Startup Watch: Theranos Falls And Snapchat Rises

FALLING: Theranos announced on Wednesday that it is shutting down its blood-test centers and laying off 340 employees, roughly 40 percent of the company. CEO Elizabeth Holmes says the company will instead focus on its MiniLab product which aims to commercialize small, automated labs. The whole thing feels like a smoke screen to distract people from the fact that Theranos had once been valued at $9 billion and hailed as revolutionary in the healthcare community. That was until the Wall Street Journal found out that Theranos’ testing system actually didn’t work and the FDA banned Holmes from operating a lab for two years. 

RISING: The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., is preparing for an IPO in March that could value the company at over $25 billion. That would make Snap Inc. nearly twice as valuable as Twitter at its 2013 IPO but only a quarter of the value of Facebook’s record-setting $104 billion IPO in 2012. $25 billion is a lot of funny looking sunglasses.