him (or whatever gender).
Usually people in positions of power have actively sought that power, and it attracts a very specific kind of personality.
Are you saying Musk is a huckster who makes big promises and don't meet them because he has hit most of his promises from what I have seen (albeit they are always delayed but that is just his management strategy to incentivize his employees to work harder)?
Didn't mean to target Musk, but he certainly is in the same area. You ever notice how thin-skinned he is towards criticism and how he's constantly pivoting to projects which are years away? Besides the actual lies/exaggerations about Autopilot (people have died because of this), forgive this first title. The important part is the quote:
Tesla reported first-quarter earnings last week, and while they were better than Wall Street expected, the earthshaking news that emerged was that Musk is taking the carmaker in a new strategic direction.
Tesla, which delivered about 50,000 vehicles last year, is aiming to deliver 500,000 in 2018. The production target isn't new, but the timeline is. Tesla had previously said it would build half a million cars a year by 2020.
This did not happen, which led him to Tweet last July that they could deliver 20k cars per month by Dec. This did not happen either. Investors were relieved they managed to hit 2k per week as of March (this is down from the 2.5k they were targeting).
It's really not a difficult tactic. If you have lots of money you can subsidize lots of failure. The failure ends up ignored, but your 10% hit ratio is looked at as though you're some kind of visionary. You can do that for a long time, if you've got the runway. Holmes will probably be running a very big company in about a decade.
> Besides the actual lies/exaggerations about Autopilot
I'm a big Musk fan but Autopilot definitely pisses me off. It's a hugely exaggerated term for laypeople which is why people keep dying on it and I'm highly skeptical they can get full autonomy with their current sensors (and apparently some of his autonomous workers agree which is why they left). You win that round because I agree that is a bullshit promise which will likely be unsolved in its current iteration due to his cop out of "bar regulatory approval".
Your other points are all about timelines which I and most others know he always always always underestimates (I don't even know of one that he actually has hit). However, I still feel as though he hits most of those targets eventually and he is definitely moving way faster than other companies towards the hard problems he is trying to solve which is why I don't care nor believe any of his timeline estimates.
>You ever notice how thin-skinned he is towards criticism
Don't really notice this. Got any examples (I follow tesla and spacex a lot so I'm probably biased towards backing him)?
>How he's constantly pivoting to projects which are years away?
Really> His Tesla master plan has been on point. The only spacex big change I can remember is the huge delays to falcon heavy but that was primarily due to falcon 9 capabilities growing by leaps and bounds cannibalizing almost all of the heavy contracts (also, changing falcon 9 capabilities effects falcon heavy design).
If you go check out /r/enoughmuskspam, you can discover that SpaceX is a failure because they don't have full reusability of Falcon 9 yet, or because they canceled Red Dragon and Grey Dragon, or that BFR is a distraction from the 'fact' that SpaceX is selling commercial launches at a big loss, etc.
And then you compare the user list to /r/ula and /r/nasa and various Tesla shorts groups, and you'll find a similar list of usernames. Hmm.
> Are you saying Musk is a huckster who makes big promises and don't meet them because he has hit most of his promises from what I have seen (albeit they are always delayed
If you promise to deliver something at a particular time and deliver it later, you did not meet your promise.
Wow. There have been negative stories and critical comments about Theranos for years. Do a search for yourself. I feel like it was on HN where I first heard about Theranos as a potential sham.
Somebody in another thread theorized that he's signaling to future business partners. "Do business with me and I will always publicly have your back, no matter what."
It would also signal to downstream investors: I don’t do my due diligence so don’t trust the companies I invest in. VC is a reputation market on both sides of the table so companies will want to take this into consideration.
> Timothy Draper, the well-known venture capitalist, had been a neighbor when the Holmeses lived in California. The children played together. “I gave her her first million bucks to get the business going,” Mr. Draper says. “She totally blows me away with her vision.” [0]
He's not. The first time I pitched him, I was blown away by how quickly he understood our business. He thinks differently, but from what I've seen contrarian bets are a good way to succeed as a VC. He also doesn't care about looking a little kooky or cheesy... sort of refreshing vs the rest of the Bay.
Disclaimer - He passed years ago, but he's an investor in our latest venture.
We can compare her to Shkrerli, who if the media portrayals are accurate is obnoxious so I don’t want to be seen defending him, but it is a great contrast that the Armenian immigrant got 7 years and the pretty WASP got a slap on the wrist.
Can you point to the specific statutes that she violated? "Fraud" is very broad -- I am not clear that she did anything illegally, just unethically and deceptive. We aren't criminalizing how Reddit astroturfed their site. Is the only difference the scope? The investment monies? The potential?
I'm not interested in debating the moral aspects, as I suspect we violently agree. But it's crucial to be specific, against current legal code, when stating things like you did.
Serious question: is a test provider who knowingly provides test results which it knows to be inaccurate and therefore leads patients to wrong diagnoses and potentially treatment, are they criminally liable or only civilly for fraud/breach of contract?
For anyone needing to bypass the paywall, if you google "WSJ Theranos Inc.’s Partners in Blood" in an Incognito window you will generally have no problem getting access. Not guaranteed but works most of the time. Sometimes there will be a pop up to close. Using Incognito increases the likelihood of access if you have previous WSJ use.
It worked for me without problem in this case. If you regularly access the WSJ using this method they may track IPs as well as cookies as they have a differentiated access pattern for social and search links based on identifiable user history. Incognito mode gets around cookie tracking but not IP tracking.
WARNING: clicking this link may try to redirect you through facebook and expose your identity. Also, it didn't work for me as far as bypassing wsj.com to get the full article. I was logged off of facebook, but due to cookies, facebook still knew whom I last logged in as.
If this worked for anyone, please just copy/paste the article text in here... assuming that's allowed.
Wow, I kind of feel bad for Holmes now. Seems like she really got taken advantage of and got romantic love interests confused with how to properly run a company.
Which, if true, is super annoying seeing as she was held up as an example that bucks the trend and stereotypes when it comes to women in entrepreneurship.
How did she get taken advantage of? She commited a billion dollar fraud. All of a sudden just because there's a guy in the picture it's all his playing and she was just a pawn? Don't you think that's extremely patronising?
I'm speaking as someone who went through an emotionally abusive relationship. I think you're significantly downplaying just how impactful shitty role models and power dynamics like this can be.
> I think you're significantly downplaying just how impactful shitty role models
What you said would make sense if we knew that she had him as role model. THEN you could make the case that role models are important and claim that I downplay their importance. But we don't know if she had him as role model, so again you're guessing. I could just as easily make opposite guess: do you know how easy it is to manipulate men by dangling sex in front of them?
- focus is on Balwani, the COO who drove to work in cars with vanity plates on his sports cars that read DAZKPTL and VDIVICI
- Balwani and Holmes met in Beijing as part of a Stanford course in China, she was young and bullied by the other students and Balwani took her under his wing
- apparently Holmes and Balwani were dating, she fired him, they aren't together and because of the ongoing criminal probe have been instructed not to speak with each other
- Balwani had a small war against Glassdoor reviews including having HR post fake ones and pressuring Glassdoor into taking down overly negative ones
- Holmes' weirdly low voice was an act! She's been caught using her normal register.
- They invited VP Biden to tour a fake lab.
Man the onion layers of weirdness just never stop peeling away about this company.