What annoyed me is that Theranos has been singled out as a bad apple, an exceptional case. It is not. The “fake it ’til you make it” ethos is a poisonous Silicon Valley mantra, and I’ve heard repeated with glee all over Southern Ontario. Tech founders boast of their guts and guile at faking demos to scam investors (quietly developing a functional product only when the money is safely in the bank).
Elizabeth Holmes has been pilloried – rightly – but the notion that Theranos was exceptionally brash or dishonest is probably untrue. Also: Theranos investors were credulous fools. Unlike coding, at which any 12-year-old can develop basic proficiency and a handful of 19-year-olds have parleyed into vast fortunes, it is virtually impossible that a 19-year-old first-year biology dropout could understand pathogen detection and microfluidics sufficiently well to make a novel contribution to the field. Any scientist reading this will immediately understand what a hard slog this would require: hours in classrooms and years in laboratories. Holmes apparently believed that her callow, freshman education, her access to the monied and powerful and her sheer and not-unadmirable gumption could supplant the slog.
(Aside: I cannot be the only “tech” person to have marvelled at how investment dollars dropped into Holmes’ lap like ripe pears.)
According to “Bad Blood”, at least one of Holmes’ professors at Stanford told Holmes almost immediately upon its founding that Theranos was a stupid idea that would “never work”. And it didn’t. The scientific due diligence performed by early investors in Theranos was almost nil. It was comical, actually: when I was running the little incubator here in Southern Ontario, it’s unlikely we would have admitted Theranos to the program had the company applied. The reason is simple: we happily signed eternally binding NDAs, but we required science-based companies to let us look long and hard under the hood.
Holmes’ investor fools and their money were soon parted. Unfortunately for Holmes, they were powerful fools and once they had publicly humiliated as fools rather than the geniuses they believed they were, they were immediately (and rather satisfyingly given Theranos’ promise of single-drop diagnostics) out for blood.
The rest is history. Holmes was sentenced to 10 years in prison. I’m torn between thinking that this is a rather harsh punishment for someone whose victims were great big rich fools, and scolding myself for having any sympathy at all for a fraudulent fraudster.
And it didn’t.