Click the image to see it at full size.
I hereby declare this the meme of the day!
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His drug company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, recently bought the rights to Daraprim, a drug that’s been around for over 60 years and is the standard treatment for toxoplasmosis, which affects up to half the world’s population, especially people with HIV or who are otherwise immunocompromised. His company has since changed the price of Daraprim pills, which are said to cost $1 each to manufacture, from $13.50 each to $750, making him Big Pharma’s biggest a-hole, a field in which the competition is pretty serious.
It turns out that the Daraprim fiasco is just another data point in a long pattern of pharma profiteering über alles:
- He’s not new to unseemly financial activity. At his first job, he interned for stock market huckster Jim “Mad Money” Cramer, where he underwent his first SEC investigation after a rather successful short of a biotech stock at the tender age of 19.
- Nor is he new to drug and biotech profiteering. He has time and again been called out by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) for illegally manipulating biotech and pharma stock prices and inserting himself into the Food and Drug Administration’s drug approval process for financial gain.
- This isn’t his first price gouging. In 2014, the biotech company he founded, Retrophin, acquired the rights to Thiola, which is used to treat an incurable kidney disease and raise its price by over 20 times.
- Last year, Retrophin — and remember, he’s a founder — fired him. he was fired from Retrophin, the biotech company he founded, for all manner of “stock irregularities” including disguising legal settlements with former investors as “consulting agreements”, and using company cash to resolve legal claims against himself and a hedge fund he ran. They also sued him. In February of this year, Retrophin filed a preliminary report of his wrongdoings with the SEC.
And he’s not afraid to make it personal, either.
It was filed by one Timothy Pierotti, a former colleague of Shkleri’s at Retrophin turned business rival. The report is about a year-long campaign of harrassment by Shkleri, which included:
- Stalking Pierotti and his family,
- sending nasty texts, emails, and social media messages to Pierotti, his wife, and even his teenaged children, and
- Gaining access to Pierotti’s Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts and making damaging posts.
Shkreli sued Pierotti, whose lawyers filed documents saying that Shkreli sent threatening messages to Pierotti’s wife, such as letters saying “I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this”…
Click the image to read the full document.
…and creepy, cryptic text messages like this one:
Click the image to more Shkreli creepiness.
Epilogue (for now)
At the time of this writing, Shkreli has announced that they’ll lower the price of Daraprim:
You may also want to check out this article by Kurt Eichenwald (he wrote Microsoft’s Lost Decade for Vanity Fair back in 2012): Man Who Hiked AIDS Drug 5,000 Percent Faces Investigation for His Old Job.
Also worth checking out is TheStreet.com’s Worst CEOs in Biotech for 2014, and guess who’s on the list:
Of course I tried it. It’s not all that different from Diet Coke.
Martin Shkreli (pictured above giving the douche salute), hedge fund douche turned pharmaceutical douche, bought the company that makes the standard treatment for toxoplasmosis, a parasitical disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.
Alas, the ethically questionable practice of buying up the companies that make a drug that’s been used for decades and turning their products into “specialty drugs” simply through price gouging is proving to be a profitable business model for a number of douches.
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Hello from the St. Petersbureau!
The marina at St. Petersburg. Take this morning just before 9:00 a.m..
Welcome to the start of another working week! As I do from time to time, I volunteered to give Anitra a lift to her work in St. Petersburg, a drive that can take up to an hour or so, depending on traffic. That way, we both win: she gets a break from commuting for a day, and for me, getting out of the home office is a nice change of scenery.
I also made breakfast for the both of us while she showered this morning — scrambled eggs with spinach and a little onion — which should net me at least 100 Husband Points. I try to keep my score high. Later tonight, we’re catching up with friends on Pass-a-Grille Beach, a stone’s throw away from where we got married just over six months ago.
Chauffeuring Anitra to work has an added benefit: it’s also the perfect excuse to hook the bike on the rack and take some time to enjoy zipping around St. Petersburg’s beautiful, uncrowded, bike-friendly streets.
My car and bike rack, taken in Ottawa circa September 2011. It’s the only photo I have with a bike on the rack. I left the bike pictured above in Toronto for my oldest nephew; I now ride around on Anitra’s old bike.
I love biking around downtown St. Pete in the morning, but I end up asking the same question every time: Where is everybody?
All these photos, save the one of my car with the red bike on the rack, were taken this morning in downtown St. Pete between 8:45 and 9:00 a.m. today. You’d think the place existed in some sort of Jimmy Buffett drunken slacker time warp (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). This is Beach Avenue, the home of a lot of shops and sidewalk cafes and bistros:
Here’s 1st Street North. At this point, I’m still the only vehicle on the road:
It’s all quiet if you look north from the corner of 1st Street North and 2nd Avenue North…
…but looking west, I see what passes for morning traffic here.
