Bay area biotech StemCells to wind down.

Posted on May 31, 2016May 31, 2016 by Elon Theranos Esq.

They were working on a spinal chord treatment but their clinical trials have failed. Bay area biotech “StemCells” (I was surprised they didn’t “invest” in the .com version of their name) which was publicly traded will wind down operations. They are hoping to see what can be salvaged for investors and skirt a 100% loss. At their peak: $74 million market cap. Now, not so much. ($6 million) They also raised 32 million in two…

Violin Memory posts 20M+ quarterly loss (again…and again…)

Posted on May 27, 2016May 27, 2016 by Elon Theranos Esq.

Publicly traded memory maker Violin Memory (VMEM) has posted another quarterly loss in excess of $20M (this is the third or fourth in a row), begging TheRegister to wonder aloud “can they avoid a trainwreck?” Keep in mind, the market cap of the entire company is $36M, which means they are successively putting up quarterly losses worth roughly 2/3 the company’s market cap. This, after 7 funding rounds totalling $187M, their Series D valued them at…

…Then they spent their entire A round on the “Coming Soon” screen…

Posted on May 20, 2016May 20, 2016 by Elon Theranos Esq.

Apparently funded by some tech accelerator out of France, “Sneefr” took 50K ($50,000, not $50,000,000), they will “connect the people who want to buy and sell safely in a simple way”.

Bids for Yahoo several Billions short of expectations

Posted on May 20, 2016May 20, 2016 by Elon Theranos Esq.

We’ll file this one under “down rounds” given that not long ago Yahoo spurned a $45 Billion offer from Microsoft, early bids for Yahoo are coming in the 2 or 3 billion range .Remember, Yahoo recently bought Tumblr for presumably $1 billion (does that mean all that “value added” by the acquisition has made Tumblr the entire company?).

Theranos unravelling accelerates

Posted on May 19, 2016June 20, 2016 by Elon Theranos Esq.

Theranos scratches 2 years worth of lab tests. (Turns out 94% of their “in-house” lab tests were outsourced to external companies. The 6% remaining have all just been discarded as invalid.) BREAKING: Elizabeth Holmes’ exec assistant quits. Funding raised: $637 M Valuation: $9B Revenues: undisclosed

Hub Nation & The Scandal of Money

Posted on May 18, 2016May 27, 2016 by Elon Theranos Esq.

I just finished reading Dan Lyon’s “Disrupted”. I devoured it in a little over 2 days and took frequent breaks to email various friends and colleagues (many of them tech CEOs of non-unicorns, go figure) that they had to read it. The story of Lyon’s tumultuous ride at Hubspot, a tech unicorn which has never shown a profit, and will probably never show a profit didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. It didn’t…

OpiaTalk out of funding and shuts down

Posted on May 9, 2016May 20, 2016 by Elon Theranos Esq.

Self-described “Hyper-Conversion Company” OpiaTalk, which made some javascript thingy to induce buying trances has shut down due to lack of funding. Will now seek to “create value through liquidation”.