Theranos was transparent about the overhyping from the very beginning to somebody with an understanding of bio. It's more shocking that so much of the "tech" media bought it.
Imagine a bunch of old-school bankers or Fortune 500 CEOs from the 90s trying to pick a winning software business. They know "business" so they should be able to apply their knowledge to the software world easily, would be their reasoning. Silicon Valley's picks in biotech, like Theranos, have fairly transparently misapplied "knowledge" in the same way. They look for all the wrong things, attributes that work well in software but not other places: 1) confidence bordering on arrogance, 2) dismissal of experts and standard knowledge disguised as an attempt to "innovate.", and 3) a chance to "hop on" to a rising founder/CEO before they've proven themselves and become super expensive. Similarly, be skeptical of other SV health efforts (such as Google's) unless there are real scientists behind it and also real experience in biotech (not tech).
Complete Genomics (next to LinkedIn and Google) is an example of what happens to a biotech company that has really great tech, but runs the business like a tech company rather than a biotech company. Scale goes completely sideways, they miss the market, and get sold off to a bigger fish and most likely will languish.
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Theranos was transparent about the overhyping from the very beginning to somebody with an understanding of bio. It's more shocking that so much of the "tech" media bought it.
Imagine a bunch of old-school bankers or Fortune 500 CEOs from the 90s trying to pick a winning software business. They know "business" so they should be able to apply their knowledge to the software world easily, would be their reasoning. Silicon Valley's picks in biotech, like Theranos, have fairly transparently misapplied "knowledge" in the same way. They look for all the wrong things, attributes that work well in software but not other places: 1) confidence bordering on arrogance, 2) dismissal of experts and standard knowledge disguised as an attempt to "innovate.", and 3) a chance to "hop on" to a rising founder/CEO before they've proven themselves and become super expensive. Similarly, be skeptical of other SV health efforts (such as Google's) unless there are real scientists behind it and also real experience in biotech (not tech).
Complete Genomics (next to LinkedIn and Google) is an example of what happens to a biotech company that has really great tech, but runs the business like a tech company rather than a biotech company. Scale goes completely sideways, they miss the market, and get sold off to a bigger fish and most likely will languish.