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.
My memory is from when I was an advisor for Google Ventures. Theranos had come by looking for funding but wouldn't talk with GV except with an NDA (and VC will usually not sign NDAs). That made GV suspicious so they sent an employee to get tested by the device and noticed the test results came from a competitor's machine.
They wisely decided she was full of shit, and didn't invest.
The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing
The lack of awareness was the prof not realising corporate and upper class women are just as capable of being con artists with a dysfunctional grasp on reality as men are. (Other women are too, but they don't get the opportunities.)
It's an ironically sexist assumption.
Although at the same time men are less likely to face consequences - unless they defraud big-ticket investors without prior permission. Which was the true crime here, and the only one that matters at these levels.
Yeah, the same is maybe more obvious outside of HN, but engineer/tech companies often play the same trope but on "brilliant and smart people but bit naive/rose-tinted views that couldn't unintentionally harm anyone even if they tried", like how media showcased Zuckerberg initially, before everyone realized his true colors.
They still say it about Sam Bankman Friendman and that failed situation awareness fund dude that worked for him.
They will even argue, forever, that the situation awareness did not failed or folded, because being margin called does not count when bright smart young person gets margin called.
And the general scam of an attractive young woman speaking to a bunch of elderly men (realy, look up the early investors) and somehow convincing them to part with thier money is as old as time.
I just read this article about a Stephen Hawking biography that talks about how "Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability" so identity perception by the public does in fact contribute to how people think about their achievements.
Uh, let me tell you that that behavior is ignored in high profile scientists regardless of disability.
It is only in the last couple years that outright sexual abuse of employees and trainees has become something that could discredit a high profile scientist, and even those people are getting plenty of support in finding new places to do research thanks to the Epstein class.
Hawking was long dead before that, and many high profile scientists are guilty of what Hawking is guilty of.
Heh, I have a variant of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute, to bigotry, that which can be explained by misanthropy.
That is, don't assume that bad behavior is because of someone's membership in a particular demographic, when it could just be a general instance of people being assholes.
I am reading a comment (1) by a person (2) who read an article on a newspaper website (3) discussing a book (4) written by someone about the life (5) of Stephen Hawking.
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.
> 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'.
The scam was sold on her gender ("successful female entrepreneur"), so unfortunately it's going to be part of the heuristic.
Male-led scams aren't sold on the gender of the scammer; gender is completely ignored (No one describes those as "a successful male entrepreneur").
Unfortunately, the gender sale was a big part of the scam. I'm looking at many male-led scams, and they did not sell it based on the gender of the scammer.
> Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
No, it only proves that you have ideology deeply rooted. I believe you see sexism everywhere. The type of person you just want to say "oookay, huh, is sexism here, in the room with us?"
No, that's just sexism backfilling which things to discriminate against.
She was sold as a successful Stanford dropout, a genius who had a simple idea and assembled a very powerful group of people to push the idea and a ton of funding. Nobody is saying we shouldn't trust Stanford dropouts anymore.
I'd hesitate to jump to the conclusion that Holmes had editorial control over the way journalists portrayed her. The idea that a 'young woman overcoming the odds' story sells more than 'young man overcoming the odds' doesn't take any leaps of faith to explain.
That doesn't mean that Holmes didn't benefit from such coverage, she obviously did, but to call it part of the scam as if it was under her control seems a bit far fetched.
It's just pattern recognition at work. None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam, so it's about as notable as a scam founder wearing black shoes.
But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.
"female led" is only a selling point if women are underrepresented as founders, so it still circles back to whether or not the industry already had a pattern of sexism that made having a prominent female founder an outlier in the first place. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree, but I think it pretty clearly did.
Sexism is defined as prejudice or discrimination based on sex.
Prejudice means to form an opinion before the facts are in, but if the facts are there and support you, it is not prejudice.
Discrimination is fairly broad, but in this case can be summarized as preventing someone to get a job due to who they are as a person.
Having established what these words mean, I think it is difficult to entertain the idea that sexism played a role in women being underrepresented as founders in the 2020s. Also, as I have no data on this, I am not sure if the claim of underrepresentation is itself a prejudice or not.
How many women try and succeed? How many men try and succeed? I do not expect to have the percentage be vastly different in the last ten years.
If you don't believe that a system can be set up in a way that discourages certain people from trying, then sure, you can only measure the success of people who try. I don't understand how someone can think that there are no structural influences on whether people try to participate though.
I'm also not sure why you're bringing up "in the 2020s" as a counterargument against the idea that Theranos was not an outlier at the time when it stopped operating in 2018.
> None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam
If she never mentioned being female I don't remember it. In fact she used to talk in a fake man-voice to sound serious. Other people used the fact that she was a woman to sell the scam because it is still uncommon for a woman to be in that position. There was no possible way for her to avoid it, even by pulling her hair back hard, talking in a goofy deep voice, and dressing like Jobs.
edit: my point, if it's not clear, is that the fact that women founders are fewer is why people focused on her being a woman. If that's used to ignore future woman founders, making them rarer, it's a degenerate pattern recognition.
Scammers/predators/grifters/sociopaths will adopt any disguise and say whatever needs to be said that gets the mark to fall for it.
Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests.
Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's membership.
Is there a push to reduce qualifications in order to bring in people who don't historically enter your profession? No matter how kind or society-changing you're being, scammers will see that you're doing that, and will abuse that mercilessly.
They likewise bilk people who oppose that ideology, and will gladly present themselves as collecting for disadvantaged white boys, before running off with the money.
Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage. You don't have to harden your hearts, but you do have to engage your brain and apply suitable skepticism and scrutiny of their claims.
> Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage.
TheLastPsychiatrist used a good phrase to describe this: cognitive kill-switch. Anything that stops further examination or exploration of an assertion is a CKS. In Holmes' case, the CKS was "you're just sexist if you don't believe"...
Appreciate you taking the time to engage, unlike those that eye rolled and down voted. (They don’t like admitting their participation in pattern formation it would seem.)
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.
That’s only true in the public Zeitgeist, there is a huge preference among portions of the workforce for male leadership stated or unstated. This is not a good thing. I literally worked with a guy who was about to quit because a woman would boss him around and she was about 10,000 times as qualified as he was
Or perhaps this guy perceived normal, appropriate management that he would have been perfectly fine with had it come from a man as “bossy” when it came from a woman.
or perhaps she was just a toxic colleague, with tons of experience in a narrow field that he did not have and making colleagues leave was just her thing.
Vote me down all you want, women are just as capable as men in every way, including the wrong, toxic ones
No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She rode that wave.
Men ride other waves, but specifically not that one. Unless you count trans women in sports. Or Tim Walz.
> Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company
Why would anyone think that having significantly less than 50% women requires no investigation if they didn't think women are intrinsically bad for a company? The problem isn't a skew in favour of women. If you expect 50-50 and get 30-70, obviously that's something to look into, but you're complaining there aren't people trying to increase the skew further. It's like complaining about the lack of organisations explicitly calling to raise the growth in average temperature as a counterweight to all those who want to lower it, or about the lack of charities promoting deforestation.
EDIT: luckily I quoted the things I was replying to, because the above poster drastically edited his/her post, just resorting finally to namecalling.
> Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen.
Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any more and expect people to believe you, because who would lie about a thing like that? People now know that someone such as yourself would definitely lie, and so they will check for themselves. You need evidence.
> Case in point: there has been zero outrage about trans men. If you looked at a trans man you’d never suggest that a person who looks like this [1] should compete in women’s sports. You’d probably never even realize they were trans unless you were specifically told.
That's because a lot of the aim of society is to protect women, in various ways. So men who claim to be women who can beat women in women-only sports competitions, or can go in their changing rooms or bathrooms means women are not being afforded the protections we have tried to give them. That's why we have different bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports contests in the first place. No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
> Just so you are factually and scientifically informed, when trans women transition, they are taking hormone replacement therapy that blocks testosterone. It tends to make them significantly worse at sports as a result.
No, you are misinforming here. They don't have to do anything. "Self ID" exists. That's why a male rapist claiming to be a woman got put in a woman's prison in Scotland[0]. Also, for those who do take hormones, hormones don't help with lung capacity, size, Q angle, bone density, and all the many other things that make men better at sport.
> No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
No one cares about women entering a sporting contest in the men's category because there is no such thing. There are open categories, and there are restricted categories. The women's category is a restricted category, because 50% of the population deserve their own champions. Just like there are childrens' categories, categories for people who live in Gary, Indiana, and categories for people with different levels of paraplegia.
The fact that roughly half of people are men and half are women causes the open category to often be referred to as the "men's" category, but it is not. If a woman can and wants to compete in the "men's" category, she should. If this results in a crowding out of men in the rankings of some sport, they should feel free to start an actual restrictive men's category for that sport. Men's and women's bodies, socialization, and opportunities to practice are different. Men are 50% of the population and deserve their own champions.
edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
That might depend on the event, but the first thing that came up disproves your blanket claim. It's from World Boxing:
As part of this policy, World Boxing will operate two categories as determined by sex: a men’s category and a women’s category. To be eligible for the men’s category, a competitor must be male at birth. To be eligible for the women’s category, a competitor must be female at birth. [0]
This is for the safety of women. You can comfortably ignore the mad bit where they add "at birth" as though you can change your chromosomes.
> edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
I don't think so. No one cares about male competitors who aren't the best of the best.
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.
No one thinks that the number of males participating in business is too low, and that it is socially-beneficial and morally-important to promote male-run businesses.
This sort of thing is really hard to avoid. If you've ever spent time as somehow very different in a social setting, you can see this happening all the time. Even in positive ways.
Scamming as a male can actually improve your reputation. Donald Trump is currently the president of the united states despite years of ripping people off. If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
Here’s how I think it makes sense: accountability for unethical behavior arrives via more or less direct routes depending on who you are.
The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent.
But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.
I don't think it's that simple. If Bernie Sanders were an unknown, but had stabbed Iryna Zarutska on video and walked off saying he got that white girl, I'm pretty sure he would've still gone to jail and been subject to the death penalty. It's more than high-status people generally don't do that sort of thing, because you probably didn't get where you were if you were that unintelligent, violent, and impulsive.
In fact, in that exact case the chap who did it was treated far too leniently by the justice system and they've un-"Progressived" the law in some ways to make it so he would never be able to do that again. Which is progress. Or at least the undoing of Progress.
This is true, but I think my point still holds. If he were to get of jail, say by donating a substantial sum to Trump and then coincidentally getting a full pardon. And then he ran, I don't think that his infamy as a scammer would hurt him. If anything, that fame and name recognition would help. He could just lie and say he was framed and set up and yada yada and people would believe him.
Certain people were so desperate for the female Steve Jobs, that when a woman came along literally cosplaying Jobs, they jumped without asking any questions.
Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.
Yes, my daughter and I still will randomly say "worlds youngest self-made female billionaire" to each other and laugh when we hear someone use a phase that is only true because of an excessive number of qualifiers.
