I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up.
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"
Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
The point is that anything subject to hype is also at a greater risk of being a scam.
If we were desperate for red-headed founders then the risk of any given red-head riding the wave of hype rather than substance is higher than at baseline.
That's the point being made. Your comment about male led misses it because there's currently no hype about male led. Though I can see it coming back.
No one markets ‘male founder’ as a reason to trust the business. Once gender is framed as a virtue, people start asking whether that claim actually means anything.
It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped.
I watched the entire trailer fully believing that Nathan Fielder had managed to find the most unhinged uncanny look-alike actress to play Elizabeth Holmes.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
Or Charles Manson could weasel his way into existing startups, claim them as his own, become the richest man in the world, AND kill so many more people than he ever thought possible!
> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
The difference between science and engineering right there...
How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field)
she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
There was some major tension in the trailer - I can't believe that's actually Elizabeth Holmes, but seeing her I can see how she managed to win over so many - she is very intense.
I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up.
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"
Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
The point is that anything subject to hype is also at a greater risk of being a scam.
If we were desperate for red-headed founders then the risk of any given red-head riding the wave of hype rather than substance is higher than at baseline.
That's the point being made. Your comment about male led misses it because there's currently no hype about male led. Though I can see it coming back.
No one markets ‘male founder’ as a reason to trust the business. Once gender is framed as a virtue, people start asking whether that claim actually means anything.
I inherently don't trust old white guys so i'm not sure that's true
It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped.
Word to wise entrepreneurs.
I watched the entire trailer fully believing that Nathan Fielder had managed to find the most unhinged uncanny look-alike actress to play Elizabeth Holmes.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
Or Charles Manson could weasel his way into existing startups, claim them as his own, become the richest man in the world, AND kill so many more people than he ever thought possible!
wait, it was actually her? I thought it was also some uncanny valley magic
Love everything Nathan Fielder does. The trailer is awesome.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI
It's like a horror movie trailer, only scarier.
"That’s part of its appeal — it’s a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus"
This is fable level unreadable to me
> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
The difference between science and engineering right there...
How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field)
You mean marketing and engineering.
Management and engineering.
Owners and employees
she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
If Sam Altman was actually named Elizabeth Altman the OpenAI CEO would be in jail.
was about to reply, but... this has more layers than a (rotten) onion - I'll just restrain myself form doing so :P
There was some major tension in the trailer - I can't believe that's actually Elizabeth Holmes, but seeing her I can see how she managed to win over so many - she is very intense.
Who’s “Bobby” mentioned in the article? Did the writer just mix up Billy Evans with Bobby?
It does seem that way, half-way through they switch from "Billy" to "Bobby"
Wow that is a one scary intense trailer. Hard to believe we are not witnessing some kind of serious psychopathology right there