From ZeroHedge:
Dead Unicorn Bounce? Theranos Hires "Compliance" Execs Following CEO's 2-Year Ban
Sometimes you have to know when to "stay down." Having been barred from owning or operating a lab for at least two years, Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos founder and CEO, said that:And last month Vanity Fair relayed Draper Fisher Jurvetson's Tim Draper's thoughts:
And it appears, as Reuters reports, that is what they are doing as desperate investors maintain the dream despite its total crushing by regulatory authorities and any reality checks......the company would be "shutting down and subsequently rebuilding the lab from the ground up, rebuilding quality systems, adding highly experienced leadership, personnel and experts, and implementing enhanced quality and training procedures."
Theranos Inc hired two executives to oversee regulatory, quality and compliance standards, in a bid to turn around the struggling blood-testing company after it received sanctions from U.S. regulators.
Dave Wurtz, who previously worked at Thermo Fisher Scientific, was appointed vice president, regulatory and quality. He will work on getting FDA clearances and approvals, marketing new products, and look into medical-device quality systems....MORE
World’s Most Loyal V.C. Says Theranos Critics Are Just Haters
Tim Draper goes to bat for Elizabeth Holmes.
When Theranos C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes was growing up, her neighbor was famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper. A family friend to the Holmeses, Draper’s children grew up playing with Elizabeth. He also, incidentally, wrote one of the first seed checks to Theranos a decade ago, long before it was valued at $9 billion (and later, just $800 million). His Sand Hill Road firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has continued to support Holmes. And he’s still defending the company today, even after a series of critical Wall Street Journal reports revealed that the start-up often relied on generic machines to run its blood tests because its own proprietary Edison machines—the technology that the entire business ran on—didn’t work.See our June 2015 piece "Theranos: She's Young, She's Rich, Is She A Marketing Huckster?" for the thinking of one of the heavyweights of laboratory diagnostics, Dr. Dr. Eleftherios P. Diamandis.
Despite it all, Draper told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in aninterview published Thursday night, “nothing’s gone wrong with Theranos.” The venture capitalist compares Theranos to “the way Uber was attacked by taxi drivers, and Bitcoin was attacked by the banks,” he says. “Theranos is being attacked by the powers that be in big pharma, in [Holmes’s] competitors, in the world of medical insurance, the people in government who are going to be very much affected by a really cheap, really effective, wonderful solution.”
In Draper’s view, Big Pharma is terrified of Theranos, and is demanding the government regulate it in ways that it wouldn’t regulate Theranos’s competition. Instead, Draper says, “we should be really focused on the consumer. The consumers love it.” ...MORE
