Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors in her startup, which falsely claimed to revolutionize blood testing.
Holmes had convinced investors that Theranos' technology could detect numerous diseases from just a few drops of blood, but the technology never actually worked.
It was a sort of assertion as opposed to being a technology.
An assertion is some text dreamed up by a talented marketer, and the text, once dreamed up, becomes a substitute in the marketplace for an actual technology.
Ms. Holmes found to her ultimate chagrin that the marketplace, in the end, wants assertions to become facts.
So she's in jail.
In the meantime, Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes' partner, has launched a blood-testing startup called Haemanthus, which is named after a flower also known as the blood lily.
The company is marketing itself as “the future of diagnostics” and claims to have developed a machine that uses AI directed lasers to analyze blood, saliva, and urine samples to detect diseases like cancer and infections.
The assertion this time has two incomprehensible technologies deployed: lasers and AI.
That's a good move: it can take years and years to tune an AI driven laser.
Just to obfuscate it to the hilt I suggest they add a third technology to the assertion: quantum entanglement.
That way when the thing doesn't work they can say it's working but it's in another dimension.
No comments:
Post a Comment