With over a thousand emails, slides, texts, and documents unveiled during the United States v. Elizabeth Holmes trial, Extend engineer Bo Lau created a website that simulates what it might have been like to be the chief executive of Theranos before everything came crashing down.
(Every day, I am grateful to the American legal system for making the discovery process public.)
The environment that Lau created is ambitiously detailed, taking you right back to 2016, a time when iPhones had home buttons, and you had to slide your finger across the screen to unlock it. Even the MacBook Air is running OS X El Capitan.
You can click around the environment, which lets you look through the documents made public from the court case on HolmesтАЩ iPhone and laptop screens. You can even run the Theranos Edison machine, the companyтАЩs ill-fated device that was supposed to be able to extract large amounts of health data from one drop of blood.
The project seems like it was mostly made for laughs, but itтАЩs actually an interesting way to peruse the documents from one of the most infamous court cases in tech history тАФ itтАЩs a lot easier to navigate this than to source thousands of PDFs from court websites.
ThereтАЩs another agenda, though. Lau is promoting a watch party that her company is throwing for Nathan FielderтАЩs upcoming documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, тАЬYou Can See Everything.тАЭ
Also, of course, sheтАЩs promoting the company itself. So, what exactly does Extend do? Apparently, it can тАЬparse, extract, and split your hardest documents with unmatched accuracy.тАЭ (IтАЩm not really sure what that means, but if it makes something like this Holmes desk simulator possible, then I guess that means IтАЩm bullish on B2B SaaS.)
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