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I don't know - I can agree that the "pretty young woman" effect may have gotten the ball rolling down this path, but saying it's the "underlying problem" kind of minimizes the agency she had in creating this situation, which was already enormous many years ago, before it was too late. And some men, like the late Ian Gibbons, did try to engage her with legitimate feedback. I think the bigger underlying problem was her managerial style - demanding utter secrecy so as to maintain her own omniscience. I don't know why it works so well for Apple, but it seems like the silo-ing of Theranos prevented any kind of intra-organizational regulation, so business pushed ahead full steam even as the product failed to materialize.

That is an excellent comment (I upvoted it), but I feel like saying it may have gotten the ball rolling but is not the underlying problem is -- semantics? Once the ball is rolling, it tends to keep rolling that way. Once you have the likes of Henry Kissinger making you feel like you are Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, why on earth would you listen to some lesser known punk telling you "You think you're all that, but you're not!"?

You sound unfamiliar with Ian Gibbons' role in the situation. He was Therano's chief scientist for 8 years. It's hard to envision how Holmes could have ignored his concerns simply because the rest of her echo chamber was positive, short of God herself fêting Holmes.

For more info on Ian: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-ther...

It's hard to envision how Holmes could have ignored his concerns

Yet, it appears that she successfully did exactly that: Ignored his concerns. And your article says so, from the very top:

In a searing investigation into the once lauded biotech start-up Theranos, Nick Bilton discovers that its precocious founder defied medical experts—even her own chief scientist—about the veracity of its now discredited blood-testing technology.

The quote is irrelevant, we certainly know she didn't listen to concerns! :)

The thread you started is about the thesis that she was in an echo chamber of positive thinking due to her being "pretty", and I'm specifically addressing your attempt to defend it by noting that once Kissinger made Holmes feel like Wile E. Coyote, she wouldn't listen to some punk.

All the reporting indicates Kissinger wasn't involved, and that she ignored even her chief scientist's grave concerns. It wasn't just "some punk", and she wasn't getting a pass from everyone because she was pretty.

Having been alternatingly over-praised and ripped apart by people I look up to, that's where the parents suggestion of agency comes in for me, to be able to step back and look at your situation analytically, to not believe your own hype, to have a clear enough understanding of the task "her life was built for" (taken from another quote elsewhere) to question once in a while if there is any meat to the opposition. These are all components of professional/adult responsibility; and with great power etc etc. (implied is the typical transitive money==power of our society)

The thrust of this ramble; I do hold her to have a great deal of personal responsibility, and differentiate very little between any participants who had sufficient knowledge and did nothing.

It's much more likely that she was a well-connected, upper-crust WASP with lots of connections. When you have Kissinger, Bill Frist, and George P. Shulz as advisors, and a few VCs already on board (who it turned out were family friends), other investors and media tend to just assume everyone else has done the due diligence.

From second-hand experience, women (young and pretty or otherwise) have absolutely no trouble getting their ideas shot down, or getting dismissed in general as unserious.

From second-hand experience, young pretty women have absolutely no trouble getting their ideas shot down.

Getting your ideas shot down is not at all the same as getting good constructive feedback that helps you orient properly. It is actually pretty easy to chalk that kind of thing up to jealousy and hatefulness (and, thus, ignore it). "Haters gonna hate" and all that.

I did consider further editing my original comment to clarify that detail. I have gotten plenty of negativity in my life, even quite ugly stuff. That is extremely different from someone who actually wants me to succeed telling me why my project will not fly and that I need to address those things in order to have any hope of succeeding.

My adult sons can be counted on to give me that kind of constructive feedback. So far, I have mostly failed to get it from other men and it is mostly men who have the kind of knowledge I am interested in accessing.

<it is mostly men who have the kind of knowledge I am interested in accessing.

As a female, I actually find this kind of offensive. There are plenty of intelligent, capable women working in tech, if that is the field to which you are referring, as well as business, healthcare, etc.

You are entitled to your feelings. It is a factual statement. I am not going to retract it nor apologize for it.

> charming, pretty women more often than others either get no feedback or get gushed at

Having watched her speak, she is neither.

> Instead, she is being dragged through this bloody mess

I am at a loss in this sentence. In a world where immigrant children drown at sea, we are supposed to think she s actually a victim?

I don't think the reason she didn't get her reality check was her looks, but her family wealth and connections. She got plenty of feedback since WSJ started reporting about her. Her response was even more secrecy pretending there is no elephant in the room.

