(05-18-2018 03:09 AM)nola Wrote:  I don't know if this was already mentioned but it just popped up in my twitter she was banging her COO

https://www.teamblind.com/article/IAmA-f...A-YgdcDwrz

52 year old Indian guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesh_Balwani

They met in Bejing while he was doing his MBA while she was in high school. He was still in his 30s back then, so maybe he saw that nerdy inexperienced girl and managed to bang. He certainly was slimmer and more attractive back then while she was an easy lay who got ignored by most men in school. I think that he was her boyfriend before he became COO - that is even mentioned in the mainstream.

Something tells me that both he and her are far better connected to pull this off - they had secretaries of state at their board and really high-level men behind them:

My God!

I'm pretty sure the last picture on the previous page is of Holmes with the billionaire Carlos Slim, not Ramesh Balwani.

In any case, the journal had a piece this morning.

It looks as though blame is being shifted to Balwani. Anyone want to start taking bets that he takes the fall?

From the Wall Street Journal

Quote:Theranos Inc.’s Partners in Blood

Theranos Inc.’s 15-year quest to revolutionize the blood-testing industry met with the latest in a series of crippling blows in March when the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the Silicon Valley diagnostics firm with conducting an “elaborate, years-long fraud.” The SEC accused the firm of deceiving investors into believing that its portable device could perform a broad range of laboratory tests on drops of blood pricked from a finger, when in fact it was doing most of its tests on commercial analyzers made by others.

Much of the attention has focused on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. But another character played a central role behind the scenes in the alleged fraud: Ms. Holmes’s boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, according to more than three dozen former Theranos employees who interacted with Mr. Balwani extensively over a number of years. Mr. Balwani, who met Ms. Holmes when she was a teenager, jointly ran the company with her for seven years as president and chief operating officer and enforced a corporate culture of secrecy and fear until his departure in the spring of 2016, the former employees say.

Unlike Ms. Holmes and Theranos, who reached a settlement with the SEC to resolve the agency’s civil charges in March without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Mr. Balwani has denied separate charges the SEC filed against him in a parallel action and is fighting them in a California federal court. Ms. Holmes didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Balwani provided a statement from his lawyer, Jeffrey B. Coopersmith, saying Mr. Balwani accurately represented Theranos to investors to the best of his ability, worked hard to maximize shareholder value and took on significant risk investing in the company while never benefiting financially from his work.

When Mr. Balwani met Ms. Holmes, he already had made a fortune from his role in a technology startup. Born and raised in India, Mr. Balwani first came to the U.S. in 1986 for his undergraduate studies and later worked as a software engineer for Lotus and Microsoft. In 1999, he joined CommerceBid.com as its president and No. 2 executive; it was developing a software program for companies to pit their suppliers against one another for contracts in live online auctions. Business-to-business e-commerce had become hot, and in November 1999, the sector leader—the similarly named Commerce One—acquired the startup for $232 million in cash and stock, though it had just three clients testing its software.

Mr. Balwani received Commerce One shares that he sold for more than $40 million, based on a lawsuit he later filed against an adviser over tax-shelter advice. The deal’s timing couldn’t have been better for the startup’s executives. Within five months, the dot-com bubble had popped and the stock market had swooned. Commerce One eventually filed for bankruptcy.

Not long after cashing in, Mr. Balwani crossed paths with Ms. Holmes in Beijing. In the summer of 2002, both were enrolled in Stanford University’s Mandarin program, which featured several weeks of instruction in China. Ms. Holmes, a month away from starting her undergraduate studies at Stanford, struggled to make friends on the trip and got bullied by some of the other students, according to a description a friend of Ms. Holmes’s mother gave in a legal proceeding. Mr. Balwani, the lone adult among a group of college kids, stepped in and came to her aid, according to this account.
Mr. Balwani, rarely seen in photos, and Ms. Holmes speak to the staff on July 2, 2015, in the cafeteria of Theranos's then-headquarters in Palo Alto. The FDA had just approved one of the company’s fingerstick tests.

