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 Holmes’ iPhone and laptop screens. You can even run the Theranos Edison machine, the company’s 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 it’s actually an interesting way to peruse the documents from one of the most infamous court cases in tech history — it’s a lot easier to navigate this than to source thousands of PDFs from court websites.
There’s another agenda, though. Lau is promoting a watch party that her company is throwing for Nathan Fielder’s upcoming documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything.”
Also, of course, she’s promoting the company itself. So, what exactly does Extend do? Apparently, it can “parse, extract, and split your hardest documents with unmatched accuracy.” (I’m not really sure what that means, but if it makes something like this Holmes desk simulator possible, then I guess that means I’m bullish on B2B SaaS.)
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