From Professor Damodaran's Musings on Markets:
I saw the new Steve Jobs movie, with the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, over the weekend. As a long-time Apple user and investor, I must confess that I was bothered by the way in which the film played fast and loose with the facts, but I also understand that this is a movie. Sorkin clearly saw the benefit of using the launches of the Macintosh in 1984 and the iMac in 1997 as the bookends of the movie and the tortured relationship between Jobs and his daughter to create an emotional impact, and took dramatic license with the truth. As I watched the movie though, I kept thinking about Theranos, a company with a gripping narrative and a CEO who, like Steve Jobs, wears only black and who seemed headed for a biopic until a few weeks ago.
The Theranos Story: The Build Up
The Theranos story has its beginnings in March 2004, when Elizabeth Holmes, a 19-year old sophomore at Stanford, dropped out of college and started the company. The company was a Silicon Valley start-up with a non-Silicon Valley focus on an integral, but staid part, of the health care experience, the blood test. Ms. Holmes, based on work that she had been doing in an Stanford lab on testing blood for the SARS virus, concluded that she could adapt technology to allow for multiple tests to be run on much smaller quantities of blood than the conventional tests did and a quicker and more efficient turn around of results (to doctors and patients). In conjunction with her own stated distaste for the needles required for conventional blood tests, this became the basis for the Theranos Naotainer, a half-an-inch tube containing a few drops of blood that would replace the multiple blood containers used by the conventional labs.
The story proved irresistible to just about everyone who heard it, her professor at Stanford who encouraged her to start the business, the venture capitalists who lined up to provide her hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and health care providers who felt that this would change a key ingredient of the health care experience, making it less painful and cheaper. The Cleveland Clinic and Walgreens, two entities at different ends of the health care spectrum, both seemed to find the technology appealing enough to adopt it. The story was irresistible to journalists, and Ms. Holmes quickly became an iconic figure, with Forbes naming her the “the youngest, self-made, female billionaire in the world” and she was the youngest winner of "The Horatio Alger award" in 2015.
From the outside, the Theranos path to disrupting the business seemed smooth. The company continued to trumpet its claim that the drop of blood in the Nanotainer could run 30 lab tests and deliver them efficiently to doctors, going as far as listing prices on its website for each test that were dramatically lower (by as much as 90%) than the status quo. In venture capital rankings, Theranos consistently ranked among the most valuable private businesses with an estimated value in excess of $9 billion, making Ms. Holmes one of the richest women in the world. The world seemed truly at her feet and reading the news stories, the disruption seemed imminent.
The Theranos Story: The Let DownThe Theranos story started to come apart on October 16, when a Wall Street Journal articlereported that the company was exaggerating the potential of the Nanotainer and that it was not using it for the bulk of the blood tests that it was running in house. More troubling was the article’s contention that senior lab employees at the company found that the nanotainer’s blood test results were not reliable, casting doubt on the science behind the product.
In the following days, things got worse for Theranos. It was reported that the FDA, after an inspection at Theranos, had asked the company to stop using the Nanotainer on all but one blood test (for Herpes) because it had concerns about the data that the company had supplied and the product's reliability. GlaxoSmithKline, which Ms. Holmes had claimed had used the product, asserted that it had not done business with the start up for the previous two years and the Cleveland Clinic also backed away from its adoption. Theranos initially went into bunker mode, trying to rebut the thrust of the critical articles rather than dealing with the substantial questions. It was not until October 27 that Ms. Holmes finally agreed that presenting the data that the Nanotainer worked as a reliable blood testing device would be the most “powerful thing” that the company could do. It is entirely possible that the data that the company has promised to deliver will be so conclusive that all doubts will be set aside, but it does seem like the spell has been broken....MORE