In the 37-year-old Mr. Balwani, the 18-year-old Ms. Holmes saw what she wanted to become: a successful and wealthy entrepreneur, according to a friend of Ms. Holmes. He became her mentor, the person who would teach her about business in Silicon Valley. They became romantically involved not long after Ms. Holmes dropped out of Stanford in the fall of 2003, according to the friend and early Theranos employees. When they’d first met in China, Mr. Balwani was married to a Japanese artist and living in San Francisco. By October 2004, he was listed as single on the deed to a condominium he purchased in Palo Alto. Other public records show Ms. Holmes moved into that apartment in July 2005.

When she first incorporated her startup in early 2004, Ms. Holmes wanted to develop a wristband that would simultaneously detect people’s ailments by drawing their blood with microneedles and cure them by injecting them with the appropriate drug. But the TheraPatch, as she called it, proved too futuristic, so she pivoted to a different vision: a portable machine that would perform dozens of laboratory tests from a drop of blood pricked from a patient’s finger.

In Theranos’s early years, Mr. Balwani advised Ms. Holmes but didn’t work at the company, according to early employees. They nonetheless felt his presence behind the scenes, saying it wasn’t unusual for Ms. Holmes to start sentences with “Sunny says.” In September 2009, he joined the company as its second-in-command. Theranos by that time had burned through $47 million it had raised from investors in its first three funding rounds and was on the cusp of bankruptcy. To keep it afloat, Mr. Balwani agreed to personally guarantee a $12 million credit line it took out.

With some of his own money now at stake, Mr. Balwani wasted no time asserting himself. He frequently barked orders and dressed people down, former employees say. They remember him cutting a brash figure among the scientists and engineers, wearing white designer shirts with puffy sleeves and the top three buttons open, acid-washed jeans and blue Gucci loafers, along with pungent cologne.

He flashed his wealth through his cars, driving a black Lamborghini Gallardo and a black Porsche 911. Both had vanity license plates: The one on the Porsche read “DAZKPTL” in mock reference to Karl Marx’s treatise on capitalism. The Lamborghini’s plate was “VDIVICI,” a play on the phrase “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), which Julius Caesar used to describe his quick victory at the Battle of Zela.

Mr. Balwani took to firing people so often that it gave rise to a new expression at the company: to “disappear” someone. That’s how Theranos employees used the normally intransitive verb when someone was dismissed. “Sunny disappeared him,” they would say.

By the summer of 2013, the Theranos machine had gone through three iterations. The first, a microfluidic device, had been abandoned in 2007. The second, a converted glue-dispensing robot called the Edison, had been shelved in 2010. The third, which Ms. Holmes had christened the miniLab, was supposed to be the one that finally turned her vision into reality. But while she and Mr. Balwani were telling Theranos’s retail partner, Walgreens, that the miniLab could perform the full range of lab tests on tiny finger-stick samples, the truth was that it remained a work in progress, according to the SEC. The list of its problems was lengthy.

The biggest problem of all was the dysfunctional corporate culture in which it was being developed. Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani brushed off those who raised concerns or objections as cynics and naysayers. Employees who persisted in doing so were usually marginalized or fired.

While Ms. Holmes was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Mr. Balwani often appeared out of his depth during those discussions, according to several former Theranos engineers. He had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During one meeting, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claw at the end of a robotic arm. Except Mr. Balwani didn’t hear “end effector”—he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. Mr. Balwani’s knowledge of chemistry also was spotty: For instance, he mixed up the chemical symbols for potassium (K) and phosphorus (P), a mistake most high-school chemistry students learn to avoid.

