Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos looks to provide instant diagnosis:
Ms. Holmes, a 29-year-old chemical and electrical engineer and entrepreneur, dropped out of Stanford as an undergraduate after founding a life sciences company called Theranos in 2003. Her inventions, which she is discussing in detail here for the first time, could upend the industry of laboratory testing and might change the way we detect and treat disease.
Ten years ago, Ms. Holmes was working out of the basement of a group college house, a world away from her current headquarters at a rambling industrial building in a research park just off campus. The company’s real estate was one of the few Theranos facts known to Silicon Valley, but one suggestive of the closely held business’s potential: The space was once home to Facebook, and before that Hewlett-Packard.
The secret that hundreds of employees are now refining involves devices that automate and miniaturize more than 1,000 laboratory tests, from routine blood work to advanced genetic analyses. Theranos’s processes are faster, cheaper and more accurate than the conventional methods and require only microscopic blood volumes, not vial after vial of the stuff. The experience will be revelatory to anyone familiar with current practices, which often seem like medicine by Bram Stoker.
I first heard about Theranos in 2005, and did a blog post about them at that time. I’m glad to see they’re doing so well.
One of the things that had impressed me about the company was that in their jobs postings they had mostly avoided the unfortunate tendency of many companies to be overly specific in their hiring specifications, focusing on things like years of experience with specific software tools — often to the detriment of attributes that matter much more. In their job posting for an electrical engineer, for example, they are looking for things like “(experience in) integrating electrical and electro-mechanical mechanisms in a small consumer product,” “exceptional skills in CAD for circuit simulation and logic design,” “experience designing, executing, and documenting experiments and presenting the data to management in a clear manner,” and “ability and personality to take responsibility for several projects at one time.”
The job listings today are still better than most, but they are a little too credentialist for my taste — too much “degree in ______ from a top-tier university.”