Post-Theranos, Startups Are Still Out for Blood
‘Hubris is very dangerous’: How blood diagnostic companies are distancing themselves from Theranos’ fraud charges
Tanay Tandon ditched class the day Elizabeth Holmes came to speak to his fellow freshmen at Stanford University a few years ago. At the time, says Tandon, now 22, the campus community was already skeptical about Theranos, Holmes’ now-infamous blood testing company. That’s because her talk took place around the time John Carreyou at the Wall Street Journal published his first story questioning Theranos’ legitimacy. According to Tandon’s classmates, Holmes — who dropped out of Stanford to start her company — spent part of her lecture explaining to the students why she felt the accusations against her were wrong.
“It was the brink of everything starting to explode,” Tandon says about her visit.
The meteoric rise and fall of Holmes and Theranos has been the subject of the Wall Street Journal investigation, a bestselling book, a podcast, and a documentary. Most damningly, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani “with raising more than $700 million from investors through an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about…