Though the miniLab remained a malfunctioning prototype, Ms. Holmes was intent on launching Theranos’s fingerstick tests in Walgreens stores by September 2013. So she and Mr. Balwani dusted off the Edison and launched with that, the SEC says. But the Edison could handle just one class of blood tests; to perform the dozens of others they had promised Walgreens their technology could handle, they needed a workaround. The solution was to secretly modify third-party commercial machines to adapt them to small blood samples.

When Christopher James and Brian Grossman of San Francisco hedge fund Partner Fund Management came to visit Theranos’s Palo Alto offices in early 2014, Mr. Balwani told them that Theranos had developed about 300 different blood tests and could perform 98% of them on tiny fingerstick samples—up to 70 from a single sample—according to a lawsuit that Partner Fund later filed against Theranos. (Theranos settled the suit, which alleged fraud, for $43 million in the spring of 2017 without admitting or denying wrongdoing.) Mr. Balwani mentioned nothing to Messrs. James and Grossman about using commercial analyzers; the implication was that all the tests were handled on special Theranos technology, according to the Partner Fund suit.
More Saturday Essays

Messrs. James and Grossman were impressed by something else Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes said—that Theranos’s devices were being used in the field by the U.S. military, according to a person they briefed on their meetings with Theranos. If that were true, a contract with the Department of Defense could add another big source of revenues.

A spreadsheet with financial projections that the Partner Fund suit alleges Mr. Balwani sent them supported this notion. It forecast gross profits of $165 million on revenues of $261 million in 2014 and gross profits of $1.08 billion on revenues of $1.68 billion in 2015.

But the U.S. military wasn’t using the Theranos devices in the field. And six weeks later, Theranos’s controller, Danise Yam, sent very different revenue and profit projections to a firm that Theranos had hired to price employee stock options, according to a deposition Ms. Yam gave in the Partner Fund litigation. Her figures were about one-fifth the size of Mr. Balwani’s for 2014, and less than a 10th of his amounts for 2015.

In July 2015, Ms. Holmes invited Vice President Joe Biden to come visit Theranos’s facility in Newark, Calif. It was an audacious move given that the company’s lab had been operating without a real director since the previous December. The lab’s morale was low. Two months earlier, Mr. Balwani had terrorized its members after a scathing critique of Theranos, entitled “A pile of PR lies,” appeared on Glassdoor, the website where employees review companies anonymously. Negative Glassdoor reviews about the company weren’t unusual; Mr. Balwani made sure they were balanced out by a steady flow of fake positive reviews he ordered members of the HR department to write, according to former employees. But this particular one had sent him into a rage. After getting Glassdoor to remove it, he conducted interrogations of employees he suspected of having written it, but never found the culprit.

More recently, Mr. Balwani had fired Lina Castro, a member of the microbiology team. According to colleagues, Ms. Castro’s offense had been to push the company to institute standard environmental health and safety protections in the lab. “I did everything with integrity for the patients and for my team,” Ms. Castro said in an interview. “I wanted everyone in the laboratory to work in an environment that was safe.”

Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani wanted to impress Vice President Biden with a vision of a cutting-edge, automated laboratory. Instead of showing him the actual lab with its commercial analyzers, they created a fake one, according to former employees who worked in Newark. They made the microbiology team vacate a room it occupied, had it repainted, and lined its walls with rows of miniLabs stacked up on metal shelves.

Ms. Holmes took Mr. Biden on a tour of the facility and showed him the fake automated lab. In a discussion with a half-dozen industry executives right afterward, Mr. Biden called what he had just seen “the laboratory of the future.” Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Biden declined to comment.

Three months later, on Oct. 15, 2015, The Wall Street Journal published the first of a series of articles raising questions about Theranos’s technology and practices. The Journal’s reporting triggered the SEC probe as well as a criminal investigation spearheaded by the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco. The U.S. attorney has declined to comment.

At first, the company strongly denied the Journal’s reporting. But Ms. Holmes later conceded problems at Theranos’s Newark lab in an interview with Maria Shriver on NBC’s “Today” show in April 2016. As CEO, Ms. Holmes said, she ultimately was the one responsible.

