The point is, if I were Jessica Richman, I would never have gotten past the idea stage with this. I’d have been like “how is this a business?” I wouldn’t have been able to pitch it with a straight face. The only way this business model could work is if she lied to customers.
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I’m not saying we should all pile on her in particular; I’m sure it’s not fun to be her right now and I’m sure there are lots of other founders that have done worse and not gotten caught. (One of the perils of being female in the public eye: your scandals are extra scandalous.)
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In general: there’s more to business success than just revenue & user numbers. You can boost those artificially by shady tactics, in the short run. If the apparent growth is totally out of whack with what you know of the userbase and their needs, something is fishy.
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“Ah yes, health insurers, well known for their willingness to pay for experimental and elective treatments” — wait, no, scratch that, reverse it!
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I see the impulse to go “ok, I can’t see how this helps those customers, it makes no sense, but they’re buying, so the company must be doing something right.” But there’s always another possibility: that it’s fraud.
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The natural comparison to uBiome is Theranos, because that’s another female-founded health-tech fraud. But the types of fraud are actually very different.
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Theranos’s tech would have been unquestionably valuable (to patients, drugstores, insurers, etc) had it worked. And something like it probably could have worked. It just didn’t. Elizabeth Holmes lied to everyone about the tech, and went to extreme lengths to avoid discovery.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
I get the impression that Theranos' tech could work for some applications if it was competently executed. There must be a huge amount of useful information in a capillary blood sample, and probably there is some level of tech that could extract it. Yes?
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Replying to @RokoMijicUK
That’s what I thought but apparently
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @RokoMijicUK
my understanding (to be clear this is not my area of expertise) is that the tiny volumes of blood used inevitably lead to wildly variable results, especially if you want to run multiple tests from a single draw
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the way you're describing the problem, if you just take *enough* fingerprick tests, you could average them and get a more reliable measurement. (Not as inconvenient as it sounds, if you could have a machine at home.)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @RokoMijicUK
in terms of volume problems, yes possibly, though I'm not sure I'd rather have dozen fingerpricks over one veinous draw also still doesn't deal with the problem of contamination from damaged cells you have with fingerpricks
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