I've long felt that the tech industry is somewhat blinded by decades of Moore's Law and its equivalent in storage, networking, etc. 2-10x improvements are so normal for Silicon Valley that they begin expecting to find them everywhere.

In just about every other field or industry, a 10% improvement every decade is amazing and represents the combined efforts of tens of thousands of researchers. A 2x improvement is a once-in-a-lifetime revolution that will be backed my mountains of joint; and 10x (like Theranos promised) completely unheard of.

This also functions as a great BS detector - breakthroughs of the scale Theranos claimed just don't happen out of nowhere - there would be thousands of peer reviewed papers leading up to it.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and Theranos didn't even offer an ounce of it.

one of the most legendary posts on Hacker News, for sure. this is the only thing that person posted, and it was 100% spot on YEARS before the fall.

this person HAD to be an insider, no question.

I tried to search. Sadly can't find it at the moment.

But, there was/is a reddit thread that, without naming the company, originally asked is it normal for a company be "pumping numbers" in the medical field. It was an an engineer/scientist who asked it years before anything public. A number of commenters guessed it was Theranos, eventually the poster came back to confirm the suspicions while expounding on the whole experience.

This might be it: https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/rtgcl/i_have_a_highpa...

this is the reddit that I miss, and this is the ONE example where it kind of sucks that we can comment on old posts. legendary thread; thank you for finding it.

Ah yes! That's the one! Thanks!

>this person HAD to be an insider, no question

Nah, that's doubtful. I've seen plenty of posts on HN and elsewhere that held the same sentiment. MANY people said that what they were trying to do was very difficult and they did not do anything to prove they had any technical advances to do it. The company was shady and overly secretive in a really strange way. The board was inappropriate for a biotech company.

Everyone with a background in biology or microfluidics said these things. It wasn't hard to find.

That's why I was so surprised when they partnered with Walgreens. I thought at the time that Walgreens must know something that the public didn't.

Or read their patents.

I owned 5 software patents. They are all hot airs.

Reading patent wouldn't help much.

You can go read any software patents and would be: wtf is this about?

Yes, but how many software shops get billions in funding specifically over sham inventions they've patented?

Theranos patented a skin patch that automatically analyses blood and dispenses the best drug from the patch's inventory.

My point is that reading patents wouldn't help much.

Most patents are written in an egregious way, even patents from a legit tech company.

Thanks for sharing this. It was a trip to read all those comments with what we know right now.