Yet it was Mr. Balwani who took the fall three weeks later. While Theranos called his departure a voluntary retirement in a news release, a friend Ms. Holmes confided in shortly afterward says she fired him.

These days, Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes are no longer a couple. Their lawyers have instructed them not to communicate with each other, people familiar with the matter said, because of the ongoing criminal probe.

Write to John Carreyrou at [email protected]

Balwani, by the way. Check out the body language.

Finally, Carreyou, the guy who wrote this piece, is putting together a book on the whole debacle. It should be an interesting read.

Article pretty much sums up what I expected.

You have a shy bullied awkward girl who is blessed with good familial connections - but those things don't buy you the respect of the world and your peers. So she gets into the startup business spurred on by an Indian man who lucked out during the dot-com craze. Note that he did not repeat his success, so it was one lucky break that made him a multi-millionaire. With such a wide range of experience behind him he thought that he had the Midas touch and could also lead a big company.

That he would fuck an 18yo blonde after playing the White Knight for her in China - I don't blame that.

As for his company behavioral pattern - they are the usual mix of an unstable bloke who lucks out and then spreads his idiocy into an organization. I met a few of those founders and some managers - if the business runs well then their errors are ironed out, if the biz is in a down-slope, then such a behavior costs the company dearly.

In this case it seems that they experimented with multiple products - some clearly showing a lack of reality-based thinking:

Quote:When she first incorporated her startup in early 2004, Ms. Holmes wanted to develop a wristband that would simultaneously detect people’s ailments by drawing their blood with microneedles and cure them by injecting them with the appropriate drug. But the TheraPatch, as she called it, proved too futuristic, so she pivoted to a different vision: a portable machine that would perform dozens of laboratory tests from a drop of blood pricked from a patient’s finger.

That she would think that a wristband could contain a gamut of drugs and needles to dispense is ridiculous. Also a "microneedle" test being able to perform this is bizarre - as if everything can be assessed via a tiny blood test via magic.

So you have 2 unstable individuals high on cocaine and amphetamines with clearly little technical knowledge (she should have at least finished MIT to have herself grounded) being able to bullshit their way through life. Balwani's cash project before was also one that was more bullshit than substance - like so many others. Maybe they thought that they could bullshit their way through this as well and cash out before it collapses.

It's an amazing story of a belated Silicon Valley craze that was bolstered by good connections, feminism and girl-power thinking. Both Balwani as well as Holmes should stay far away from starting any businesses - she is only a good salesperson, but who would believe her now? He is probably also mainly good at sales.

He should fuck off to some island and spend his days fucking around and having a family. I know that banging a blonde 6 must be heaven for him, but seriously - it's not worth it and it seems that they might be going after him first since she can get a pussy-pass.

^ You know it's funny. I've been in the hospital several times in my life for diabetes, broken bones and for other odds and ends, and the amount of blood nurses take every day for testing plus the multiple IVs to administer the drugs left my arms looking like the arms of a 10 year dope addict. To think that a wristband with little needles could do the work of several round-the-clock nurses, several blood exams and a hell of a lot of IVs tells me she was always a scam artist.

< I won't deny that if we have nanotech available where 10.000-100.000 nanobots can enter a drop of blood, then miniature amounts may be feasible. But even then - current research points to the fact that the blood at the fingertips is highly different from the one taken elsewhere - but who knows - you have such advanced tech, then they can find a way to balance it.

But this is decades away at least and similar to the wristband utterly deluded. Also - medicine is not as clear-cut as one might think. There are a myriad of diseases out there - you test only for a few viruses and bacteria initially. There are immense differences between the skills of certain doctors. One excellent private one charging 500$/hour may indeed have fantastic analytical skills finding out what is ailing you while 20 others will put you on some pills not solving the underlying issue at all. Medicine is not just blood-tests and automatic meds.

