{"id":22056,"date":"2019-02-08T12:10:27","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T17:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=22056"},"modified":"2019-02-08T19:47:01","modified_gmt":"2019-02-09T00:47:01","slug":"theranos-was-an-immigration-and-h-1b-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/08\/theranos-was-an-immigration-and-h-1b-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Theranos was an immigration and H-1B story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bad Blood<\/a><\/em>, the authoritative book on the rise and fall of Theranos<\/a>, describes American- and British-born engineers and scientists being fired for saying “the goal is too ambitious” or quitting when realizing this. Who replaced them? According to the book, almost all immigrants from India, either folks who’d recently completed a degree in the U.S. or coming over on H-1B visas, all managed by Ramesh Balwani<\/a>, Elizabeth Holmes’s boyfriend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the “grand fraud” stage of Theranos, therefore, it was a primarily immigrant show except for the young impresaria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[I’m going to guess that neither Mr. Balwani nor any of these engineers and scientists make it into the children’s book First Generation: 36 Trailblazing Immigrants and Refugees Who Make America Great<\/a><\/em>…]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The money to fuel the craziness of Theranos seems to have been all domestic. Walgreen’s kicked in $100 million(!) as an “innovation fee” and then loaned the company another $40 million, according to the book. The credulous yet imperial CEO Steve Burd (Wikipedia<\/a> shows him hanging out with Barack Obama) drained huge amounts of Safeway shareholder cash to help Theranos. The idea in both cases was that Theranos devices were supposed to be placed in these retailers’ stores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the end result is a tech staff that is mostly Indian, I wonder if the Silicon Valley location makes sense. Why not have all of the engineers and scientists work from Bangalore or Delhi? Instead of 8 people sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Menlo Park, each of those 8 workers can enjoy his or her own comfortable house (rent for a 3BR apartment in the center of Bangalore is about $570\/month (source<\/a>), 1\/10th the price of Menlo Park (source<\/a>)). What’s the advantage of bringing H-1B slaves over to toil on a Silicon Valley plantation compared to running the tech farm in India?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Another interesting aspect of the book is learning just how much room there is for human error in traditional medical lab tests, e.g., in the handling of reagents. Elizabeth Holmes was not wrong in thinking that a fully automated process could potentially be more reliable.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Related:<\/p>\n\n\n\n