Well, to become the world's youngest female billionaire, you just have to pick the right parents and birth date. Difficult to do for sure, but seems much less interesting to talk about than becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
At the time women were (and still are) underdogs in STEM, so it's no surprise your professor would want to highlight that. For all the rest of were aware, she really was a successful health-tech founder
- young female founders running successful businesses appear to be exceptionally skilled because they have been fighting against the current for their entire life. And the future of that company is double-boosted: They have an exceptionally good founder at the helm, and that founder is going to get even more free media coverage than they normally would.
- ... therefore if I see a young female founder, say no more, I will extrapolate from historic facts and conclude that the company is highly likely to be successful.
- ... and Goodhart's Law kicks in. Whether it is because those with intent to defraud realize what they need to do / they were always around but are now no longer filtered out, or it's simply because the Constanza-liars (they believe their own lies) are not being reality checked anymore doesn't matter: The measurement tool 'is a young female founder' has lost all its predictive power.
- even worse, if the relevant parts of society (the editors of financial newspapers, the bigwigs at investment corps) don't sniff the change in the wind fast enough, we get a new oversimplified yardstick: Someone is going to conclude 'might as well treat every young female founder as a fraud, because statistically they probably are!'
I think your innate sense here is the right answer: The original sin here is treating the identity of the founder as the only significant aspect. Not a heck of a lot of inquiry and skepticism about the promise of Theranos was required to start unravelling that whole mess.
Weird to put together "female and young": females are discriminated against, but it is older people, not younger ones, that are discriminated too. This ain't Japan, were seniority is king. This is America, where you are in decline after 30.
Yet paradoxically, being old is nearly a requirement for political office.
Biden was the oldest president in history, and with his re-election, Trump will become the oldest president in history should he live out his term.
The average age of the 119th Congress overall is 59 years old, with the House averaging 57 and the Senate averaging 64. For comparison, the average age of the US as a whole is just under 39.
This is probably one of the largest reasons the country is in the state it's in: most of those in power won't live long enough to see the consequences of the policies they enact, so they don't give a damn.
I remember the endless glazing of Sam Bankman-Fried being pretty similar. Pretty sure they engineered it that way. Sell the idea of success. Trump did the exact same thing.
She cosplayed Steve Jobs with the sweater, had obviously studied the west coast CEO bullshit trope stuff, and everything and used her earnest attractive nature to dupe a bunch of well known old men to endorse her.
Being female was a part of the grift but not the most notable. Many male grifters do the same thing without the girl power thing.
Being female is key for the sympathy play after the fact, and this little exercise to fish for a pardon from POTUS with a documentary. She went from Steve Jobs Girlboss to exploited victim, boo hoo.
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!
Who was it again that said money is thrown out the window without any concern, you just have to stand below the right window? It was true then and it is true now. Really helps if the money you are throwing out isn't your own, too.
> Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup
We like to think we live in a meritocracy, but the fact so much of success is based on personality, manipulating people, being charming and persuasive, tapping into others' insecurities and ambitions.
Elizabeth Holmes is a symptom of the same basic human dysfunction that brought us Charles Manson and Donald Trump.
All founders and CEOs are like this, to the point that when I meet a person in leadership who clearly isn't a sociopath my default reaction is to assume that they're not successful.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
And surely with all the competent engineers working for her, she could have figured out where to pivot to, once she understood that the original basic idea was unworkable.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
> So he calls Amanda Seyfried, who sits and watches the scene we’ve just seen of Holmes sitting and watching Seyfried portray her.
This is so very Nathan Fielder. Perfect encapsulation of his unique brand of humor. Seyfried portrays Holmes, giving her interpretation of Holmes. Holmes watches the portrayal, giving her interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation. Seyfried watches Holmes' interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation of Holmes.
This vibe is basically the entire theme of The Rehearsal. It's an exercise in how many Matryoshka dolls we can un-nest in our meta exploration of the topic. Keep zooming out and re-view yourself in the scene you just played which is a super interesting way to discover things about yourself and others
(from the trailer) Holmes' mouth reminds me of the Amazon logo. Not just the shape. Also the complete disconnect between the commonly held meaning of a smile and the entity which is currently using it.
My worst nightmare would be to wake up in a room with SV tech execs, something like her + zuck + musk + altman, legit impossible to tell if they're human or skinwalkers
> 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...
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...)
Imagine claiming undue credit for the works of Euler, Einstein, Michaelangelo, and hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe, while disclaiming the constant bailouts from the taxpayer so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money, and being blinkered to the fact that 'money' doesn't solve hard problems or do hard things, workers do.
Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
> so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money
If you think capitalists never lose money then you're not on this planet. Obviously money is lost all the time. There are lots of investors, lots of companies, and few winners. This is mad. Of course bailouts happen, and they're done by the state. Capitalism would let them fail.
> hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe
In this case the church was the capitalist. They risked the capital that paid for the cathedral. Although it was fairly low risk, as building a cathedral is pretty well understood.
> Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
In this case the state is the capitalist, although it's taking the money by force rather than with a risk/reward voluntary investment. The worker isn't doing this by him/herself.
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: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
For those who are experts on body language, non-verbal communication, psychological communication tricks, etc -- what on earth are we seeing in that trailer?
I’m not an expert at body language, but I think anyone can see she is trying really, really hard to appear friendly and trustworthy. But when someone is trying that hard to convince you they are benign, it makes you suspicious.
