<story><title>Theranos closes last blood-testing lab after reportedly failing an inspection</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/17/theranos-last-lab-inspection-test-fail/?ncid=rss&amp;utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&amp;utm_content=FaceBook&amp;sr_share=facebook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cixin</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to have more insight into how this happened.&lt;p&gt;It seems like there&amp;#x27;s a pattern of high profile failures of highly funded science-based startups.&lt;p&gt;From the outside the science seems faulty from the start, the management team seems to have no strong scientific background.&lt;p&gt;Do investors really fund purely based on their force of personality? Personal connections? Do they see a big market and then ignore the scientific DD?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to understand this better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>metaphorm</author><text>&amp;gt; Personal connections?&lt;p&gt;In the case of Theranos I believe it was this. Elizabeth Holmes seemed to have an &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; with a lot of Washington D.C. influencers and I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure her pitch was based on using those connections to score lucrative DoD contracts.</text></comment>
<story><title>Theranos closes last blood-testing lab after reportedly failing an inspection</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/17/theranos-last-lab-inspection-test-fail/?ncid=rss&amp;utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&amp;utm_content=FaceBook&amp;sr_share=facebook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cixin</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to have more insight into how this happened.&lt;p&gt;It seems like there&amp;#x27;s a pattern of high profile failures of highly funded science-based startups.&lt;p&gt;From the outside the science seems faulty from the start, the management team seems to have no strong scientific background.&lt;p&gt;Do investors really fund purely based on their force of personality? Personal connections? Do they see a big market and then ignore the scientific DD?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to understand this better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frisco</author><text>I think this is availability bias. Many large (&amp;gt; $100M) deals happen all the time in early stage life sciences but don&amp;#x27;t get picked up by the tech press or covered as &amp;quot;startups&amp;quot;. A few high profile stories flame out spectacularly like this but they are typically already the outsiders to the industry.&lt;p&gt;To the specific scenario, when N is small all kinds of idiosyncratic bad decision making can happen.</text></comment>