The Dropout

Foggy said:

At least in the show, Holmes commits blatant fraud to obtain her B Round before Sonny is ever involved, which is what gets her to the $100M evaluation and starts this thing really taking off. I don’t buy she was disconnected from reality bullshit. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Click to expand...

I listened to the audiobook Bad Blood about this. They really go into how insane both she and Sonny were. It sounded like they fed off each other and really believed in faking it till you make it.

I really enjoy the whole thing. I am in medicine and go to the hematology lab all the time to hang out w friends, and our small hospital that has a very small menu of labs has a room full of huge ridiculously expensive equipment that requires all sorts of crazy quality control and specialized things like plumbed in deionized water or whatever.

Like just the machine to run a legitimate quality CBC is 4-5 times larger (and require spun blood) than the Theranos box they show in this show. And there exists a machine for ambulatory medical care settings called a Piccolo that can run a handful of tests, it’s beautiful, probably 2-3x size of Theranos, but uses a completely different technology than the CBC machines. And these Piccolo machines are only “so good” and for really abnormal results they require a send out to a reference lab.

The legitimate lab equipment that every hospital uses are like … the size of large chest freezers, but bigger. And expensive, and require around the clock maintenance (quality controls) to keep their results accurate. And they have multiple of these to run all the different tests we need.

The idea she would have a shoebox sized device to run all the tests and it would sit on a counter and not need constant intervention or quality controls run is just laughable.