I watched a 90 second clip from this film earlier today: Holmes unblinking asking ‘Why would I deceive you…’ Really strange stuff. I have to admit that I watched the clip a second time.
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.
Holmes seems to have the Harvard Business (MBA) mindset: science, R&D, engineering are just results to squeeze out of recalcitrant practitioners. Any failure in those domains is evidence only of the scientists' or engineers' refusal to align themselves with the Vision.
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
One thing that the earlier documentary on Theranos, The Inventor, made obvious is that Holmes is pretty charismatic at a personal level. At one point, Gibney is trying to interview her, but the camera he’s setting up isn’t working for some reason, and he’s apologizing. She says “it’s alright” and then leans in and says “we’re going to get through this” and smiles. It’s very warm. It was easier to see how people bought into her and her vision after that.
In particular, season 2 is truly a work of art. As you said, it is just flat out brilliant. If you haven't watched the final episode of nathan for you (season 4 episode 7), watch it. it's equally fantastic.
I get that musk frequently underdelivers and has gone insane recently, but what he’s done with spacex and Tesla is genuinely impressive. So I’m not sure what the hell do you mean, what exact standard?
I think lying to investors is essentially what she was convicted of. You can make the argument that Musk believes what he says. Or you can say that he stayed clear of methods that make malice very obvious like forging documents.
But I don't think the comparison is completely far fetched. Let's take stuff like his "funding secured" tweet, the "2016 autopilot promo video", his "Solar Roof" stunt do come a little close to outright lying to investors for my taste.
Not quite the level of forging documents, but pretty dishonest.
Meh, from the documentaries I have seen and reading about her, to me it seems that she is hungry for attention. She will do whatever she vmcan to get attention, and she has succeeded once more with this documentary. She is also getting your money.
I dont understand why dont people stop beating that death horse. She is a scanner and fraudster. She defrauded a lot of people and is in jail for that. Move on. Let her rot in the obscurity in she belongs to
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.
My memory is from when I was an advisor for Google Ventures. Theranos had come by looking for funding but wouldn't talk with GV except with an NDA (and VC will usually not sign NDAs). That made GV suspicious so they sent an employee to get tested by the device and noticed the test results came from a competitor's machine.
They wisely decided she was full of shit, and didn't invest.
The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing
Gender etc provided a new vector.
The lack of awareness was the prof not realising corporate and upper class women are just as capable of being con artists with a dysfunctional grasp on reality as men are. (Other women are too, but they don't get the opportunities.)
It's an ironically sexist assumption.
Although at the same time men are less likely to face consequences - unless they defraud big-ticket investors without prior permission. Which was the true crime here, and the only one that matters at these levels.
Yeah, the same is maybe more obvious outside of HN, but engineer/tech companies often play the same trope but on "brilliant and smart people but bit naive/rose-tinted views that couldn't unintentionally harm anyone even if they tried", like how media showcased Zuckerberg initially, before everyone realized his true colors.
They still say it about Sam Bankman Friendman and that failed situation awareness fund dude that worked for him.
They will even argue, forever, that the situation awareness did not failed or folded, because being margin called does not count when bright smart young person gets margin called.
Musk as well among others.
I find this a week comparison. I've driven a Tesla, I've used PayPal. My government has used spaceX to do space things.
Whatever you think of Musk there's a significant amount of "actually exists and works" that's on a different planet vs Theranos
And the general scam of an attractive young woman speaking to a bunch of elderly men (realy, look up the early investors) and somehow convincing them to part with thier money is as old as time.
Heck, Henry kissinger was on her board.
I mean, plenty of men have done the same thing. No imagination required.
I just read this article about a Stephen Hawking biography that talks about how "Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability" so identity perception by the public does in fact contribute to how people think about their achievements.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/07/hawking-by-gra...
Uh, let me tell you that that behavior is ignored in high profile scientists regardless of disability.
It is only in the last couple years that outright sexual abuse of employees and trainees has become something that could discredit a high profile scientist, and even those people are getting plenty of support in finding new places to do research thanks to the Epstein class.
Hawking was long dead before that, and many high profile scientists are guilty of what Hawking is guilty of.
Heh, I have a variant of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute, to bigotry, that which can be explained by misanthropy.
That is, don't assume that bad behavior is because of someone's membership in a particular demographic, when it could just be a general instance of people being assholes.
I am reading a comment (1) by a person (2) who read an article on a newspaper website (3) discussing a book (4) written by someone about the life (5) of Stephen Hawking.
What I read !== Stephen Hawking.
Words will never be a human, for what it's worth. May as well delete that code path, as it'll never be reached.
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?"
Interestingly you won't find this for well connected white males.
Sam Bankman Fried didn't hurt anybody else in his gender class, but somehow now all women have to carry the baggage of 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.
> 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'.
The scam was sold on her gender ("successful female entrepreneur"), so unfortunately it's going to be part of the heuristic.
Male-led scams aren't sold on the gender of the scammer; gender is completely ignored (No one describes those as "a successful male entrepreneur").
Unfortunately, the gender sale was a big part of the scam. I'm looking at many male-led scams, and they did not sell it based on the gender of the scammer.
> Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
No, it only proves that you have ideology deeply rooted. I believe you see sexism everywhere. The type of person you just want to say "oookay, huh, is sexism here, in the room with us?"
No, that's just sexism backfilling which things to discriminate against.
She was sold as a successful Stanford dropout, a genius who had a simple idea and assembled a very powerful group of people to push the idea and a ton of funding. Nobody is saying we shouldn't trust Stanford dropouts anymore.
