If you're a Walgreen's investor, blame their management for not doing the proper due diligence.
If you're a Theranos investor, blame yourself for not doing the proper due diligence.
If you're a Theranos investor, blame yourself for not doing the proper due diligence.
> If you're a Theranos investor, blame yourself for not doing the proper due diligence.
I think we can only get people into non-zero-sum behavior when we talk about things like, cause, power, and responsibility.
For example, I'd accept no blame here. But I do feel responsibility in a couple ways. As a participant in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, this event will effect me. Even if I didn't make the mess, I'm going to have to help clean it up. And looking back, I think about the power I might have had to cause a different outcome. What if I had spoken up more against the hype cycle? What if I had said more clearly that this was a bubble? I'm only one person, but there were a lot of people who could have spoken up more. If we had done it together, could we have reduced the damage of the bubble? Hard to say, but next time I'll try harder and see what happens.
If this sort of thing interests you, you might enjoy Dekker's "Field Guide to Understanding Human Error," which is a brilliant book about airplane safety investigations. I thought it had a lot of applicability in tech.
In addition to the delusion, there was operational mismanagement, but even that is not a scam.
Let's all worry about blaming someone for a problem instead of fixing it. It's so much more productive.
In the case of Theranos the problem of "what went wrong?" and "who fucked up?" are effectively the same - either the investors didn't do proper due diligence or the founders misled them. You can't fix the problem without knowing the cause. It doesn't really matter whether you couch it in terms of "what" or "who"; knowing one automatically informs you of the other.
If the investors didn't do their proper due diligence, then they can take steps to be more responsible in the future. If the founders misled them, then it becomes an economic and political issue of how to address and further prevent such problems.
Or just throw someone under the bus and keep repeating the same mistakes.
Rarely industry players will invest in security instead of just banking the money. But aviation companies, airports, manufacturers - nobody wants to have any of their products involved in an accident.