The whole Theranos disaster and partly also whats going on at Tesla are just good illustrations of the hubris in Silicon Valley. As soon as you leave the domain of stuff that can be accomplished with more or less buggy software, you collide with a bunch of real world/physical problems that are much harder to solve and need a lot of experience and perseverance to get right. That attitude that the guys developing blood testing devices at Siemens & co for decades are just a bunch of idiots who never thought of reducing the size of the devices and/or the amount of blood it takes to perform the tests is pretty preposterous. Just like the car industry which has been at the forefront of process automation has never thought of using robots for dashboard assembly etc.!? Its not that they dont do it because they are stupid or lazy (which is the assumption of SV) but because the tried for many years and it just doesn't work well enough.
Its really interesting, that SV VC seem to have forgotten that very basic question: why have the existing players not come up with something like that? Very often the answer is, they have and they tried and they figured out a long time ago, that it probably doesnt work well enough in the real world.
Its really interesting, that SV VC seem to have forgotten that very basic question: why have the existing players not come up with something like that? Very often the answer is, they have and they tried and they figured out a long time ago, that it probably doesnt work well enough in the real world.