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If this is not Culture War tell me, but I'm flabbergasted, I have to share that with you all.
So it seems there is a documentary out about Elizabeth Holmes. I had no idea until I stumbled across this trailer, and at first I thought it was a movie. Because it looks like a movie. And I thought this was two actors and one, at least, of them was going to turn out to be a serial killer.
No, it would seem this is indeed the one, the only, the real genuine pure-quill Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy herself. And all I can say is holy crap.
Because she looks nuts. She looks like "I am about to slip some gelsemine into your tea and then sit by your bedside mopping your brow and cooing reassuringly as you slowly succumb to its effects, in the best traditions of the Golden Age of British murder".
It seems to be shot like a film, there has to be a hefty dose of acting going on because the guy playing? being? the director/narrator of the documentary looks like he is acting the part of "guy reacting to something he doesn't trust" with the hanging open mouth and sucking his tongue etc. reaction. But it seems like the filming really was that weird.
Gosh amighty. And there's a small child, a real small child and not "the script needs a baby" child actor, in this and everything. That really makes me concerned, because I would not leave that woman in charge of a goldfish.
The woman was either crazy as a loon or drugged out to the orbit of Pluto, or both. Because that kind of "pop your eyes wide open until the balls nearly fall out and stare unblinkingly and hold that stare for minutes" kind of behaviour, that is not normal.
How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades? Did the crazy only come out later?
Because DC money does not understand how Silicon Valley works. Almost all her investors are from DC circles, which makes sense given her pitch. "Female Zuckerberg reinvents medical testing" is a compelling sell to the sufficiently ignorant.
And on paper why couldn't she do it ? On paper Tesla, SpaceX, and Theranos do not look that different from each other : 'Autistic savant finds space with lazy legacy players, blindsides them with a technology leap and cleans house despite expert insistence that the technology simply wasn't there yet.'
Now, if you're from the valley, then you immediately see the folly in that reasoning. If you are YC, A16z or Sequoia, then you get pitched this exact story 20 times a day by an equally talented Stanford dropout. Premier VCs know that the story is for the media, they want to see hard outcomes : Growth (like Facebook before it made its first dollar), Technology (like when Altman showed Satya GPT3) or Revenue. Theranos had none of those, and failed to secure a single tier 1 VC.
Tesla wasn't just ambitious, it was standing on the shoulders of legacy giants who had already made and subsequently canned electric cars because of political pressure more so than technical pressure. Tesla was started at a time when batteries were improving exponentially by the year. Tesla hit the goldilocks zone in so many ways it is incredible. The ambition and the crazy founder were secondary to what was clearly fertile ground for disruption. Compare that to Elon's ill-fated attempts to reinvent trains (hyperloop), tunnels (boring company) or trucks (cybertruck). One may think that Elon's personality is what made him successful. On the contrary, Elon's personality is tolerated so VCs can get in early with tech's clearest technical thinker (alongside Bezos) with a proven record of hitting jackpot about 20% of the time.
Unfortunately, DC investors do not have the keen ability to tell the difference between someone with the right optics vs the true signals that indicate possible success. Holmes' narcissism (bad = ruthless climbing and image management) was mistaken for turbo-autism (good = technical obsession and single minded force of will). Her hyperbolic claims (fraud or naivete) were mistaken for insight. DC elite are used to military projects that make billions vanish without a trace. Spending $1B on seemingly valid breakthrough did not read as fraud. After all, the F-35 wasn't demonstrated for decades after the $50 billion in funding. They were especially gullible given the DC & old-money credentials of the Holmes family.
Probably both.
Tech VCs regularly yeet money into far dumber stuff than Theranos. Theranos definitely skewed East Coast due to the Healthcare aspect, which is something that Tech generally historically hasn't had that great a taste for and has its own crazy infrastructure of tiny explorer companies and acquisitions.
Is that really the case?
What else do we have that's high profile and obviously physically impossible? Even things like exaggerations of self driving cars are "not quite there yet and not clear when we'd get there" not "impossible."*
*With the caveat that Theranos is obviously impossible without other more eye catching and valuable technologies, not impossible with science fiction technology.
Silicon Valley tends to ignore Hardware as much as possible since it's too expensive, tricky and prone to falsification. YC's kicked out a bunch of companies over the year for straight-up fraud, though.
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