I'd hesitate to jump to the conclusion that Holmes had editorial control over the way journalists portrayed her. The idea that a 'young woman overcoming the odds' story sells more than 'young man overcoming the odds' doesn't take any leaps of faith to explain.
That doesn't mean that Holmes didn't benefit from such coverage, she obviously did, but to call it part of the scam as if it was under her control seems a bit far fetched.
It's just pattern recognition at work. None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam, so it's about as notable as a scam founder wearing black shoes.
But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.
"female led" is only a selling point if women are underrepresented as founders, so it still circles back to whether or not the industry already had a pattern of sexism that made having a prominent female founder an outlier in the first place. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree, but I think it pretty clearly did.
Sexism is defined as prejudice or discrimination based on sex.
Prejudice means to form an opinion before the facts are in, but if the facts are there and support you, it is not prejudice.
Discrimination is fairly broad, but in this case can be summarized as preventing someone to get a job due to who they are as a person.
Having established what these words mean, I think it is difficult to entertain the idea that sexism played a role in women being underrepresented as founders in the 2020s. Also, as I have no data on this, I am not sure if the claim of underrepresentation is itself a prejudice or not.
How many women try and succeed? How many men try and succeed? I do not expect to have the percentage be vastly different in the last ten years.
If you don't believe that a system can be set up in a way that discourages certain people from trying, then sure, you can only measure the success of people who try. I don't understand how someone can think that there are no structural influences on whether people try to participate though.
I'm also not sure why you're bringing up "in the 2020s" as a counterargument against the idea that Theranos was not an outlier at the time when it stopped operating in 2018.
> But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by.
Only by sexists.
They definitely do, just implicitly. In the past it was more explicitly stated.
> None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam
If she never mentioned being female I don't remember it. In fact she used to talk in a fake man-voice to sound serious. Other people used the fact that she was a woman to sell the scam because it is still uncommon for a woman to be in that position. There was no possible way for her to avoid it, even by pulling her hair back hard, talking in a goofy deep voice, and dressing like Jobs.
edit: my point, if it's not clear, is that the fact that women founders are fewer is why people focused on her being a woman. If that's used to ignore future woman founders, making them rarer, it's a degenerate pattern recognition.
The patterns did not form themselves.
It’s rarely “just pattern recognition at work.”
Scammers/predators/grifters/sociopaths will adopt any disguise and say whatever needs to be said that gets the mark to fall for it.
Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests.
Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's membership.
Is there a push to reduce qualifications in order to bring in people who don't historically enter your profession? No matter how kind or society-changing you're being, scammers will see that you're doing that, and will abuse that mercilessly.
They likewise bilk people who oppose that ideology, and will gladly present themselves as collecting for disadvantaged white boys, before running off with the money.
Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage. You don't have to harden your hearts, but you do have to engage your brain and apply suitable skepticism and scrutiny of their claims.
> Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage.
TheLastPsychiatrist used a good phrase to describe this: cognitive kill-switch. Anything that stops further examination or exploration of an assertion is a CKS. In Holmes' case, the CKS was "you're just sexist if you don't believe"...
CKS is an effective CKS if misused.
Appreciate you taking the time to engage, unlike those that eye rolled and down voted. (They don’t like admitting their participation in pattern formation it would seem.)
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.
That’s only true in the public Zeitgeist, there is a huge preference among portions of the workforce for male leadership stated or unstated. This is not a good thing. I literally worked with a guy who was about to quit because a woman would boss him around and she was about 10,000 times as qualified as he was
then again, how good a manager would she have made if she was bossing around colleagues to the point of them quitting?
Management is not just about qualification, it's also about the human aspect.
I have seen enough toxic femineity at work to say it is actually a thing, on par with toxic masculinity.
Or perhaps this guy perceived normal, appropriate management that he would have been perfectly fine with had it come from a man as “bossy” when it came from a woman.
or perhaps she was just a toxic colleague, with tons of experience in a narrow field that he did not have and making colleagues leave was just her thing.
Vote me down all you want, women are just as capable as men in every way, including the wrong, toxic ones
All of you misread would and put your own spin on it. She wasn’t even hired yet, and he had never met her.
> Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
Only if you're determined to look for it.
No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She rode that wave.
Men ride other waves, but specifically not that one. Unless you count trans women in sports. Or Tim Walz.
> Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company
Why would anyone think that having significantly less than 50% women requires no investigation if they didn't think women are intrinsically bad for a company? The problem isn't a skew in favour of women. If you expect 50-50 and get 30-70, obviously that's something to look into, but you're complaining there aren't people trying to increase the skew further. It's like complaining about the lack of organisations explicitly calling to raise the growth in average temperature as a counterweight to all those who want to lower it, or about the lack of charities promoting deforestation.
> No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men.
They do? Epstein totally did that. Thiel totally does that. All those deeply conservative male leaders do that.
I regret engaging, comment removed.
I enjoyed your response, sorry about that
EDIT: luckily I quoted the things I was replying to, because the above poster drastically edited his/her post, just resorting finally to namecalling.
> Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen.
Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any more and expect people to believe you, because who would lie about a thing like that? People now know that someone such as yourself would definitely lie, and so they will check for themselves. You need evidence.
> Case in point: there has been zero outrage about trans men. If you looked at a trans man you’d never suggest that a person who looks like this [1] should compete in women’s sports. You’d probably never even realize they were trans unless you were specifically told.
