[jonknee]

This article shows how much the Wall Street Journal really knocked the Theranos story out of the park. It's remarkable that non of the investors or regulators paid half as much of attention.

> One of the only journalists who seemed unimpressed by this narrative was John Carreyrou, a recalcitrant health-care reporter from The Wall Street Journal. Carreyrou came away from The New Yorker story surprised by Theranos’s secrecy—such behavior was to be expected at a tech company but not a medical operation. Moreover, he was also struck by Holmes’s limited ability to explain how it all worked.

Theranos also sounds similar to a cult, which may explain why her staff never figured out that they were a fake company:

> After he wrapped up, the leaders of Theranos stood before their employees and surveyed the room. Then a chant erupted. “Fuck you . . .,” employees began yelling in unison, “Carreyrou.” It began to grow louder still. “Fuck you, Carreyrou!” Soon men and women in lab coats, and programmers in T-shirts and jeans, joined in. They were chanting with fervor: “Fuck you, Carreyrou!,” they cried out. “Fuck you, Carreyrou! Fuck. You. Carrey-rou!”

[dzhu]

"It's remarkable that non [sic] of the investor or regulators paid half as much of attention."

Actually, the regulators paid just as much, if not more attention to Theranos - the article itself asserts this:

> On August 25, 2015, months before the Journal story broke, three investigators from the F.D.A. arrived, unannounced, at Theranos’s headquarters, on Page Mill Road, with two more investigators sent to the company’s blood-testing lab in Newark, California, demanding to inspect the facilities.

According to someone close to the company, Holmes was sent into a panic, calling advisers to try to resolve the issue. At around the same time, regulators from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates laboratories, visited the labs and found major inaccuracies in the testing being done on patients. (The Newark lab was run by an employee who was criticized for insufficient laboratory experience.) C.M.S. also soon discovered that some of the tests Theranos was performing were so inaccurate that they could leave patients at risk of internal bleeding, or of stroke among those prone to blood clots. The agency found that Theranos appeared to ignore erratic results from its own quality-control checks during a six-month period last year and supplied 81 patients with questionable test results.

[enzamatic]

People need to realize their authority comes from regulating sale. They couldn't regulate the device because it was not for sale. At the point that they began selling tests, they could regulate the nanotainer because it's a consumable, essentially sold to the customer with each test. I think they were probably involved as early as they could be.

[bbctol]

It's also noteworthy that "sounding similar to a cult" and "sounding similar to a tech startup" can both be applied...

[jonknee]

Most startups at least have some truth behind them, part of the culty aspect of Theranos is that it was all bullshit kept secret by a single worshiped leader.