Theranos was dealing with people's health. Misdiagnoses, delayed treatments, etc, that's real harm. Imo, comparing that to building web apps isn't the same.
The actual crime Theranos founder went to jail for was not misdiagnosing people. It was defrauding investors because they made them believe their machines were doing the tests when really they were sending them out to separate labs
Completely different story. With Theranos the investors sued the founders, with Builder AI they didn't. This suggests they knew what was really going on, so it wasn't fraud in their eyes.
It is not a completely different story. The lender yanked back the money they lent because they found out about fraudulent sales numbers. That led to the bankruptcy. It was still the people whose money was in the game who brought the company down in both scenarios because fraud is a big red line for anyone whose money is on the line
I understand where you're coming from, but we need to stick to the facts. If there are no court cases, we can't imply that fraud was committed. We don't know what kind of agreements were in place, why the money was being transferred, or what the expectations were on both sides.
We also don't know what was discussed in private. For example, it could have been something like: "We want to be part of this investment opportunity, we'll give you $40 million. But if regulators start asking questions, we want the money back."
Without full context or legal findings, everything else is just speculation.
I'm surprised no one is talking about Microsoft's investment in BuilderAI, a total loss. It's unlikely they'll recover much, if anything. So why aren't they suing the CEO and CFO? Maybe some of the issues were handled quietly behind the scenes to avoid public exposure or reputational damage? I don't know.
They admitted themselves to this fraud. Try reading the article you are posting under:
> Less than two months ago, Builder.ai admitted to revising down core sales numbers and engaging auditors to inspect its financials for the past two years. This came amidst concerns from former employees who suggested sales performance had been inflated during prior investor briefings.
It doesn't get more textbook fraud than lying to investors about how many sales you've recorded
Yes, round-tripping is considered fraud in business. The CEO and CFO committed fraud. That has been proven, and there is no doubt about it.
But the article also claims they misled investors about the technology they were using, and that part is false. It even mocked Indian developers for working as programmers and pretending to be machines, which is obviously absurd.
> This suggests they knew what was really going on, so it wasn't fraud in their eyes.
But now when we are talking about obvious fraud everyone agrees about and which caused investors to pull money you are pivoting to a quibble about whether the marketing was lies or not. Maybe a company which lies about its sales figures can't be trusted to be truthful about its product
Theranos was using the same testing equipment and techniques as any other lab for most of their diagnostic services. Which is how they avoided being instantly exposed when their results ended up being meaningless. “In October 2015, John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was using traditional blood testing machines instead of the company's Edison devices to run its tests, and that the company's Edison machines might provide inaccurate results.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
They did plenty of shady shit including producing poor results, but that’s largely incompetence independent of fraud vs intentionally putting people’s lives on the line.
IMO, the fraud kind of hides the equally important story where incompetent 19 year old collage dropout shockingly doesn’t know how to effectively setup and manage complex systems.