That's because a lot of the aim of society is to protect women, in various ways. So men who claim to be women who can beat women in women-only sports competitions, or can go in their changing rooms or bathrooms means women are not being afforded the protections we have tried to give them. That's why we have different bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports contests in the first place. No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
> Just so you are factually and scientifically informed, when trans women transition, they are taking hormone replacement therapy that blocks testosterone. It tends to make them significantly worse at sports as a result.
No, you are misinforming here. They don't have to do anything. "Self ID" exists. That's why a male rapist claiming to be a woman got put in a woman's prison in Scotland[0]. Also, for those who do take hormones, hormones don't help with lung capacity, size, Q angle, bone density, and all the many other things that make men better at sport.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Bryson_case
> No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
No one cares about women entering a sporting contest in the men's category because there is no such thing. There are open categories, and there are restricted categories. The women's category is a restricted category, because 50% of the population deserve their own champions. Just like there are childrens' categories, categories for people who live in Gary, Indiana, and categories for people with different levels of paraplegia.
The fact that roughly half of people are men and half are women causes the open category to often be referred to as the "men's" category, but it is not. If a woman can and wants to compete in the "men's" category, she should. If this results in a crowding out of men in the rankings of some sport, they should feel free to start an actual restrictive men's category for that sport. Men's and women's bodies, socialization, and opportunities to practice are different. Men are 50% of the population and deserve their own champions.
edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
That might depend on the event, but the first thing that came up disproves your blanket claim. It's from World Boxing:
This is for the safety of women. You can comfortably ignore the mad bit where they add "at birth" as though you can change your chromosomes.> edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
I don't think so. No one cares about male competitors who aren't the best of the best.
[0] https://worldboxing.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/World-Box...
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.
The government does! At least right now in the United States. And yeah, I think it's reasonable for people to start asking.
No one thinks that the number of males participating in business is too low, and that it is socially-beneficial and morally-important to promote male-run businesses.
https://xkcd.com/385/
This sort of thing is really hard to avoid. If you've ever spent time as somehow very different in a social setting, you can see this happening all the time. Even in positive ways.
Scamming as a male can actually improve your reputation. Donald Trump is currently the president of the united states despite years of ripping people off. If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
Unfortunately he was a registered Democrat.
So was Trump. To a true scammer, politics is just another grift.
> If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
And yet somehow he - a man - is in jail. A jail built by men, condemned by a justice system designed by men to lock bad men up.
... was in jail.
He died in 2021.
Curiously enough, unless something changed and nobody updated his Wikipedia page, his family didnt even collect his ashes.
Because Madoff scammed rich people. You can get away with a lot if you scam the poor. Not so much when you target the wealthy.
That makes no sense within the topic of conversation.
Here’s how I think it makes sense: accountability for unethical behavior arrives via more or less direct routes depending on who you are.
The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent.
But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.
I don't think it's that simple. If Bernie Sanders were an unknown, but had stabbed Iryna Zarutska on video and walked off saying he got that white girl, I'm pretty sure he would've still gone to jail and been subject to the death penalty. It's more than high-status people generally don't do that sort of thing, because you probably didn't get where you were if you were that unintelligent, violent, and impulsive.
In fact, in that exact case the chap who did it was treated far too leniently by the justice system and they've un-"Progressived" the law in some ways to make it so he would never be able to do that again. Which is progress. Or at least the undoing of Progress.
This is true, but I think my point still holds. If he were to get of jail, say by donating a substantial sum to Trump and then coincidentally getting a full pardon. And then he ran, I don't think that his infamy as a scammer would hurt him. If anything, that fame and name recognition would help. He could just lie and say he was framed and set up and yada yada and people would believe him.
True - I see what you mean. Well, I don't know if it's true, but I get the logic.
I inherently don't trust old white guys so i'm not sure that's true
Thing is, SBF, Tate, and Paul aren't old (well, depends on your frame of reference I suppose); so even discriminating on age wouldn't help you much.
indeed one could find exceptions to every rule
Then you are sexist and racist, nothing to be proud of!
funny that no one said that to the parent comment that blindly speculated that holmes caused more sexism simply for being a woman
yet bring up the ruling class and that gets called out for sexism despite the endless string of fraud cases covered by those demographics
I’m sure that if parent comment said that he doesn’t trust black women he’d get called out.
You a vc?
heh
https://xkcd.com/385/
Yes, 100%
Certain people were so desperate for the female Steve Jobs, that when a woman came along literally cosplaying Jobs, they jumped without asking any questions.
Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.
Reminiscent of what happened with Jason Arday[0].
[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-o...
Yes, my daughter and I still will randomly say "worlds youngest self-made female billionaire" to each other and laugh when we hear someone use a phase that is only true because of an excessive number of qualifiers.
Well, to become the world's youngest female billionaire, you just have to pick the right parents and birth date. Difficult to do for sure, but seems much less interesting to talk about than becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
At the time women were (and still are) underdogs in STEM, so it's no surprise your professor would want to highlight that. For all the rest of were aware, she really was a successful health-tech founder
It's a wider take on [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law):
- young female founders running successful businesses appear to be exceptionally skilled because they have been fighting against the current for their entire life. And the future of that company is double-boosted: They have an exceptionally good founder at the helm, and that founder is going to get even more free media coverage than they normally would.
- ... therefore if I see a young female founder, say no more, I will extrapolate from historic facts and conclude that the company is highly likely to be successful.
- ... and Goodhart's Law kicks in. Whether it is because those with intent to defraud realize what they need to do / they were always around but are now no longer filtered out, or it's simply because the Constanza-liars (they believe their own lies) are not being reality checked anymore doesn't matter: The measurement tool 'is a young female founder' has lost all its predictive power.
