Thread by @neoavatara

So, I didn't have any legal reason to not tell this story, but I had friends that were involved, and had no reason to get them into trouble.

With Elizabeth Holmes sentencing today, I think pretty much the entire story has come to a conclusion.

But the entire thing is sordid.

My tiny part? I was doing my fellowship in NYC. A childhood friend had a venture capital (he shall remain nameless; he has since made a tiny pot of gold). But his VC venture was affiliated with big players, including the likes of a guy from Omaha as well as people from Safeway.

He called me up specifically because they had gotten a request from a tiny company out of California called 'Real-Time Cures', that had a proposal that would change the medical industry!

It sounded like one of those elixirs from the 1800s.

I had, as they say, a very particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson would say. I had worked in labs studying microfluidics and biochemistry for analysis of serum samples.

In short...I kind of new what they were talking about.

At the time, my wife was expecting, I was in fellowship, we didn't have a ton of money...and my friend was going to throw me a few grand to go over the science here and tell them what I thought.

How could I refuse?

So, I got the documents they provided...and they were, to put it mildly, trash. They had no real data sets. Most of it was gibberish.

And I told my friend this.

But there were major people pushing this. So they offered me a little more money to join them on a meeting they were going to have with Dr. Roy, who was working with Holmes at the time (I never met Holmes).

In that meeting, I sat in the back, mostly because I was a nobody that was sleep deprived from being on call the night before ( I am not kidding).

But I got asked two questions. One was about the microfluidic technique, and was about the sample size.

Remember...I was sleep deprived! It is hilarious in hindsight. But I was annoyed, and basically said it was all bullshit.

I then got yelled at by some of the Theranos people for saying I didn't know what I was talking about. But I didn't care...I needed more coffee.

After the meeting, my friend and a couple of his colleagues (who represented a couple billionaires, but for the life of me I can't remember who) asked me again. I told them that it looked all fake to me. None of them invested.

The Safeway guys didn't ever talk to me.

Anyway, I took my check, and happily invested it in my son's college fund just after he was born, and didn't think about the entire thing for a LONG time.

Until about 2015, in fact. That was when John Ioannidis (of COVID fame) wrote this.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25688775/

Now, this was almost a decade later. And I had forgotten the whole thing. So I call my friend...and he laughed. Basically, he knew the entire thing was going to blow up at this point (the VC guys had caught wind finally). He did thank me for saving them a bunch of money though.

I never did hear from the Safeway guys. I later learned they lost something like a few hundred million dollars. And the irony is, if I had a better cup of coffee that morning, I might have been able to make a better argument and saved them that money. Oh well.

So, overall, I think I got paid around $10k for the entire thing? Maybe a little more. Anyway, I dumped that into my son's college fund, and its grown so much that it probably will pay for most of his college.

So Theranos, in a weird way, is going to fund my kid's education.