Ah well - hilarious story after all. Also funny how many men at the beginning of the thread were willing to bang her.

Don't say I didn't predict she was manipulating all these old rich backers directly through their dicks. LOL at even Joe Biden managing to creep into this story.



If Balwani was getting in there, what other scamming did she have going on?

She apparently used to play at Tim Draper's house as a little girl. With him still loudly praising her, she was surely selling him at least some hope that she'd play at his house as an adult and he hasn't figured it out yet, still trying to cash in.

Also, who gets bullied on a Stanford language trip full of other dorks? Every time she gets caught acting like a bug-eyed sociopath, she finds flying monkeys to tell everyone she was "bullied". I wonder who she banged to get everybody on that trip mad at her.

The SEC only investigates civil cases. This is the investigation that is completed. The WSJ article says there is an ongoing criminal investigation. This will take time. However, at the end of the day, I suspect one or both of these individuals will end up doing prison time.

(05-20-2018 11:48 AM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  The SEC only investigates civil cases. This is the investigation that is completed. The WSJ article says there is an ongoing criminal investigation. This will take time. However, at the end of the day, I suspect one or both of these individuals will end up doing prison time.

If you truly believe one of these two--especially the woman--is certainly going to prison, you are blissfully unaware of the last 20 years of American financial crimes and their outcomes.

Wow. Impressive woman.

(05-20-2018 12:14 PM)Dulceácido Wrote:  

(05-20-2018 11:48 AM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  The SEC only investigates civil cases. This is the investigation that is completed. The WSJ article says there is an ongoing criminal investigation. This will take time. However, at the end of the day, I suspect one or both of these individuals will end up doing prison time.

If you truly believe one of these two--especially the woman--is certainly going to prison, you are blissfully unaware of the last 20 years of American financial crimes and their outcomes.

I disagree. This is egregious enough that I really do think she (and he) will go down for it.

Well at least now we can answer the perennial question by Indian guys “please how can I bang a blonde white woman?”

Answer: Make a $40 million at a startup.

She’ll be a fake blonde though.

(05-20-2018 04:59 PM)RexImperator Wrote:  Well at least now we can answer the perennial question by Indian guys “please how can I bang a blonde white woman?”

Answer: Make a $40 million at a startup.

She’ll be a fake blonde though.

Beat me to the IRT quip.

Too soon?

The next self made billionaire

(05-21-2018 06:13 AM)Icarus Wrote:  

So the FBI knew in spring 2014 while the thread got up and running in autumn 2014.

Big error hiring a grandson to the political class. Of course he would not be afraid to blow the whistle - I could have told her that myself. If they hire sons to billionaires and multimillionaires, then those men won't care too much about tanking their "career" at Theranos. The only other reason for them to hold still would be if their business-model was just some inept computer, mobile phone or software application. Then they might think: "What do I care? Maybe I can cash out when it goes public - plenty of those dot-com ponzi schemes around."
But when you produce medical devices, cars, planes etc. - then it gets tricky.

And by the way - medical and pharma companies have plenty of whistle-blowers over various drugs, vaccines etc. The difference is that there the full brunt of the system is behind them. Blood tests are just a minor party of the entire medical system - and of course they have to work well. It's comparable to someone producing a revolutionary new infantry weapon that fires energy beams, but it never works. How the fuck did they think that they could keep the scam running?

< The worst part of the story is when they interview the horse-faced feminazi journalist who claims that the male Silicon Valley dominance had to be broken. Obviously the dominance is all because of sexism, otherwise women would storm the gates despite being less interested in tech, far fewer in the same intelligence range and far more risk-averse.
They never demand that the male dominance in the sewers and waste disposal has to be broken.

And once again - Icarus was the first who popped the bubble as there have been scientists before who tried to create mini-labs, but all failed at the current level of technology.

Maybe male dominance of the prison system needs to be broken as well.

