Comment by apical_dendrite 18 hours ago
Startup companies blow through hundreds of millions of VC dollars with little to show for it all the time. Theranos raised $700 million for a technology that never worked. Plenty of others wasted hundreds of millions building half-baked products that nobody wanted or that made no business sense. Remember Quibi?
> Also Theranos was aiming for something very innovative that still does not exist, whereas the govt IT systems are essentially glorified CRUD apps(no doubt complicated and with tricky integrations and need for reliability and security).
I worked both in the area of molecular biology and bioinformatics with some pretty nifty technology (which was later acquired by a large company). And in the area of giant ERP applications that are nothing but tons of boring forms.
I can confidently say that the complexity of ERP apps dwarfs anything that is needed for molecular biology.
The difference is that those companies eventually fail. The govt has essentially limitless taxpayer money behind it(till a currency crisis like Argentina, Greece etc. happens taking down the entire economy) because paying it is enforced by threat of violence and it can borrow and print money as much as it wants with deficit spending.
Also Theranos was aiming for something very innovative that still does not exist, whereas the govt IT systems are essentially glorified CRUD apps(no doubt complicated and with tricky integrations and need for reliability and security). It's an example where VCs could've exerted more scrutiny but chose not to and wasted their own money, hopefully a lesson learnt. As taxpayers, we have far fewer options, we cannot just pass on paying out hard earned money if we don't want to "invest".
Another example, the Queensland payroll system cost $1.2 billion over 8 years to develop, repair and maintain, to pay just 87K people. The initial estimated budget? $6.9 million.