Here’s an amusing sticker I found on a parked car this morning. This is my kind of emergency planning:
And finally, my current setup at the “St. Petersbureau”:
I hope your day’s going well!
The phrase from last night’s Canadian leadership debate (for those of you who aren’t Canadian, there’s a national election going on) is the one uttered by incumbent, Prime Minister, and dickish control freak Stephen Harper during the part about immigrants and refugees. It’s at the 20-second mark in the video below:
“Old Stock Canadians.” It’s got the same dog-whistle tone as the Quebec phrases pure laine, which translates literally as “pure wool”, and is better translated as “dyed in the wool”, and de souche, a 19th-century term invented by anti-Semites in France which oddly enough, translates as…old stock.
“Old Stock Canadian” is an especially interesting turn of phrase since Harper’s Conservative Party, who have been facing a steeper uphill campaign than they’d expected, recently hired pricey Australian campaign strategist Lynton Crosby, who’s known for using xenophobia in his election-winning playbook.
If you’re still not sure of what “Old Stock Canadian” means, you’re in luck. Rachel Décoste came up with a handy chart, and I’ve spruced up its typography and wording:
My friend Sarah Baird is the COO of the Toronto-based startup VarageSale, an online, local-focused marketplace that competes with Craigslist by focusing on mobile platforms. VarageSale has expanded to cover all of Canada and most states in the U.S., and now they’ve got their eyes on Florida. In order to establish a presence here, they need a community manager, and they’re looking for one based in Central Florida.
VarageSale — that’s short for “Virtual Garage Sale” — is the brainchild of Tami Zuckerman, who came up with the idea out of frustration while trying to clear out her house by selling stuff through Craigslist and similar marketplace sites. She and her husband developed an app that helped her sell her excess stuff with her smartphone, and while they didn’t start out intending to create a business, the idea grew into one.
VarageSale connects people through their Facebook profiles, and uses volunteer moderators to approve new members. You post items for sale and an asking price, and the app lets prospective buyers comment, haggle over price, or say “sold”! The service has grown in popularity, the Canadian tech news site TechVibes named them Canadian Startup of the Year for 2014, and in March, they raised $34 million in venture money from Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. So to answer a question you might have already asked: yes, it looks like they’ve got a future.
I’ll personally vouch for VarageSale’s Chief Operating Officer, Sarah Baird, as someone who knows how to get things done. I know her through my developer evangelism work in Toronto with Tucows, Microsoft, and Shopify, and through her work at Interactive Ontario (a not-for-profit industry trade organization that encourages the growth of the interactive digital content industry in the province of Ontario), the social game development shop Social Game Universe, and at various industry events in Toronto’s thriving tech scene. She gets stuff done, and my feeling is that so will any company that where she’s COO.
If you get the job, you’ll be working remotely from Florida and in regular communication with the team at the head office in Toronto, Canada, which you’ll have to visit from time to time (it’s a great city). You’ll be part of the Growth Team and the “face” of VarageSale in the Sunshine State, get people hooked up with VarageSale and building up the community of Floridians who use it to buy and sell things. You’ll be part of their global expansion effort and working closely with their Launch, Marketing, and Happiness Teams to kick off their push in Florida and building and nurturing Florida’s VarageSale communities on an ongoing basis.
Some things about the community manager job (these are distilled from their job posting):
- You’ll need to be able to communicate your passion and care for the community not just in person, but, more importantly, online.
- You have to be comfortable being the celebrity in the grocery store and the go-to online resource for all VarageSale communities. This is a job for someone who can get in front of a crowd, “shake hands and kiss babies”, and get them to take action — namely, using VarageSale and getting them to get other people to use it as well.
- Your job will be to grow VarageSale communities in Florida. This means building bases of users all over the state, finding and cultivating influencers to help get the word out, and organizing and hosting VarageSale events. That means showing up, which in turn means you’ll have to do some traveling.
- You should be comfortable working remotely in a startup culture, and you should have some marketing and/or community management experience. If you’ve ever had to be the “face” of a product or service, that’s even better. And you’ll need to know how to work a community.
If this sounds like your kind of gig, go to their Florida Community Manager job page and apply now! Tell them Joey sent you.
Links you might find useful
- Here’s the page for the Florida Community Manager job.
- Here are VarageSale’s apps on the iTunes App Store (for iPhones/iPads/iPod Touch) and Google Play (for Android phones and tablets).
- Here are a couple of articles on VarageSale: