The Blood Unicorn Is Extinct
Also semiannual earnings, speed bumps and food in shoes.
Theranos.
What would happen, do you think, if Theranos Inc. had announced today that it had built a working blood-testing machine that could perform a broad range of common blood tests on a finger-prick sample of blood? You know, like it said it had done years ago, only for real this time? What if the story of Theranos, the Blood Unicorn (Elasmotherium haimatos), was that it was working hard and fast to build a real revolutionary blood-testing device, and it missed some deadlines in that process, and out of defensiveness it cut corners and lied to investors and patients about its progress, and the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Theranos of securities fraud, and federal prosecutors accused founder Elizabeth Holmes and former president Sunny Balwani of wire fraud, and the company was battered and reduced to a shell of its former self, but its resolute engineers just plugged away at their blood-testing device, and today—after the fraud charges and indictment and terrible publicity and all the rest—they announced that they had cracked it, and that the revolutionary promise of Theranos had been fulfilled?