Tilda Swinton is always very real.
7 Likes
I’ve only read the book. Which was harrowing enough, in a very compelling way.
1 Like
This is almost exactly what happened with drkoop.com, my former employer:
- A conceptually sound idea that is not technologically achievable.
- A board of directors that means well but is not tech-savvy (C. Everett Koop).
- A set of executives that are essentially salesmen, pursuing the next round of financing while the company is left unmanaged. Also to include the “traveling road show” – executives flitting all over the country chasing investor capital, complete with chartered jets.
- A multi-million dollar office with a million dollars worth of AV equipment that is largely unused and a fancy conference table with bells and whistles.
- An uncontrollable burn rate.
- An utterly fraudulent IPO.
…and the punchline is a lot of dedicated employees trying their hardest to make the business work while the executives work against them.
29 Likes
I have not read the book, so I might add it to my list. The film is worth the time, especially if you like Tilda Swinton.
5 Likes
According to the article, her father was an executive at Enron.
9 Likes
Strictly speaking in the Theranos style setup, the executives aren’t working against the techies.
The techies are there purely to give the executives something to sell. Not a product (although that might be nice eventually) but the image that there are clever people working on a product.
It has to be plausible that there could be a product eventually. Not now obviously, you don’t get more funding for an existing product. You need there to be a vision of a product there could be if only you had the investor’s money.
It is of course much better if you are convinced yourself that it is true. Technical knowledge would only get in the way there.
11 Likes
Holy shit! THe apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
10 Likes
Just the plot description of this gave me the willies
1 Like
And there was me thinking that Factory Records’ thirty grand table was extravagant.
@L0ki " Not a product (although that might be nice eventually) but the image that there are clever people working on a product."
Top people… top… people.
11 Likes
Are/were you in Austin? There was a building on Mopac with the drkoop.com logo.
The Austin company from that era that most sticks in my mind (or, craw) was Netpliance. The company where I worked did tech support for the i-Opener. More than a few co-workers plunked down their money for Netpliance’s IPO, which occurred on or around the same day that the i-Opener hack was published. (In other words, the stock tanked.) That company withered down to nothing and we had to lay off a large number of help desk staff.
(I also recall a large building with the Excite logo going up on South Congress. Excite was my search engine of choice for a minute, there.)
I’ve worked for a (different) company where (almost) everyone had been laid off, but they brought everyone back for a few hours one day to look like they were working while a prospective client toured the office. We did get a contract with that client, but it wasn’t enough to save the company.
9 Likes
2 Likes
Probably have to pay a few bucks to buy the stock off the pink sheets and get a short position off the books.
1 Like
HP has had a long history of bad deals. Signing on to Intel’s Itanium technology (soon to be referred to as “Itanic”) was a huge and costly mistake. That was during Carly’s tenure I believe. Acquiring Autonomy was also colossally dumb: they didn’t do the due diligence and found out later they had paid billions for a pile of crap. There are also a whole bunch of smaller companies they paid significant dollars for and then had their products sink like a stone once merged into HP’s giant dysfunctional machine. Getting out of PCs was actually not a bad move. IBM did the same thing: it had become a commodity low-margin business. But before doing that, HP had bought Compaq for $87 billion, at a time when the PCs were already starting to be a bad business.
6 Likes
It’s plausible with microfluidics and sensitive enough diagnostics. There is more than enough of every compound in a drop of blood to run all the tests that are currently run with a vial of blood.
The problem, as you point out, is that the sensitivity just isn’t there yet, especially not in one instrument. They never had even a concept of how that was going to work.
Understatement of the year. Moreover, when someone does figure it out, which they will, everyone will look at them with skepticism because Theranos burned those bridges.
4 Likes
I briefly worked for the law firm that defended Holmes, doing all their scanning and copying in preparation for the case. For hours at a time each day, it was my responsibility to scan copies into the database and quality review all copied docs pertinent to Theranos, including Holmes’ personal journals. During the QC, I inadvertently read excerpts written by her own hand which did not exactly paint her in the best light.
19 Likes
Yeah buddy. It had sort of a spaceship-looking thing on the roof. Actually, first we were in this technology incubator building, then we had the IPO and moved to more expensive digs. We had a really good Tornado foosball table in there. In the beginning there was a really big group of guys and gals playing foosball, then the layoffs started and our numbers dwindled. In the end it was just me and one other guy playing twice a day. We made it through five rounds of layoffs before they turned the lights out.
I bet you have some stories about i-Opener tech suppor.
3 Likes
Trump would consolidate power structures if he had the attention span to understand how the power structures worked.
1 Like
Good lord, the way Steve Coogan pops back up from the floor is really funny.
2 Likes
8 Likes
Wow. That must have been some fascinating reading.
At drkoop, I found that the HR dept. had left all their internal documentation out in the open on the intranet, to include payroll information for the entire company, executive employment contracts (including car allowances, bonuses, and golden parachute stuff), and documentation regarding lawsuits by former employees.
What I still didn’t understand until much later was that the executives’ best case scenario was a forced exit. Always wondered why my boss high-fived me after they let him go.
10 Likes
