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Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Seeks Investors For New Company (vanityfair.com)
There's a new surprise from the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou (author of the Theranos expose Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup). An anonymous reader shares Vanity Fair's summary of their newest podcast interview:
According to Carreyrou, Holmes is currently waltzing around Silicon Valley, meeting with investors, hoping to raise money for an entirely new start-up idea. (My mouth dropped when I heard that, too....) I'm sure she will somehow succeed in convincing someone to hand over millions of dollars, especially if venture capitalists like Tim Draper (an early Theranos investor) are still out there saying the stories by Carreyrou were wrong (they weren't), and that Holmes was on the precipice of saving the world (she wasn't) before the media came after her.
You would think that seeing Holmes's duplicity wrapped up in a neat bow in Carreyrou's book, and in the S.E.C. settlement -- which, incidentally, mentions the term "fraud" seven times -- would force Silicon Valley to perform its own due diligence, and question whether the way C.E.O.s, investors, and the media interact should be re-evaluated. But alas, the tech world doesn't see Theranos as a tech company, but rather a biotech outlier... Of course, there is still a major criminal investigation underway by the F.B.I., one that could end with Holmes behind bars.
Carreyou tells another interviewer that Theranos "is a cautionary tale about the hubris in the Valley... there's certainly a lot of innovation there, but there's also an unbelievable amount of arrogance and pretending."
You would think that seeing Holmes's duplicity wrapped up in a neat bow in Carreyrou's book, and in the S.E.C. settlement -- which, incidentally, mentions the term "fraud" seven times -- would force Silicon Valley to perform its own due diligence, and question whether the way C.E.O.s, investors, and the media interact should be re-evaluated. But alas, the tech world doesn't see Theranos as a tech company, but rather a biotech outlier... Of course, there is still a major criminal investigation underway by the F.B.I., one that could end with Holmes behind bars.
Carreyou tells another interviewer that Theranos "is a cautionary tale about the hubris in the Valley... there's certainly a lot of innovation there, but there's also an unbelievable amount of arrogance and pretending."
Interesting company she keeps.. It's not just the Clintons, but also other Washington power brokers, Republicans and Democrats alike. These politicians publicly denounce crony capitalism and nepotism, and privately are huge beneficiaries and promoters of it. And you can bet that every single one of her board members and political cronies made off like a bandit in her fraud. When these politicians tell you that the system is rigged, they are speaking the truth; what they don't tell you is that the very people who claim they want to fix it are the ones who are rigging it in the first place.
And pollsters wonder why voters reject both the Democratic and the Republican establishment.
No she has an established MO. She patiently develops relationships with reputable older gentlemen she has access to because of her family connections; she gets them by playing the bubbly granddaughter card. Then she uses those relationships to convince investors. That's how people like George Shultz or Henry Kissinger gave her the credibility to get money from people like Rupert Murdoch. And so on.
Everything is fake about her, including her low pitch voice, but as she gets older the "bright young woman" aspect which opened countless doors for her is going away, so before long her wings will be clipped naturally.
But the thing is, she didn't have the "bright" part. She dropped out of Stanford as an undergraduate, so no degree beyond high school. Unlike Zuckerberg or Gates, you don't just become an expert on your own in advanced biochemistry and medicine. There was no one with degrees in medicine or biology or a related build on the Theranos board. The employee turnover rate at Theranos was extremely high, so there was no one senior at Theranos with the relevant background either.
Her relevant background was essentially that she worked in a lab at Stanford with a respected engineering professor (not medical), and she later worked in a lab where she filed for a patent (b.f.d., it's so easy to get a patent these days).
The entire thing appears to have been a sham from start to end. Investors used to working for the typical Silicon Valley startup whose brilliant idea is "it's a social media web site, but the feed is on the left instead of the right!" were duped into thinking that could shift to a medical startup without knowing anything about the field.