As John Carreyrou observed, one reason Theranos got into trouble was that it used a Silicon Valley model commonly applied to software, which can afford to have initial glitches and failures, for medical testing, which cannot. Even for software-based companies, the lean startup model can easily be taken too far, as when glitches cause reputation-damaging product failures, security risks, breaches of privacy, and scandals such as Cambridge Analytica’s use of personal data.