- even worse, if the relevant parts of society (the editors of financial newspapers, the bigwigs at investment corps) don't sniff the change in the wind fast enough, we get a new oversimplified yardstick: Someone is going to conclude 'might as well treat every young female founder as a fraud, because statistically they probably are!'
I think your innate sense here is the right answer: The original sin here is treating the identity of the founder as the only significant aspect. Not a heck of a lot of inquiry and skepticism about the promise of Theranos was required to start unravelling that whole mess.
Weird to put together "female and young": females are discriminated against, but it is older people, not younger ones, that are discriminated too. This ain't Japan, were seniority is king. This is America, where you are in decline after 30.
Yet paradoxically, being old is nearly a requirement for political office.
Biden was the oldest president in history, and with his re-election, Trump will become the oldest president in history should he live out his term.
The average age of the 119th Congress overall is 59 years old, with the House averaging 57 and the Senate averaging 64. For comparison, the average age of the US as a whole is just under 39.
This is probably one of the largest reasons the country is in the state it's in: most of those in power won't live long enough to see the consequences of the policies they enact, so they don't give a damn.
Have you ever wondered the same about other scams? Who else do you think was shaped "correctly"? Also, isn't affinity fraud most types of fraud?
I remember the endless glazing of Sam Bankman-Fried being pretty similar. Pretty sure they engineered it that way. Sell the idea of success. Trump did the exact same thing.
She cosplayed Steve Jobs with the sweater, had obviously studied the west coast CEO bullshit trope stuff, and everything and used her earnest attractive nature to dupe a bunch of well known old men to endorse her.
Being female was a part of the grift but not the most notable. Many male grifters do the same thing without the girl power thing.
Being female is key for the sympathy play after the fact, and this little exercise to fish for a pardon from POTUS with a documentary. She went from Steve Jobs Girlboss to exploited victim, boo hoo.
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.
Somewhat relevant from The Economist.
> Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-wa...
Or the other way: The reason the scam was caught was because people were looking for flaws. Society gives a lot of grace to male scammers.
The scam was caught due to a whistleblower, not because people were looking for flaws.
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!
He could have done this if he was from a more privileged background for sure.
>were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
The tech industry is rife with such suckers. We wouldn't have the wealth we have without them.
Who was it again that said money is thrown out the window without any concern, you just have to stand below the right window? It was true then and it is true now. Really helps if the money you are throwing out isn't your own, too.
> Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup
We like to think we live in a meritocracy, but the fact so much of success is based on personality, manipulating people, being charming and persuasive, tapping into others' insecurities and ambitions.
Elizabeth Holmes is a symptom of the same basic human dysfunction that brought us Charles Manson and Donald Trump.
Relevant musical interlude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0
Being charming and persuasive is legitimately one of the core skills of a CEO or any leader, though!
All founders and CEOs are like this, to the point that when I meet a person in leadership who clearly isn't a sociopath my default reaction is to assume that they're not successful.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
> who clearly isn't a sociopath
Or is a sociopath, just not *clearly*.
Hot take: She is a genius.
Just not the kind of genius that can invent new products or lead a successful company.
If she had partnered with a competent engineer and CEO, Theranos might still be in business.
The company wasn't doomed from the start. It began with a real vision.
Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
> The basic idea was and is unworkable.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
One of the best examples of this: Streaming video.
Literally a dream for decades, with billions of dollars spent on technology, marketing, infrastructure by huge incumbent players and startups alike.
Netflix didn’t innovate much on any of these angles, they “just” had the right business plan at the right moment.
> One of the best examples of this: Streaming video.
"Robots" that can talk/write like humans is probably an even longer endeavor we just managed to make believable enough to fool other humans.
And surely with all the competent engineers working for her, she could have figured out where to pivot to, once she understood that the original basic idea was unworkable.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
Same exact thought when this trailer came across my feed. "Oh, who did A24 get to play Holmes, she looks familiar somehow." hahaha
wait, it was actually her? I thought it was also some uncanny valley magic
Although I’m fully expecting actor shenanigans in the full documentary, I think the section in the trailer might actually be her for real
If you read the article, you'll see that they do have someone else play her in the second half. But that's kind of by design...?
After the complete mind melting of 2 seasons of "the rehearsal", this was my exact path too
My favorite quote from the article:
> So he calls Amanda Seyfried, who sits and watches the scene we’ve just seen of Holmes sitting and watching Seyfried portray her.
This is so very Nathan Fielder. Perfect encapsulation of his unique brand of humor. Seyfried portrays Holmes, giving her interpretation of Holmes. Holmes watches the portrayal, giving her interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation. Seyfried watches Holmes' interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation of Holmes.
This vibe is basically the entire theme of The Rehearsal. It's an exercise in how many Matryoshka dolls we can un-nest in our meta exploration of the topic. Keep zooming out and re-view yourself in the scene you just played which is a super interesting way to discover things about yourself and others
Love everything Nathan Fielder does. The trailer is awesome.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI
(from the trailer) Holmes' mouth reminds me of the Amazon logo. Not just the shape. Also the complete disconnect between the commonly held meaning of a smile and the entity which is currently using it.
What an incredible trailer. So simple but so communicative and almost gave me goosebumps, very well made.
Seeing her like that gave me flashbacks to Mark Zuckerberg before he seemingly trained away that empty stare he and others share.
My worst nightmare would be to wake up in a room with SV tech execs, something like her + zuck + musk + altman, legit impossible to tell if they're human or skinwalkers
Holy moly, that was unsettling.
