Her first of the day, it is made from spinach, parsley, wheatgrass, and celery. Holmes grips a plastic cup of unappetizing green juice. Revisit Fortune’s now equally infamous 2014 writeup on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and you’ll find the same basic schtick throughout, coupled with a similarly credulous appraisal of the figure at its center. Vanity Fair’s poorly aged depiction of O’Rourke, for example, expended countless paragraphs mythologizing mundane details about its subject’s tastes and personal biography (one particularly emblematic sentence read: “Beto O’Rourke is quintessentially Generation X, weaned on Star Wars and punk rock and priding himself on authenticity over showmanship and a healthy skepticism of the mainstream”) while offering few tangible details about what he was actually running for president to do. Some of these, of course, are at least partly about the fawning conventions of profile journalism. Nonetheless, pair a hagiographic portrait of a political figure (like the now-infamous March 2019 cover feature on Beto O’Rourke published by Vanity Fair) with its tech sector equivalent, and the parallels start to pile up pretty fast. Hucksterism, true enough, comes in many forms, and there’s plenty to differentiate the private version from the more public kind regularly churned out by both of America’s major political parties. But they could also be larger entities like venture capital firms, investment funds or pension funds investing on behalf of people who aren’t fabulously wealthy.As someone who’s often made it my business to dive deep into the shallow bombast of centrist politicians, I feel an immediate sense of déjà vu whenever I’m tasked with writing about Silicon Valley. They can be athletes like Stephen Curry or Serena Williams, or entertainers like Kevin Hart or Ashton Kutcher. ![]() These investors can be fabulously wealthy individuals. The tech startup ecosystem exists in part because investors with capital to spare are willing to risk some of that money on a founder with an idea. What Holmes did was build a company by convincing investors that she could create something she knew to be a lie. Soon she was the CEO of a company with a $10 billion valuation, but it turned out that the technology didn’t work. ![]() ![]() She pitched investors and partners on technology that would revolutionize the healthcare system - instead of drawing blood intravenously and waiting days for test results, her technology would prick a tiny bit of blood and instantly conduct dozens of tests on it. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford. I would argue what she did helped undermine the entire venture compact, and that’s why she’s going to jail.Īs TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling wrote on Friday about the company: The implication here is that Holmes’ rich investors deserved to lose their money. In the wake of Elizabeth Holmes’ sentencing on Friday for defrauding investors, I’ve seen people argue that she was only guilty of messing with the wrong people - the wealthy. ![]() Sure, due diligence matters in the investment process, but lying about your capabilities can undercut the founder-investor relationship - and in extreme cases, to the detriment of the larger, global startup market. Let’s start with the supposition that the venture-founder compact is built almost entirely on trust, especially early on.
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