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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of the blame falls on the hype machine from Silicon Valley these days. SV has mastered manipulation of the press, and that's a power that can be used just as much for bad as it can for good. The drive to have the next celebrity CEO as well as being the talk of the town has driven this media craze. Relying on the media to drive celebrity rather than accomplishments and engineering chops is what changes SV back into any other mundane cronyistic industry.

Looking back at the Theranos hype, it was exactly the phrases that SV loves to hear, but without any of the data to back it up. That can work in software to some degree, where you can just build what you need, and it's just an engineering problem. You can't do that with science; nature is not as malleable as code.

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One thing about Theranos that seems different from most SV hype stories is the insane level of focus on the founder. Every piece that reports on Theranos spends more time on her than it does the product. I'm speaking from minimal experience here (my start-up credentials right now extend to one short-lived company), but I think normally VCs aren't willing to "fund the founder" vs. "fund the product" outside of the very early stages of a start-up. Theranos has been around for a decade and the fact Mrs. Holmes is a Stanford dropout is still nearly in every single article about the company. Contrast this to Mark Zuckerberg and his former association with Harvard is nearly never mentioned anymore (In articles dealing with Facebook).

That is an interesting call-out. I think originally, that it was a deliberate part of the Theranos story, trying to piggyback on the life stories of the likes of Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg. Now it's beginning to backfire.

Facebook never had such a personality centric story past the panache of coming out of Harvard and the Ivy League.

When we're talking about Facebook, we have a zillion concrete things to talk about, the services they provide, their open source and hardware, their refusal to play ball with Jobs' attempt to turn SV into a company town, etc. etc. All sorts of things one associates with successful companies, which here I define as actually doing stuff, ignoring the minor detail of making money off of it.

Theranos is not, and has never been a successful company, aside from hype and attracting investment. Their simple inability to properly and legally run a basic, conventional diagnostics lab suggests its not even in their DNA, even before one notes that they've only been able to get one finger stick test approved by the FDA.

Silicon Valley is already circling the wagons to deflect blame:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/opinion/dont-blame-silicon...

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