It's like a horror movie trailer, only scarier.
> 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...
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...)
I don't want to necessarily claim that Altman is worse than Holmes, but I don't think the rank order is entirely clear either.
An AI CEO was absolutely Holmes' calling. You can only imagine.
Elizabeth: my company will enable a full quick and cheap blood test from just a finger prick
Amodei: AI will cure cancer
Elizabeth wasn’t ambitious and visionary enough for the current era.
If Sam Altman was actually named Elizabeth Altman the OpenAI CEO would be in jail.
People seem to forget that Sunny Balwani also went to prison over the Theranos fraud.
There are many issues with OpenAI but the two situations are pretty significantly different.
was about to reply, but... this has more layers than a (rotten) onion - I'll just restrain myself form doing so :P
You mean marketing and engineering.
Management and engineering.
Owners and employees
Capitalists and workers?
Worker and parasite?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI (The Simpsons)
Capitalists are the ones who allocate - and risk - money to attempt to solve problems like this.
Yeah and we wish they would stop. Because solutions like this are something the system optimizes for.
Then we wouldn't have anything that's hard to create and/or requires risk.
Imagine claiming undue credit for the works of Euler, Einstein, Michaelangelo, and hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe, while disclaiming the constant bailouts from the taxpayer so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money, and being blinkered to the fact that 'money' doesn't solve hard problems or do hard things, workers do.
Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
> so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money
If you think capitalists never lose money then you're not on this planet. Obviously money is lost all the time. There are lots of investors, lots of companies, and few winners. This is mad. Of course bailouts happen, and they're done by the state. Capitalism would let them fail.
> hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe
In this case the church was the capitalist. They risked the capital that paid for the cathedral. Although it was fairly low risk, as building a cathedral is pretty well understood.
> Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
In this case the state is the capitalist, although it's taking the money by force rather than with a risk/reward voluntary investment. The worker isn't doing this by him/herself.
Bro it's a thread about Theranos just take the L
She had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.
Didn't she fail out of science/engineering.
Can I claim to have an medical background if I failed the first semester?
Marketing by definition is fraudulent because it is all about creating a fake need.
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: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
Oh I'm going to use this:
"The chemistry works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky device stuff!"
And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
For those who are experts on body language, non-verbal communication, psychological communication tricks, etc -- what on earth are we seeing in that trailer?
I’m not an expert at body language, but I think anyone can see she is trying really, really hard to appear friendly and trustworthy. But when someone is trying that hard to convince you they are benign, it makes you suspicious.
I watched a 90 second clip from this film earlier today: Holmes unblinking asking ‘Why would I deceive you…’ Really strange stuff. I have to admit that I watched the clip a second time.
My brother has to remember to blink. (Thyroid or something, he's cagey about sharing diag. I suspect Grave's Disease.)
His unflinching stare into the eyes of interogation, while telling obvious lies, got us out of lots of trouble.
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"
After this, there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Perry of UBeam
Holmes seems to have the Harvard Business (MBA) mindset: science, R&D, engineering are just results to squeeze out of recalcitrant practitioners. Any failure in those domains is evidence only of the scientists' or engineers' refusal to align themselves with the Vision.
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
One thing that the earlier documentary on Theranos, The Inventor, made obvious is that Holmes is pretty charismatic at a personal level. At one point, Gibney is trying to interview her, but the camera he’s setting up isn’t working for some reason, and he’s apologizing. She says “it’s alright” and then leans in and says “we’re going to get through this” and smiles. It’s very warm. It was easier to see how people bought into her and her vision after that.
"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
At least it's not opus level unreadable amirite?
Who is Bobby the article keeps talking about? Her business partner's name was Sunny, and her husband is Billy.
Bobby-Sunny=Billy
it's an embeddings things, you know
Fielder's "The Rehearsal" on HBO was madly brilliant.
In particular, season 2 is truly a work of art. As you said, it is just flat out brilliant. If you haven't watched the final episode of nathan for you (season 4 episode 7), watch it. it's equally fantastic.
Elizabeth Holmes Thanksgiving Visit: Family Time in Prison
https://www.memesita.com/elizabeth-holmes-thanksgiving-visit...
And wtf is even a "prison camp?"
Wow that is a one scary intense trailer. Hard to believe we are not witnessing some kind of serious psychopathology right there
This looks like another homerun for a24
Imagine a world where we held Musk to the same standard as Holmes.
I get that musk frequently underdelivers and has gone insane recently, but what he’s done with spacex and Tesla is genuinely impressive. So I’m not sure what the hell do you mean, what exact standard?
I think lying to investors is essentially what she was convicted of. You can make the argument that Musk believes what he says. Or you can say that he stayed clear of methods that make malice very obvious like forging documents.
But I don't think the comparison is completely far fetched. Let's take stuff like his "funding secured" tweet, the "2016 autopilot promo video", his "Solar Roof" stunt do come a little close to outright lying to investors for my taste. Not quite the level of forging documents, but pretty dishonest.
Is she not in jail right now?
Also why in her right mind would she sign up to do this with Fielder?
My brain hurts from this project.
This is explained in the article. Including the hurting brain.
Read the article then.
Meh, from the documentaries I have seen and reading about her, to me it seems that she is hungry for attention. She will do whatever she vmcan to get attention, and she has succeeded once more with this documentary. She is also getting your money.
I dont understand why dont people stop beating that death horse. She is a scanner and fraudster. She defrauded a lot of people and is in jail for that. Move on. Let her rot in the obscurity in she belongs to