Causality is a tricky thing (see Pearlmutter et.al); often people jump on the most socially-salacious (Latin salire ~ "leaping") explanation, after the fact, probably because it is at that moment, the best available instrument for change.

I am a chronically ill homeless woman who was molested and raped as a child. I find your comment rather offensive for a great many reasons. Children drowning at sea is not relevant to the topic and most people I talk to online do not genuinely care about my suffering. So this appeal strikes me as a rather nasty means to be dismissive of me. I was not suggesting anyone else was obligated to have compassion for her and I am quite confident your supposed compassion for real suffering will fail to in any way benefit me.

Making arguments for and against things is one of the joys of discourse. There is nothing in my comment (even remotely) referring to you. Instead you are the one basically blaming me of being a bigot. I might be wrong, but you also seem to be seeking an apology. If you feel you need to "benefit yourself", please seek the help of your local welfare authorities.

I commented on how I personally feel. You are attacking that. It is a form of personal attack. And thank you for proving my point that your comment about children drowning is just a nasty rhetorical device.

I am defending myself against you basically call me offensive. I said nothing about yourself. It is not a form of personal attack just because you name it so.

She's dragging herself through the mess at this point.

It's not unusual for founders to raise large amounts (at least eight figures, say), ignore all criticism, and fail spectacularly years later in ways that make you wonder what the hell they were thinking. What's unusual in her case is her Trump-like ability to hold frame and act like nothing is wrong or ever was wrong, regardless of pesky "facts."

As an aside -- another interesting manifestation of this Trump-like behavior, and this is the clearest case that I have seen, are the multiple times when Hillary literally seizes on camera and plays it off as if it never happened.

As a male co-founder I once asked an advisor for connections with "cynical product people" in order to illicit negative feedback of my company's product. I felt like the positive feedback loop in SF was that bad (for everyone).

I think a lot of different things are in play here. Part of it I think was just a culture that wanted a female Steve Jobs character, that opportunity was there and she took it. She also got a lot of credit coming out of Stanford, hell she even hosted one of those seminar courses at Stanford.

So her gender is not a factor. It is not because she is a charismatic woman. It is just because she is a female Steve Jobs.

I don't disagree that attractive women can sometimes be disproportionately encouraged simply because of their looks but is there a reason to believe this to be the case with Holmes other than the fact that she is attractive and successful?

It is my opinion, informed by my personal experiences (edit: and by reading multiple articles about the company and its melt down). I haven't presented it as the conclusion of some study. I don't know where you can find a study of comparable situations. I don't know of any other so-called decacorns, much less ones going down in flames to this degree. So it is essentially impossible to have some kind of meaningful large scale study.

That doesn't prevent me from having opinions. I have studied things like social psychology, so it is not an uninformed opinion. But your question sort of makes me think of when I talk to men on HN who fail to see any sexism here when there does not appear to be a single woman on the leaderboard.

(That always makes me feel like "okay, if that isn't obvious on the face of it, not sure there is any point in wasting any breathe here.")

>> But your question sort of makes me think of when I talk to men on HN who fail to see any sexism here when there does not appear to be a single woman on the leaderboard

I am relatively new on this site, where is the leaderboard? How do you know whoever are on it currently doesn't include any woman? The threads that I have read so far since I have been here, except for some of the comments, I hardly check who posted the comment let alone know whether it's a man or a woman.

It is inherently hard to tell here. I appear to be the highest ranked woman here and I am thousands short of the leaderboard. I actively researched it and blogged about it. Check my profile for links.

Click on Lists at the bottom of the page and then click on Leaders.

Thanks, had never seen the Links at the bottom of the page before.

:-)

I wonder if some of the people downvoting this would explain why, as I don't see anything clearly objectionable about it and the personal opinions expressed certainly seem relevant to the topic.

So simply disagreeing with you is sexism now? I am a PoC, so should I take that people disagreeing with me are racist?

I said no such thing.

If Theranos succeeded then everyone would be singing paeans to Ms. Holmes but now she has failed it must be the fault of advisors and because she was not 'pulled up short' earlier? How you can ignore her borderline criminal behavior?

Also let's not the play the 'young kid' card. Zuck, Bill Gates all started their companies at a similar age.

Yes they did. And they succeeded. Perhaps part of the reason is that they are male and they got more of the right kind of feedback because of it.

Great point of view into what sometimes causes this problem. As a male who works with plenty of female engineers, I've never considered that (but I also give them the same treatment in code reviews as any other engineer).