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Elizabeth Holmes's partner raises millions for blood-testing startup

59 points| elorm | 9 months ago |theguardian.com

75 comments

order

tokai|9 months ago

If its possible to keep creating and rug pulling new shitcoins, then it seems obvious that the same can be done with medical start-ups.

What a weird world we are living in.

rchaud|9 months ago

Billy McFarland, famed "entrepreneur" behind Fyre Fest got out of jail and immediately announced plans for raising funds for Fyre Fest 2. Apparently there are enough suckers to go around, so why not just copy/paste the original scam instead of doing the work of tweaking it to boost legitimacy?

https://www.biography.com/crime/a63917214/billy-mcfarland-no...

elorm|9 months ago

OP here. I edited the title from Partner to Lover to distinguish between business and romantic partners but I just found out "Lover" carries an incendiary connotation in American English as opposed to British English.

Not my intention at all....

AlchemistCamp|9 months ago

I grew up in America and didn't find it incendiary at all. The extreme reaction was surprising to me, as well. The word was very common in 80s and 90s songs with no illicit or incendiary connotation whatsoever! In fact, I find headlines phrased like this article's annoying. It's just unclear and poor writing, IMO.

rchaud|9 months ago

How about something simple and accurate like "baby daddy"?

oooyay|9 months ago

Rather than focusing on Holmes and her lover, I'd like to posit some other questions I have with this approach. Let's assume for just a minute that Holmes wasn't trying to rug pull and that she genuinely wanted Theranos to succeed in it's stated mission.

Wouldn't a foundational invention like this 20-30 years ago come out of a university lab? It feels like VC funding is not the right vehicle for the kind of development that takes a lot of time and must work the first time. Those VCs are going to be looking for returns.

CalChris|9 months ago

That was implication of the original con. She was this superstar Stanford undergrad who’d discovered something so radically important she had to drop out of school for the sake of humanity.

forgotpwagain|9 months ago

It is possible that they are licensing technology that was developed in academic science and are raising money to scale it up and get it ultra-standarized for commercial scale.

I agree that the modern Silicon Valley model of VC funding has been spoiled by SaaS startups, where the capital expense is smaller, the timeline to exit is shorter, and pivots are easier. It is not great for deeptech innovation because those require more capital, time, and are more technology-constrained than software. Ironically, modern VC was developed to support semiconductor startups (1970s-90s), but has drifted from that technology-heavy origin.

elorm|9 months ago

She had a recent interview[1] where she claimed she's actively working on her research behind bars and still wants the opportunity to change the world with her invention.

This is not a coincidence at all.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_xyGbUNZ0&pp=ygUWZWxpemFiZXR...]

browningstreet|9 months ago

This would have to factor into any future parole considerations, wouldn’t it?

belter|9 months ago

What would be expected from a complete psychopath.

BurningFrog|9 months ago

If she eventually gets this right and revolutionizes blood-testing, the legend will live forever!

Big "if", I know...

KnuthIsGod|9 months ago

Elizabeth should donate a few millions to the right person near the West Wing and get a pardon.

I understand that justice is for sale in Washington these days.

OutOfHere|9 months ago

Even if the tech has evolved, this family is hardly the one to trust with one's money.

uslic001|9 months ago

As a doctor I called out Elizabeth Home's as a fraud when she first hit the scene. I have no doubt her partner is also a fraud.

jayavanth|9 months ago

This time it's different

mchannon|9 months ago

Just wow.

I think it's an uncomfortable truth that there was some good in Theranos in terms of the unfulfilled needs of society and the potential of diligent work toward realizing those needs with technology.

I don't know how often it's been said by others, but I often think that Theranos would have had an easier time if they hadn't falsified anything. Faking things takes effort too, and aiming a little lower and being less secretive would have been a better outcome. Maybe a different tack is possible through this reboot.

Mr. Evans' silver spoon is worth $10M, so raising $20M against that in such a fraught area is eye-opening. Whether he sees this as part of Elizabeth's redemption arc or just can't quit the hair of the dog that bit him, I guess we'll see.

Elizabeth Holmes' crime wasn't defrauding people, it was defrauding people richer than her. Change my mind.

