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.
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.
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 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.
Ultimately I think you’ve turned this into a political culture war issue, and in doing so have revealed even more misogyny and put it on display here.
> No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men.
Really? You believe this? I don’t know how to ask this in a respectful way: were you born yesterday?
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 who can’t be trusted. Immediately we’ve made an assumption that they’ve permanently changed their body and undergone intense societal and familial turmoil just to cheat the system and get a podium in D3 collegiate athletics; we can’t trust that they are genuinely identifying as a woman, because who would willingly choose to be a women, right?
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.
For every Elizabeth Holmes there are 10 Sam Bankman-Frieds.
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.
Also, this whole issue of trans women in sports affects almost nobody. The amount of trans women in competitive high level sports is less than the fingers on one of my hands and none of them are breaking records.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men.
Really? You believe this? I don’t know how to ask this in a respectful way: were you born yesterday?
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 who can’t be trusted. Immediately we’ve made an assumption that they’ve permanently changed their body and undergone intense societal and familial turmoil just to cheat the system and get a podium in D3 collegiate athletics; we can’t trust that they are genuinely identifying as a woman, because who would willingly choose to be a women, right?
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.
For every Elizabeth Holmes there are 10 Sam Bankman-Frieds.
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.
Also, this whole issue of trans women in sports affects almost nobody. The amount of trans women in competitive high level sports is less than the fingers on one of my hands and none of them are breaking records.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/04/19/400826487/transgender-man-lea...
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.
Word to wise entrepreneurs.
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
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...
The tech industry is rife with such suckers. We wouldn't have the wealth we have without them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI
Seeing her like that gave me flashbacks to Mark Zuckerberg before he seemingly trained away that empty stare he and others share.
The difference between science and engineering right there...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI (The Simpsons)
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
(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)
This is fable level unreadable to me