#lockherup

(07-10-2014 05:59 PM)Icarus Wrote:  

(07-08-2014 10:06 AM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  You can draw inspiration from the smallest of accomplishments, and you can demean man's greatest feats - it's your choice as to which kind of person you want to be. Do you want to learn or do you want to hate?

I find Elizabeth Holmes's story very, very strange. I am not demeaning her entrepreneurial accomplishments, but rather her scientific ones. Or, more to the point, I am not demeaning. I am merely extremely skeptical, which is the natural reaction to a story that sounds just too good to be true.

How does a sophomore know enough to solve a real-world problem? Even for a grad student, it is almost a miracle to be able to do work with serious real-world impact. Of course, grad students have to publish and are constrained by academia's straightjackets.

Prof. George Whitesides of Harvard, one of the most famous chemists in the world, has been working on paper-based low-cost diagnostics technology for several years, and his non-profit, Diagnostics for All, hasn't yet taken off, despite being funded by Bill Gates's foundation:


So, what does Ms. Holmes have that Prof. Whitesides does not? Is Ms. Holmes's father a partner at a venture capital firm, by any chance?

Icarus called it first on October the 7th in 2014.

And he is correct. I personally took part in International chemistry olympics as a teenager. Even while being enamored with chemistry for a while I found that the top-tier guys were all smarter and far far more passionate about chemistry than I ever was. Large companies certainly have well-funded R&D departments trying to accomplish what she has claimed that Theranos did.

With our world and system it is true that some areas of research are forbidden or frowned upon (super-efficient battery development, super-cheap energy creation, replacement of toxic meds with high-dosage supplements etc). But the fact is this - that area of science IS NOT RESTRICTED, CLAMPED DOWN OR FROWNED UPON!

All the multi-billion dollar companies would do it if they could, so what did she specifically do that was so novel? If she had worked as a genius-level biochemist since age 12 on it for 15 years with a relatively well funded lab, then I might be tempted to believe her at least partly. But she wasn't - she was no savant, she was no tech-genius, she was just a basic bitch who got bullied because of the way she talked and walked (like a penguin) and who wanted to emulate Steve Jobs to be rich and famous.

And that fucking smile when called the youngest female self-mad billionaire - humble bragging:

"It's not about me, it's about the wonderful test-results." Yeah - knowing full well that the test results coming out are fake in some instances. It was all about you, about fame and about money - not even about passion for science since she attempted any product. Her very product ideas betray a lack of expertise of what is possible. You cannot start working on a fucking warp-drive while not even having mastered the art of having a decent interplanetary space-ship.

(05-21-2018 09:43 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  Icarus called it first on October the 7th in 2014.

Not that it matters much, but it was actually on July 10, 2014.

Megalomaniacs should keep in mind that Steve Jobs invented no technology whatsoever. He took what already existed, refined it, perfected it and then commercialized it.





He was also in an industry where "moving fast and breaking things" is acceptable. He was not developing avionics systems, after all.

For one Steve Jobs to even exist, there must be immense swathes of new land ready to be colonized. Who creates such new land? Academia. Military-funded research. Not VC-funded startups, that is for sure. Startups colonize, but they cannot create new land.

(07-10-2014 05:59 PM)Icarus Wrote:  Prof. George Whitesides of Harvard, one of the most famous chemists in the world, has been working on paper-based low-cost diagnostics technology for several years, and his non-profit, Diagnostics for All, hasn't yet taken off, despite being funded by Bill Gates's foundation:

If Theranos was built on unwarranted assumptions, then was Diagnostics for All also? Was Bill Gates ripped off?

I blame mostly you feminazi media bitches who were lusting after the first self-made tech billionaire.

And they are making a movie with Jennifer Lawrence, but it's based on the Bad Blood book and won't be very flattering for Holmes - more like a movie about the Ponzi scheme.

Also criminal indictments are soon coming - the SEC settlement was just a minor issue.