Most VC's are taking it in the shorts right now anyway, because they're addicted to free money and there's no more free money, and most of them quite frankly suck at spotting good deals. So for the intrepid souls who cast their lot in with Mr. Evans, maybe only Nixon could go to China, and maybe they'll fare better than the stodgy fat-dumb-and-happy B-tier VC's who are not long for this brave new world anyway.

hilux|9 months ago

If Theranos hadn't falsified anything, would they have had a product? My recollection, having read _Bad Blood_, is that they would not.

Good intentions to save the world, without any working (or even possible!) technology, are not investment-worthy.

nullc|9 months ago

There is a sucker born every minute.

Parallels with cryptocurrency where the scam scamcoin token authors just spin up a new one after running off with the funds from their prior one.

ComplexSystems|9 months ago

Awful title; this is her husband, not her "lover."

serf|9 months ago

1: they were never married

2: why is lover so bad?

I see the hate in this discussion for the phrase, but I don't get it.

Is it some modern thing where we're supposed to separate the concept of marriage from sex due to asexual types or some such?

legitimate question : I don't get it. I'm more than willing to avoid the use of lover, but someone at least explain it to me.

would more casual concepts like 'defacto' or 'commonlaw' be better? 'life-partner'? 'co-life strategist' ?

bigmattystyles|9 months ago

Tangent but why does the title here says lover while the article says partner; no fan of Holmes, based on that, a probably (unfair?) low opinion of this guy, but come on.

asveikau|9 months ago

Came here to say this.

The reporting of that guy and his relationship with her definitely caused me to have some negative thoughts and opinions, as in, what's wrong with this guy that he'd be involved with her? Isn't it irresponsible to have kids knowing she was headed for prison? But putting that aside, they have two kids together, which gives him a higher status than "lover".

The wikipedia on them says their status is also oddly ambiguous:

> In mid-2019, Holmes and Evans reportedly married in a private ceremony.[137][138] Holmes and Evans have not directly confirmed whether the two are legally married, and several sources continue to refer to him as her "partner" rather than her husband

belter|9 months ago

I reported what was the actual and correct title and got downvoted for it :-)

j4coh|9 months ago

I’ve just completely lost the ability to tell the difference between satire/parody and reality.

blindriver|9 months ago

This title is ridiculous. He's Holmes's husband, not her "lover". They were married in 2019.

lolinder|9 months ago

Technically they never married, which is why the original article uses a bunch of other phrases to describe their relationship, but agreed that the change from "partner" to "lover" makes the title needlessly provocative. "Partner" was fine.

michael_nielsen|9 months ago

Agreed, & flagged the submission. The actual article is of interest, but I really don't want to reward inflammatory titles.

aerhardt|9 months ago

As clickbait trash, it is nevertheless sublime.

belter|9 months ago

The title is: "Elizabeth Holmes’s partner reportedly raises millions for blood-testing startup"

piker|9 months ago

Doesn't look like any smart money on this one yet, but there's something bold about it. It's like Nassim Taleb's thing that you hire the ugly surgeon. This is one hideous surgeon. Fraud seems near impossible here.

[Edit: a lot of thoughtful responses but downvoting?]

riffraff|9 months ago

Matt Levine (financial columnist) often makes the point (or joke) that in fund management there a tendency to reward (as in: they get more money to manage) people who lost a lot of money, on the basis that they did manage to have a lot of money to start with, make bold bets, and should at least have learned something at this point.

Michelangelo11|9 months ago

Yes, but in that example, he specifically says the ugly surgeon has to be as high-profile as the carefully-coiffed, megawatt-smile, could-have-just-walked-off-the-Chicago-Hope-set surgeon you're comparing him to. It's a heuristic for choosing between experts of roughly the same rank.

dragonwriter|9 months ago

If everyone uncritically invests because the Holmes association is perceived as making fraud impossible, then the association has actually had the opposite effect.

This is literally a rule that is entirely dependent on the rule itself not being popular.

hilux|9 months ago

I hear what you're saying, but counterexamples (i.e. repeat scammers) abound.

Maybe Taleb's works should be added to that blog post - leading on HN today - about the questionable value of lay business books.

nullc|9 months ago

Taleb took payment to promote cryptocurrency scammer Craig Wright and his BSV scamtoken.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.