[joezydeco]

I honestly believe Holmes, as a sophomore at Stanford University, believed she had come across an idea that nobody had ever thought of before (low-volume microfluidic immunoassays).

The exception is that this science had already been explored, for decades, by the major companies that specialized in this technology. There simply was nothing to show that worked, yet, so there was nothing to commercialize. And the big players aren't going to publish their interim research, or Holmes wasn't motivated to actually do the homework.

She wasn't the first to think of it, but had enough traction (combined with a vaccuum of commercial products) to convince people she had, or had some mystery secret sauce that was going to make it work.

The fact that Theranos hired Cass Grandone, an Abbott Diagnostics exec that pioneered the previous generation of microparticle immunoassay/ELISA technology, and Grandone walked away after six months shows that he knew their science never worked, and was never going to work.

[kolpa]

Holmes' lab lead / advisor and orignal bizdev lead was a Dean of Engineering at Stanford. It's not just a sophomore not doing her homework; it's a $$$-eyed senior tenured professor at a premier research university who perpetrated and perpetuated this.

[Nomentatus]

A Steve Jobs-like ability to live in her own reality distortion field, plus much of the salesmanship, but minus Steve's very acute (not perfect) sense of what currently impossible problems were on the cusp of being solved, creating future practical products.

There were two companies that I simply couldn't understand, at all, from media reports in the last couple decades. One was Enron, 'tother Theranos. Turned out there was a reason why.

[kolpa]

Jobs's job was to look at stuff and see what he could sell, and to demand that employees invent more stuff to sell. Holmes' job was to invent stuff on demand. She tried (and failed) at a much harder job.

[Nomentatus]

Jobs set the tasks, often demanding very specific inventions and advances - plug and play networking for NeXT, a vastly cheaper mouse mechanism, etc, etc. Only in hindsight can those marked advances be taken for granted. Often very correctly. He was an engineer, starting on the front line as she did, just not the best - I don't know that she was, either.

[Sangermaine]

Yeesh, the Hacker News spin on stuff like this is absurd.