Quartz reports on the turbulence of biotech company Theranos:
In 2015, Stanford Business School published a fawning interview with Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, the now-discredited biotech company that claimed to have invented cheap, effective, and revolutionary blood-testing technology.
In the interview, Holmes said her road to success “wasn’t weighted by influences that I couldn’t do it,” and, perhaps most tellingly, said would-be billionaires should avoid backup plans: “I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted that you’re not going to succeed.”
That thinking on Jan. 6 resulted in the announcement of 155 layoffs (paywall)—40% of the company’s staff. Those job losses, The Wall Street Journal reported, come on top of 340 cuts in October, leaving Theranos with about a quarter of the staff it had last August. In a statement, awkwardly titled “Company Re-engineers Operations,” the company said it has “identified a core team of 220 professionals to execute on its business plans,” and that its rejiggered executive team has “substantial additional regulatory, compliance, and operational expertise.”
Maybe it’s just the engineer in me, but this doesn’t sound like an obscure legal problem, but rather the reality that Your Solution Doesn’t Work. It might even be A Bloody Fraud. It could even be I Must Be Part Of The Game.
Which doesn’t have anything to do with respecting your customers, nothing to do with social responsibility. Now, I haven’t researched any further, although I’ve heard rumbles about the troubles of Theranos for years. So I suppose I’m just troubled – why not shut the company down and be done with it? Surely it’s not hard to prove the technology does or doesn’t work, it seems to be a well-defined and, if I dare, an unsubtle problem to prove solved.
I’m puzzled.
